“Good luck paying the taxes,” Grandfather said with his last, wicked breath.
Oh she’d pay the taxes. Whatever it took, she’d fill this house with color and light and every person she’d ever liked who needed a safe home, and his crabbing old ghost could choke on it. https://twitter.com/TJPayne3333/status/1291787427078647810

“You failed,” Grandfather’s ghost said the first night, after she’d spent the whole day walking from one bank to the next. Only one had laughed outright - mostly they stared with pity from their fancy desk chairs, shook their heads at her lack of capital & collateral & co-signer.

“Bite me,” she said.
“Oh! Except you can’t! You’re discorporeal & have no teeth anymore. How inconvenient that must be for you, Grandfather.”
He rattled the walls & chandeliers all night, but she had rosemary & salt in the lining of her sleeping bag, plus industrial earplugs.

“Failure,” he whispered again, when even the creepy internet bank emailed to turn down her loan.
She dipped her fingers in her water glass, whispered a quick blessing, flicked holy water at him.
“I have 3 months, you mean old snake,” she muttered, then cursed as her phone died.

The laundromat had plugs & a vending machine. Jason had low self-esteem & insomnia.
“But I’m not good at anything,” he said. “How could I possibly help?”
“You’re good at being my friend.”
Then the kicker:
“And it’s rent-free, as long as you don’t mind camping & ghosts.”

By the time Jason’s sister dropped him off a few days later, Gradnfather’s whispers had started to get the upper hand.
“This place is bad juju up to freakin rafters,” Medea said with a whistle. “Shell. Just pack in & come home with us. Make Jase sleep in the yurt, he loves it.”

“I don’t love it,” Jason said. “But it does seem like a better option than the ghost & termite palace.”
“There are no termites,” Shell said. “I hope.”
Medea had a mighty glower of disapproval - given her name she had to, but she also had a caretaker streak a mile and a half wide.

Dea left them that night with full stomachs, a cooler of food, cots, solar-powered doodads galore, & a filled tool box so large & obvious that Shell almost thought Grandfather had a point about her chances, given that she’d arrived by taxi with only a sleeping bag & a backpack.

Jase woke her from the palatial comfort of a camping cot with a hand on her ankle. In the light from his phone, his eyes looked huge & shadowed, lips pressed together.
Jason didn’t have industrial earplugs. Shell took hers out.
“...a man,” Grandfather whispered. “Weak.”

Shell grabbed Jason’s hand.
“A dead weight,” Grandfather said. “Dragging her down even faster than she was already going to go.”
The middle of the night was chilly, but rage sure kept a body warm.
“Only things dead around here are the flies on the windowsills & you, you viper.”

Grandfather rattled the house until the overhead beams moaned.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she told Jason.
“Hopeless. This house is mine. They’ll kick you out come winter. Your bones will rest in the woods with nothing to shelter you.”
“We’re not living in Ethan Frome, jeez.”

She dug in her backpack until she found the bottle of salt, bay laurel, & rose petals.
“Bones in the woods. You old ghoul, get out of here.”
Grandfather hissed a curse at the palmful of salt Shell threw at him. She could hear him in the attic. But the air in the room was lighter.

They made oatmeal over Dea’s camp stove in the yard, where they could yawn over breakfast in peace.
“Sorry,” Jason said.
“Sorry my grandfather continues to be a jerkface even in the afterlife. We’ll get you some earplugs. Don’t worry about it.”
Jace shrugged.
“I do, though.”

“Quit talking like you’re a bad luck charm.”
Jason squinted at her.
“Shut up, you just spent all night listening to that misty old fart and you think you’re the one who’s bad luck? I’m the one related to him!”
Jason practiced avoidance via blowing on oatmeal until Shell laughed.

“Excuse me, I have the natural bad luck of being named after the worst character in Greek mythology,” he said.
“Pretty sure Zeus was the worst. Followed by Odysseus.”
“That’s Theseus erasure.”
“And it’s all Apollo erasure, eat your breakfast.”

“Now we’ll be cursed by Greek gods AND your evil grandfather,” he said, sounding inappropriately happy about it.
Shell figured things couldn’t get a whole lot worse than being broke in a falling-down haunted house with camp stove instant oatmeal for breakfast.

