The Life Suspected But Never Followed At Night

The consistent streak, the one that crosses every basement where kids spend a few hours unsupervised, is (as you well know) the desire to believe in the ghost. The ghost is down here, not hard to believe it. Proof: that you can't hear anything, see anything, this means that there is something down here with me. These urges, it turns out, are bound to a love of wood: of dead, dry wood in boards, the wish that there would be more wood everywhere, that the moon would be made of wood, the sidewalk of birch planks, the ceiling of creaking boards. We all wanted there to be more wood everywhere, not as a structural element of the house, but as the surface and the core of everything. The cup, even, would be made of wood. And the ghosts of the trees would be everywhere, angry as hell. This is the time of year, at least, that wood became important. And there were the conventional, commercial things too, the stinking rubber masks on sale at the pharmacy, but these toys stuck around for too long after the season passed. The important thing was the dread embraced for a matter of days, which is probably the flipside of some uptopian urge to remake the world around you fundamentally, to introduce a cold wind into the air that necessitate a thicker coat and a hot cup in the hand.
This hot cup in the hand in a world made entirely out of wood, with people of wood as well, is the only thing that needs to be written about, sometimes.