A very good, unexpected and compassionate ghost story. Highly recommended.
The times ghosts truly scare me aren’t from the shock of a dead face staring up from the bottom of a basement staircase; I’m usually too drunk or high for that, too hyped up on aggression. I’ll simply charge at the thing, running after it into a root cellar or climbing a wooden ladder into an unlit barn attic to chase it away. The sights that genuinely unsettle me, that keep me awake at night, are the weird, demented loops I sometimes catch them in, the bleakness of a ghost’s new existence, the never-ending isolation of the afterlife, empty versions of ourselves stuck in routines that have lost all meaning.
[…]
Looking in the mirror one night, I realized with a shock that I had become as pale, forgotten, and nocturnal as the ghosts I’d spent my life fighting. I was turning into a version of the very thing people hired me to clear.