One squeamish friend was enough to spur her to do something about the dead things on windowsills. Four hands were enough to clear several rooms of the worst grime. Grandfather howled in the attic.
“Laughter all day keeps evil granddads at bay?” Shell said when Jason asked.

Zaya arrived a couple days later, towing a box trailer behind her pickup.
“What the hell?” Shell asked once she quit crying on Z’s shoulder.
“Somebody told me the light on the third floor is great in the afternoon,” Zaya grinned.
Jason mimed an innocence he definitely never had.

“Happens to be a somebody I know who’s as terrible a cook as you. So I come bearing three things you need,” Zaya said, “rent, a disbelief in ghosts, and the ability to feed you. Medea sent a big hunk of salmon, and I have a grill.”

Zaya’s disbelief in ghosts only lasted until Grandfather woke them all up by yelling, “artist. Nonsense! You know what happens to artists? They go mad, knowing how useless they are.”
“Okay, I don’t like this,” Z muttered from her air mattress, blanket around her chin.

“Shell, throw some of your stuff,” Jason said, as if she wasn’t already digging for the bottle of salt.
“Pitiful,” Grandfather said.
He was so ramped up that he was almost visible, a pale blur on the corner of one’s eye.

“Each one of you as useless as the next. You’ll starve, you will. No more talent than a dog licking itself -“
“I beg your damn pardon,” Zaya said.
Shell found the bottle.
“You’ll starve, and your bones will rest in the woods!”
“Not that again,” Shell said, & threw the salt.

Shell and Jason climbed down closer to Z while she adjusted her hold on reality.
“Sorry,” Shell said. “I’m so sorry, I should’ve tried harder to convince you he’s real. Are you okay? Are you in shock or anything?”
“No talent,” Z said, her dark eyes wide as a frightened cat’s.

Grandfather moaned 3 floors above them. Zaya shook her fist at the ceiling.
“I’ll show you talent, you windbag old prick,” she yelled.
Shell had to look away from the quiver at the side of Jason’s mouth. Laughing at Z only ever resulted in sharp elbows on soft places.

“You’re okay?”
“I am not okay,” Z snapped. “I just got called useless and no-talent by a damn ghost! I don’t even see where he gets off, he doesn’t even have a body.”
“It’s in really poor taste, for sure,” Jason said.
There was the thing with the elbows. Jase yelled a lot.

It was probably no good for the lifespan of the air mattress that they all slept on it together, but with Shell’s salt-embedded sleeping bag on top and plenty of earplugs, at least they were safe from ghostly drafts & moans. Proximity did okay keeping nightmares away, too.

Shell couldn’t imagine how she would’ve done it without a stubborn artist and a pro-level support friend on site to counter the way Grandfather whispered at her constantly while she cleaned& scraped each day.
“Ten weeks, granddaughter. Out on your ass in time for the new year.”

Sure! No problem! Ten weeks to a tax bill that was more money than she has ever had in her savings account ever.
At least by that point Zaya would be done with her show. Jason could go back to Dea’s house. She could. Maybe sleep in Dea’s yurt.
“Worthless,” Grandfather said.

Zaya set up her studio on a corner room on the third floor. She danced, arms outstretched, in the afternoon sun, while Jase & Shell clapped. The splattery tarps looked cheerful among the grime.
“Futile,” Grandather whispered in the vulnerable moment when Shell brushed her teeth.

If anybody’s asked her, Shell would’ve said she was doing great, trekking laundry into town, scrubbing filthy floors & sills, ignoring horrible ghostly grandfathers. Ignoring looming tax bills.
“Okay,” Zaya said. “We gotta paint some stuff.”

“You’re not painting?” Shell asked.
“Shell,” Jase said. “You don’t climb your own stairs?”
The problem was that higher floors were closer to the unembodied grandfather in the attic.
“I’m painting, Michelle,” Z said. “Honey, I don’t listen to that ugly bastard, I’m fine.”

Fine. Surely everything was fine. Z’s rent kept them in food, and inch by inch the house was less gross. Less gross would mean a better selling price, right? When she couldn’t pay the taxes.
“Baby, I know you know what it means when I tell you I talked to my auntie,” Zaya said.

Shell tried not to do a goldfish impression, with little confidence in her success.
Zaya had a fully formed opinion approximately once every 3 seconds. Her auntie was the same. They didn’t get along, in the way that chemistry teachers only put potassium in water to make a point.

