There’s a boy covered in dirt who lives in my closet. He’s kind of shy but he’s okay for a ghost, I guess. He’s stuck around with me the longest though I don’t have much to compare him to. Pop usually got rid of them before they had any chance to stick around. A little spell here, a candle lit there, a hail-mary, Santa Maria combination once in a while. It was normal. It was what we’ve always done. And Clay, as I’ve named him, has always just watched, and returned to his space in my closet.
We’ve never actually spoken in the ten years he’d been with us, but I did my best not to be outright rude. Bad enough he was dead, I didn’t think it polite to ignore his ghostly existence. Especially since he didn’t seem interested in going anywhere. We’d tried everything under the sun we could think of to get him to go – wherever ghost went – but he never budged. He always just stood there with that bored expression on his young face and a frown that never altered. I sometimes wondered if that what he looked like when he died or if he was just bored and unimpressed with being dead.
I was standing in front of the mirror, trying to decide if my tank top was hiding my gun well enough. I adjusted the hem a few times until it fell just right, before I turned to Clay, who was leaning against the outside of the closet door. His arms were crossed, his fingertips caked with dirt digging into the once white sleeve of his t shirt. He looked at me the way he always did, watching, observing.
“Does it work?” I asked him.
He titled his head a bit, as if he were truly considering his answer before he nodded, still looking bored an uninterested.
I grabbed my phone and keys from the top of my dresser as I headed out of my bedroom. By the time I made it to the bottom step and out the front door, Clay was already in the passenger seat of my Honda. He had the seat back, his dirt caked boots on the dash.
As I climbed in, I turned to him and looked him straight in his dull eyes and said, “You’re damn lucky you’re a ghost or you’d be cleaning my dashboard with your tongue.”
It’d only been in the year that he’d started leaving the house with me. I tried asking him more than once about the change, but unless it was a yes or no answer, I just got a blank stare, deeper frowns, and sometimes a shoulder shrug. I realized a long time ago, Clay kind of just did whatever he damn well pleased. Part of that was almost never leaving me alone. Part of me wanted to be annoyed by his presence, bothered by a ghost having attached himself to me. I remember the first time I went to Momma Jones and told her how I felt, that I wanted to get rid of Clay by any means. She’d looked me square in the eye and told me no.
As one of few females of Slayer linage, it’s written that the hunter always attainted a familiar at some point in their lives. Momma Jones is sure Clay is exactly that. “He may not be what you wanted but it’s what you got. You work with what you got girl, ain’t no God out there prepared to give you any more than that,” her thick country accent burned into my memory. It was with that, that I finally gave in and stopped trying to banish him.
