Graham Osbrook
December 18, 2020 4:54 PM
Casual inquiries by Graham Osbrook
It felt, Graham thought, just about exactly like Christmas. It had been on the cold side when he had gotten home to Texas for the holidays, and his parents and paternal grandparents had complained that it had been too hot for the season not long before, but today, at his maternal grandparents’ house in Louisiana, the weather was perfect. Sixty-five degrees, the exact, perfect Christmas sort of temperature – especially for someone going to visit his maternal grandparents.”I’d take snow over any more warm weather,” his sister had remarked. ”Especially since it’s a Louisiana year. I thought I was going to smother the last time we were there.”
He had nodded, knowing exactly what Claire had meant. At some point in his infancy, his parents had come to a peculiar compromise on how to handle the holidays. Each year, they took turns going to each other’s parents’ house – Greene’s one year, Osbrooks’ the next – and the other set of grandparents also came to the house which was hosting that year. Usually, the aunts and uncles who didn’t belong to the hosting set of grandparents didn’t come, but sometimes they did. And on Louisiana years, they could sometimes run into a small problem, which was their grandmother’s belief that a fire should be lit and burned at full blast every day from November to Easter, nearly, despite the fact that she lived in Louisiana.
Admittedly, it wasn’t purely aesthetic. His grandfather had a touch of arthritis, and even slightly chilly weather made it hurt. Still, though, while Graham did not mind that the Christmas t-shirt he was wearing had long sleeves, he didn’t think he would have complained, either, had the sleeves been short.
It probably helped, he thought, that the Greene house had larger individual rooms than the Osbrook house. When they had Christmas with his father’s parents, it could get a little claustrophobic, but the casual living room at his mothers’ parents’ house was roomy enough that everyone could sit comfortably and still carry on more conversations at once than there were – with four grandparents, two parents, one Graham, one Claire, an Aunt Maria, and an Uncle Edward – people in the room. This allowed Graham to sit down in a corner quietly and munch on his cheese cubes and crackers and just watch everyone in a state of general contentment, at least until someone noticed him.
The person who finally did was a grandmother. Josephine Greene had gone back to the kitchen to fill her plate again, and spotted him and took a chair on her way back into the living room. “What are you doing over here all by yourself?” she asked.
Graham shrugged. “Just eating,” he said truthfully, and then had a thought. “Oh – hey – can I ask you about something? I just remembered.”
“Sure.”
“Do you know anything about the…stuff that ghosts can have? How they get them, or which ones they can get?”
Josephine frowned a bit, seeming perplexed. “What do you mean?”
“Sometimes ghosts have things they didn’t have on them the moment they died, right?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Is there…such a thing as a ghost painting? Not a painting of a ghost,” he added quickly, since he supposed that would be possible. Pearly white paint could be made semi-translucent depending on saturation and what colors were behind it, and while he had no idea how paintings were enchanted, he assumed one bit of paint was as enchantable as any other. “But like – the ghost of a painting. Does that make sense?”
His grandmother tilted her head for a moment, her dark eyes half-lidded with thought. “I think I know what you’re asking,” she said finally. “But it’s not anything I’ve ever heard of. Why do you ask?”
Graham almost wanted to tell her the whole story, about what he had seen at Sonora. Maybe if he did, she would know what had happened, and it might turn out that he had just used the wrong words to describe it while he was trying to be general? If that wasn’t the case, though….
“It was just some stupid debate some of us were having at school,” he said. “I don’t even remember how we got onto that, to tell you the truth.”
He was not telling her the truth, of course, but he was confident that this story would pass muster. He had thought about whether to ask her – or anyone – about what he had seen at length, many times, since it had happened. He kept a straight face, and he was successful in quickly changing the subject.
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Graham Osbrook
Casual inquiries
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