“We’re gonna paint some things,” Zaya said. “Auntie & her saints willing, it’ll help.”
They painted the studio the yellow of dandelions. They painted the bedroom ceiling the bright, calm blue of an early autumn sky.
Grandfather hung beyond the door that night, shrieking. Outside.

“How’d you get related to this guy?” Jase asked on the next laundromat/grocery run.
Shell scowled at him.
“Come on.”
She shrugged.
“How does anybody? He was my mom’s father.”
“What about your grandma?”
“Ran off to Mexico with the gardener when Mom was 18, can you blame her?”

Shell had never blamed the grandmother she never knew for running out to warmer climes and warmer arms, given the musty shadows of the house & Grandfather’s unending horrible commentary.
She’d visited twice in her life, before sitting at his deathbed.
Way, way more than enough.

“It’s so sad, the way you don’t know how you’ll fail,” Grandfather said.
Shell tried to agree with him for a minute, but she remembered that she wasn’t the one prevented from entering a room by a blue ceiling.
She had a bunch a friends who could use a home.
Blue paint was cheap.

Days were the worst now, with Z & Jace busy painting & cleaning. Grandfather had lots to say about her uselessness & future as a woodland skeleton.
Nights, at least, she bunked down in a sky-ceiling room with friends who loved her enough to share an air mattress & ear protection.

Shell didn’t worry about Zaya. If she had a show, there was no reason to fret about Z. Responsibility was the hymn Z’s bones sang every dawn: if she had a deadline, she’d meet it. She’d defend her dandelion studio with every breath.
Jason, though: he kept disappearing.

Medea came for a long weekend, with 3 nearly identical giants in tow that Shell had always thought we’re the same person, all of whom were presumably boyfriends.
More important, one was good at plumbing, one at electrical, and one at boring ghosts into a second death.

“What in the seven hells is keeping that old bastard here?” Dea asked over burgers and boxed wine the night before they left.
“Old shitbag loves the attic above my studio. He groans up there all day,” Zaya said.
“Can’t be just that,” the ghost-boring boyfriend said.

Dea waved her cup around.
“I know you have all your sanctified herbal sprinkle & stuff, Shell. But you gotta think meaner to get rid of this guy. Find out his focus & I’ll be up here with a jackhammer & a blowtorch. We’ll burn this jerk to his reward, babe.”

On one hand, Medea was an excellent friend to have in one’s corner in times of crisis.
On the other hand, bottles of carefully collected ingredients made holy by intensive prayer under the light of the full moon deserved a little better then “sanctified herbal sprinkle.”

(I have to go to bed, y’all, I am old, and my beauty sleep needs are intense)

She knew she had to go the minute Z had mentioned the attic, but it took Shell a couple of days to work up the courage. She scrubbed, peeled wallpaper. Bought a $10 chair at a thrift shop. Sat in it and brooded over how much she did not want to go in the attic.

The known problems of attics were many: spiders, spiderwebs, non-spider alternative insect life, rusty nails, & uncertain footing.
You know, to add to the vindictive ghost.
And the worst possible thing to imagine: the discovery of a rotten roof.

Shell slithered out of her slightly musty, deeply ugly thrift store chair to moan on the floor in preemptive forever-brokeness plus spider bites.
She stopped when she realized that she sounded just like Grandfather, except half an octave higher.

She didn’t bother dusting off her clothes, since they’d just be worse post-attic.
She did stop by Z’s studio on the way up to borrow a bandanna to tie back her hair.
“Wear a yellow one, he hates it,” Zaya said.
That cheerful thought lasted all the way to the narrow attic door.

Grandfather had had the house emptied out before he died, to prevent anything valuable from falling into Shell’s tax-paying hands.
Shell generally prized consistency, but she made an exception for Grandfather.
As, apparently, the junk haulers had made an exception for the attic.

Hope flared at the sight of piles-up junk, including at least 1 table & at least 2 chairs. Relief flared at no sight of visible sunbeams from above.
Shell went cold, then she was pretty sure what Grandfather meant to yell was “get out,” but all the consonants were lost in shriek.

Trying to explore a dark attic while being screamed at by a ghost was less fun than a few other things Shell could think of.
Zaya pounded on the ceiling of her studio and yelled “hush it, used-to-be old man, I’m painting!”
Shell laughed. Grandfather retreated.

