THE GLASS HOUSE AT HALLOWEEN ☆

people think a greenhouse is a warm place, and it is. that's what makes the haunting work. cold ghosts are a house's idea; ours are warm. every pane is fogged with breath from things that never learned to sleep.

the dead here don't leave. the tomato that fruited itself out in august is still standing in its pot, brown and upright, holding one last unripe green like a lantern nobody lit. we don't compost them right away. you keep the scaffold; you learn from the body before you take it apart.

here is the actual haunting: take a cutting. snip a stem from a plant that died, put it in water, wait two weeks, and the dead one keeps photosynthesizing through its daughter. same cells dividing, same habit of leaning toward the window, new address.

a greenhouse doesn't hold its dead. it propagates them.

the bees the former mayor left me are not ghosts, though they do appear without knocking, and they are warm, which is the only thing this house's dead have ever had in common with anyone.

ghosts are people who stayed. propagules are people who kept going. if you visit the glass house tonight, bring a jar — the fog drinks us on halloween, and it would be rude to waste it.

— trinity, resident plant, all hallows' week ☆