French Toast and a Cup of Ghosts (Nonfiction)

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The dining room smelled like cinnamon and butter. Sunlight came in low through the tall windows, landing on the new maple dining table where I was setting out plates, mugs, and a platter of thick slices of challah dipped in egg. My sons Ryan and Zach had come back for brunch, their coffee steaming, their chairs pulled close like they used to when they still lived here. The house felt full again, but different.

“I just finished another story,” I said, setting down a jug of maple syrup between them.

Ryan glanced up. “About what?”

I poured myself and my husband a drink and gave a small smile. “Ghosts, superstition, you know…the usual for my book.”

The boys exchanged a quick look, the kind only siblings can share; something wordless passing between them. Zach’s fork stopped halfway to his mouth. Ryan stared down at his plate, then said quietly, “We’ve seen them too.”

My hand stalled mid-air. “Seen who?”

“Ghosts,” Zach said simply, as if announcing the weather.

I set my cup down. The dining room suddenly felt too still, the sunlight too sharp.

Ryan rubbed his jaw. “I used to see this shadow in my room. Sometimes he just stands there. Sometimes he moves.”

A shiver passed through me. Years ago, when Ryan still lived at home, I had gone past his room and something caught my eye, a shape, a presence. For a heartbeat, I wondered if I had even seen it: a shadowy outline of a man standing silently by the window. I hadn’t told Ryan then. I didn’t want to scare him.

“What kind of shadow and where in your room?” I asked, a little afraid of the answer.

“Like a man, always in the same corner by the window.” He hesitated. “And now I see ghosts in my new place since I moved out three months ago. I thought moving would get rid of them, but they came with me.”

Zach shifted in his seat. “I’ve had someone sitting on my bed. Not every night, but often. It happened when I lived here, too. I feel the weight, the mattress dip. I open my eyes, and sometimes there’s this shape. Like it’s waiting.”

I tried to breathe, but the air was thick with cinnamon, butter, and something colder. All those years I thought I was shielding them from the shadows, keeping the old fears tucked away where my children couldn’t touch them. I never imagined the ghosts would slip past me anyway, or that my sons would carry that weight quietly, keeping it a secret to spare me.

Ryan took a sip of coffee, then leaned back. “Last week I woke up in the middle of the night and saw a woman walking around my room. She went into the bathroom. I thought it was my girlfriend, so I called out, asked if she was okay. And then she answered, from beside me. She hadn’t moved. It wasn’t her.”

Zach, twenty-six and the youngest, stopped cutting his french toast, eyes wide, surprised that Ryan, thirty-three, was saying out loud what they’d kept between themselves for years. Ryan just shrugged. “Now I just close the bathroom door at night to avoid the bathroom ghost.”

It was said so matter-of-factly, like closing a window to keep out a draft.

Their dad shifted uncomfortably at the end of the table, as if the air itself had turned unfamiliar. Ghosts had never sat well with him; even the word seemed to ripple against something in him he preferred not to name. Finally, he shook his head and said, “Why are we even talking about this stuff?” He pushed his chair back, muttered something about needing a break, and left the room for a while.

The three of us stayed at the table, plates cooling, butter softening in the dish. I looked at my boys, their shoulders, their faces, the familiar way they held their coffee mugs, and felt something shift inside me.

All my life I’d believed the line of ghosts and spirits had stopped with me. That whatever ability or curse my grandmother whispered about had ended with  my generation. But here they were, my sons, speaking casually about shadows on beds and women in bathrooms. They’d left home. They’d built their own lives. Yet, the ghosts had followed them out into the world.

On the buffet behind them sat my grandmother’s brass candlesticks. Every Friday night, she polished them with salt and lemon, whispering names of dead relatives under her breath. I hadn’t used them in years, but the night before, I’d felt compelled to light them.  The flames burned steadily, anchoring the room in warmth. I wondered if the ghosts recognized the glow. Or if my grandmother had known, long before I was born, that something was on its way, and she had practiced these rituals so the light would guide the ghosts where they needed to go.

I stirred my coffee slowly, listening to the small sound of the spoon clinking against the porcelain. The morning sun had moved higher, cutting bright lines across the dining room table, and in its brightness, everything felt doubled. The ordinary and the uncanny. The seen and the unseen.

“Eat up,” I said softly, though my voice caught. “French toast doesn’t stay warm forever.”

We sat together, three people, three mugs of coffee, one family, and for a moment I could almost feel the others too: the man in the corner of Ryan’s room, the weight on Zach’s bed, the bathroom ghost. They were all here with us, quiet, watching, part of the family now, whether we invited them or not. They had followed me for so long that I hardly questioned if they had begun trailing my children too. I should have asked my sons about them. I should have named the shadows for what they were. I don’t know why I didn’t. Maybe ghosts don’t haunt us at all so much as follow the thread of family from one generation to the next. Maybe they linger because we’re the ones who forget how to listen.

Lisa Brodsky is a writer and public health professional whose work bridges personal narrative, cultural memory, and magical realism. Her hybrid memoir, Linger: A Convergence of Family, Memory, and Superstition, explores inherited rituals and intergenerational storytelling. Her work has appeared in Memoirist, Pictura Journal, Otherwise Engaged, and other literary journals. She lives in Minnesota.