It seemed a good moment to make her exit. Shell grabbed a small box and dragged a chair down the stairs behind her while Grandfather made the walls creak.
“Good job, dusty,” Zaya said.
The chair was wobbly, with a dark stain on the seat fabric.

The box was pretty carved wood holding only a broken rosary. Shell picked it out of the box. Grandfather rattled the dining room chandelier & shouted that they’d freeze to death.
So that was a bust.
“Find something good?” Jase asked from the doorway, brushing twigs from his hair.

“Just a box. Where have you been all day?”
Jason shrugged.
“Walking in the woods. Do you know where the property line is?”
“Why?”
“Just curious.”
Sure, just curious, wandering the woods they were threatened with every day. Shell reminded her shoulders not to live around her ears.

“Why are you creeping on Jason?” Z asked from way too close.
Shell retrieved her soul from the outer atmosphere.
“I’m not,” she panted.
Creeping would’ve involved wanting to watch Jase using the camp shower, instead of grimacing over his bare shoulder into the woods behind him.

“Then why are you standing in the one corner of the pantry where you can see the shower, as long as you don’t mind a neck cramp.”
Zaya’s eyes were slits and her voice gravel.
“I’m just worried about him.”
Z gazed out toward the camp shower.
“The woods thing?”
“Yeah.”

“That makes more sense than you suddenly not being offended that we live in oozing flesh sacs.”
Zaya grinned at Shell’s cringe& patted Shell’s arm.
“I don’t think you have to be so drastic, though. Worry about him when he’s not sleeping.”
Shell figured she’d just worry generally.

Shell made herself stomp up the attic stairs every day possible - meaning she sometimes had to take time off from digging in the dust with a ghost hanging off her shoulder telling her what a waste ofliving she was. Jase joined her when it rained, but he slept badly those nights.

The day a spider the size of a dinner plate landed on her hand was when Zaya broke the attic door off its hinges coming to save her, palette knife in one hand & broom in the other.
Z was miffed about it, but Shell’s screams were so awful that Grandfather stayed away a whole day:

Z sold a painting; they had the gas turned on to blissfully cook & bathe indoors like civilized people.
Even better, the next time Grandfathet moaned that they’d freeze to death & become bones in the woods, Shell followed up her cussing by taking an hour-long bath in his bathroom

Still no focus, though. Shell had cleared most of the attic looking for it. Grandfather was angriest right above Z’s studio, but the floor there was bare even of dust.
“You’ll never be rid of me, girl,” Grandfather snarled. “When you’re fox food in the woods I’ll eat your soul.”

Shell bought a 50-lb bag of rock salt at the hardware store & prayed her voice out over it under the next full moon.
It was worth being on constant broom duty that they could all now banish him forcefully whenever he opened his fool mouth.
For whatever equated a mouth in a ghost.

They found Jason sitting in a corner of the bedroom one afternoon, arms around his knees. He wouldn’t say why, but he didn’t sleep for several nights. Shell tucked bay laurel leaves in all his shoes.
He stopped going to the woods & helped Shell pull furniture down from the attic

It was good to have a kitchen table to sit around. The chest of drawers took all 3 of them to fetch down and left a huge bruise on Shell’s foot as a souvenir. Like everything else they found upstairs, it was empty of valuables, unless there was a hot market in mouse bones.

Shell kept waking to see Jase on his phone in the middle of the night, the shadows making his face look hollow.
“I’m okay,” he said. “Just thinking about stuff.”
Stuff that made him wiggle dooorknobs & watch videos about fixing locks.
Who’d want to be locked in with grandfather?

Zaya had paintings; paintings required frames. Frames meant enough purchases that 4 hands were needed. And nobody was going to stay in the house alone, so it was a group trip to town.
Shell held Z’s basket & watched Jase stroll the aisles with his list of door-security supplies.

The old guy at the counter watched Zaya pile wood into his coworker’s arms and talk 60 miles a second about sandpaper grit.
“Where are you folks from?” he asked Shell.
“Ostrosky house, just east of here.”
“Yeah, I know it.”
He chewed his mustache.
“You related?”

“I’m very sad to report that the old man was my grandfather.”
Hardware Guy grinned into a bunch of well-worn lines.
“Not much of a people person,” he said.
“No,” Shell said. “None of us ever blamed my grandmother for running off with the gardener.”

