Nicholas Cook

We Disappear

There's desire and then there isn't. "You know in the beginning of books," he says, "where it reads, 'This is a work of fiction,' like we didn't already know?"

His things are arranged neatly on the floor. "This one goes." he says, then, "This too." Things I'll never see again. He presses his body flat against the wall, asks if I see him.

Light bounces around before hitting my eye. "What is enough and what isn't?" I say.

The Ghost

The ghost smokes a cigarette. Behind walls no one can see him. He stays quiet. He was once asked, "Why this lifestyle?"

He gets a phone call in the middle of the night. A wrong number. "Thanks for calling anyway," he says. His bed is small and wedged between two walls.

A draft wakes him. He feels the presence of something alive and human-like on the other side. "Hello?" he says.

The woman calls the ghost to bed. She opens her blouse. He leans in. All sensation left years before. He hovers silently.

After he died, the ghost was given a pack of cigarettes, an old Nokia, an address written on a Post-it.

CP

Nicholas Cook lives in New York.