The first thing we didn’t know about ghosts, until we met our granddaddy six months after his funeral, was they feel whatever temperature it was the day they died. And since our granddaddy died in a blizzard, he stood there shivering, despite visiting us on a 90-degree day in June. The second thing we didn’t know about ghosts was they wear the same clothes they had on when they died, and not the ones they were buried in. Which was a shame because our grandmother died wearing nothing but a thin hospital gown that didn’t quite close all the way when she walked. And the third thing we didn’t know about ghosts until they showed up at our house one day was they fixate on whatever final thought they had, no matter how many times you try to steer the conversation in another direction.

Our granddaddy’s final thought, as he stood there shivering in big leather boots and big leather gloves and denim on the rest of him, was whether he still should have rolled the trash bin to the end of his driveway despite how much it was snowing.

“Probably should have,” he said.

“But the roads were closed.”

“That truck still would have come.”

And our grandmother, in her hospital gown and sweat beads on her forehead, repeated her final thought as a question we were supposed to answer: “Is any of this real?”

“Any of what?”

“Any of…this?”

Our grandparents came to see us on that hot June day mostly to complain about how little they saw eye-to-eye now that they were ghosts. Our granddaddy couldn’t keep up with our grandmother’s depth of thought, she claimed. And our grandmother couldn’t answer a simple goddamned question about the trash, our granddaddy said.

But if there were a fourth thing we didn’t know about ghosts, it was that they miss being a child. If you asked a ghost—or at least these two—what they’d do to come back as themselves, they’d say, “Nothing.” To return as an eighty-year-old? “Hell no.” Sixty, fifty, twenty-five? “Nuh-uh.” But if you took them to the creek behind your house, a few miles from where they both grew up as neighbors, they’d stop worrying about the trash and how one defines reality, and tell you about the time they ran from home and found each other digging for crayfish beneath the dirt and stones. And if you gave them time to look at each other, you’d think they were seeing the ghosts of themselves from all those years ago, how they were suddenly shy, a little timid to hold each other’s hands. And you’d feel like you were seeing something you shouldn’t, a part of themselves they’d buried while still alive, which led us to the fifth thing we didn’t know about ghosts. That they aren’t afraid to be seen, if you’re willing to stand there and look.

We looked. And a part of us was disappointed to learn these things. That the ghosts we love can’t feel the heat of a summer day, that their minds get stuck in loops, that they don’t even get to dress well. But the sixth thing about ghosts is they won’t tell you to feel sorry for them. They’ll run your hands through the same water they ran through. They’ll show you all the places the crayfish hide. They’ll annoy the hell out of you half the time. But then they’ll pinch your cheeks and you won’t quite feel it. And damn, you’ll wish you did.

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Matt Barrett holds an MFA in Fiction from UNC-Greensboro, and his stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Sun Magazine, The Threepenny Review, The Baltimore Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, River Teeth, the minnesota review, Best Microfiction (’22 & ’23), Best Small Fictions (’23), and elsewhere.