Pop's Ghost

Flash fiction

Photo by Pierre Laboratory on Unsplash

We never talk about Pop’s ghost. It sits with us at the breakfast table. Ma with her coffee, me with my toast and apple butter. I think about him eating an invisible bowl of off-brand Wheaties. It’s funny to think about the dead keeping up with the practices of life. How does Ma imagine him now? Who knows? Who’ll ever know.

This morning, she drinks the dregs from her mug and says she’s off to work. Pop chomps invisibly, says goodbye, says luv you, says have a good day, babe.

“Me too, here in a minute,” I say, “I’ll probably be late tonight.”

“Late? Again?”

“We’re losing guys left and right. I told you.”

She sighs.

“Nobody wants to be a miner no more,” I say.

“Well. Maybe you’ll go back to school one day.”

“Half of them would rather be strung out.”

I’m making more money now than I’ve ever made in my life. I have a savings account, a nice fat one, and money piled up in a mutual fund. Pop’s ghost says what’s wrong with coal. And if Ma could’ve heard, she would’ve slapped the table and said that pretty soon, all that’ll be left under the mountains will be a million caves.

“And every one of them,” she’d say, “the size of a goddamn concert hall.”

Pop’s ghost lets her go, lets her head out to her truck, rumble down the drive to the lane to the chicken plant. The driveway dust clogs the morning sunlight for a minute before it settles back on the dandelions and timothy grass we’ve always called a yard. When it does, when the sun runs clear again, Pop says he’d like to know, without coal, what’d be the plan to keep the lights on. And, if he could hold a paper, he’d fold it and fold it again and slide it under the edge of his plate.

I get my keys and lunchbox, my helmet and boots and tell myself to stop at Gabe’s for a few new pairs of socks.

“So long, Pop,” I say.

I don’t work where Pop died. They let me switch. You can’t look in any direction around here without seeing something rusty and broke down. Or else the sides of the mountains. Well, definitely the sides of the mountains. And maybe Ma is right. Maybe we’re bound for a cave in, the entire state of West Virginia, poured into the burning, churning layers below. I’d like to study that. What’s underneath the coal? What keeps us scooting along over the face of the planet? What made the land arch its back the way it did way back when and then fall dead asleep?