“Running off ... who told you that?”
Shell tried to remember, but it had happened long before she was born.
“General family knowledge.”
“Wasn’t general around here. Your Granny ran off, but it wasn’t with the gardener. We lived next door to them. He died 3 years ago, right here.”

“What do you think of this doorknob?” Jase yelled, holding up what indeed appeared to be a very doorknob-like object.
“Depends, is it the cheapest option?”
Hardware Guy gave Shell a look like she’d tried to stab him with a spork: all the wounding was in the disappointment.

“Miss. You can’t put plastic knobs in that house. It’s an insult to the building.”
Which, yeah. In Shell’s wildest dreams, the house shone with brass and wood polish, bright walls, and lots of art. In her wildest, most expensive dreams.
“That’s all I can afford, though.”

Hardware Guy gazed at his expertly restored tin ceiling.
“Miss. I’ll just start a tab for you.”
He didn’t even ask for a credit card.
That in itself was almost as spooky as living with a ghost.
“I’ll be stuck here forever just from the weight of my hardware bill,” Shell said.

Z had enough hilarity about that, & her plans never again to frame a painting using anything but wood “bought” on Shell’s nonexistent dime, to carry them through takeout burgers on the porch back home, until Jase finished off a milkshake with the longest saddest slorp in history.

He set the cup down & hunched over his knees. Shell & Zaya had a conversation of frowns.
“There really are bones in the woods,” Jase said. “I found them the other day.”
Shell tried to yell, throw fries at Jason, cry, & exit reality all at once, meaning she sat perfectly still.

“The hell you mean bones in the woods,” Zaya said.
She really was the most sensible one in the bunch. Shell wanted to hug her.
“From a person,” Jason said.
Z erupted into a speech about safety, police & all kinds of very reasonable questions that would make perfect sense, except.

“Are you okay?” Shell asked.
Then again louder, which stopped Z talking.
Jase shrugged.
“I mean. Could be worse. Bones can’t do anything to me.”
“Could be worse!” Zaya yelled.
Jason rolled his eyes. Shell’s outlook improved by 67%.
“We live with a horrible ghost, Z.”
“Ok. Point.”

“Turns out real-life scary is less terrible than inside-my-head scary,” Jase said with a lightness that would never fool the 2 people who’d driven him to the hospital back in the day.
Mentioning that was Zaya’s melt button.
“Love you, baby,” she said, pulling Jason close.

“Enh, quit it,” Jase said while he made no attempt at all to work out of Z’s embrace.
“We know that means you love us too,” Shell said.
“There are damn bones in the damn woods!” Jason said.
(Still letting Z hug on him.)
“Stop changing the subject!”

Zaya, as the adult on the porch, could multitask cuddling Jason and scrolling on her phone to find the sheriff’s non-emergency number.
“Now you know I don’t want cops up in my business, looking at unfinished paintings,” she said.
“It’s just, I thought,” Jase said.
“Thought what?”

“Okay, look,” Jase said. “I was freaked out enough that there was a serial killer in the woods coming to murder you us while I watched, but Shell. Shell! The hardware guy!”
“You think the hardware guy is a murderer?”
Shell’s dearest friends in all the world stared at her.

“Michelle Lynn Ostrosky,” Jason said.
Oh boy.
“Stop being a complete pistachio, that bones are your freaking grandmother.”
Shell inhabited her compete pistachio nature, because of course the freaking bones in the freaking woods were her freaking grandmother.

“We still have to call the cops,” Z said. “No statute of limitations on murder.”
“Who are they gonna charge? The ghost?” Jase said.
Their squabble was background noise while Shell thought about it.
“I need to call Medea.”
They called from the yard, to avoid ghostly interruptions.

“Oh great god of the solstice sky,” Medea said. “I’ve got a brain like a nematode, of course he killed somebody! What a terrible old dude, how are you even related to him?”
“Bad luck,” Shell said. “Anyway, the house belonged to my grandmother’s family first.”
“Of course,” Z said.

“Find the focus yet?”
“No, I’ve looked everywhere,” Shell said. “I thought for sure it was in the attic, but it’s pretty well cleared out and nothing.”
“What about between the floors?” Dea asked.
Shell blessed the darkness of night for hiding her face.
“Pistachio,” Jase intoned.