These Ghosts Are Family

1. The True Death of Abel Paisley THE TRUE DEATH OF ABEL PAISLEY
Harlem, 2005

Let's say that you are a sixty-nine-year-old Jamaican man called Stanford, or Stan for short, who once faked your own death. Though you have never used those words to describe what you did. At the time you'd thought of it as seizing an opportunity placed before you by God, but since your wife, Adele, died a month ago, you've convinced yourself her heart attack was retribution for your sin. So today you have gathered three of your female descendants in one house, even the daughter who has thought you dead all these years, and decided that you will finally tell them the truth: you are not who you say you are.

You have spent the last twenty years of your second life living in a brownstone in Harlem, running a West Indian grocery store. Recently, you shuttered the store. You have given up on fighting your arthritis pain and are finally sitting in the wheelchair Adele picked out. You are looking out of your parlor window, waiting for your daughter, the one who thinks you are dead, to arrive. It's been thirty-five years since you've seen her, so you study each woman who passes your house for reflections of yourself. You haven't bothered to shave, press your clothes, or comb your hair.

You are ready to be still and rot. You imagine the death of Stanford Solomon, unlike the abrupt end of Abel Paisley, will be achingly slow; already it feels like you are losing small pieces of yourself daily. To you, old age is the torture you deserve, a slow, insignificant death, your matter dispersing into the air like dandelion seeds until the day there's nothing left.

When you died the first time, you were still a young man in your thirties and had been working in England for less than a year. It wasn't easy for an immigrant, especially a black man, to find a decent job back then, but through a boy you'd known back in primary school, Stanford, you'd gotten a room and a job on a ship. You had

Maisy Card holds an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College and is a public librarian. Her writing has appeared in Lenny Letter, School Library Journal, Agni, Sycamore Review, Liars' League NYC, and Ampersand Review. Maisy was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica, but was raised in Queens, New York. Maisy earned an MLIS from Rutgers University and a BA in English and American Studies from Wesleyan University. She is the author of These Ghosts Are Family.