Free A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb

delighted in sharing with me the peculiar knowledge that ap parently came with body theft. "There are ghosts who know they're dead and ones who don't. Before I took over a body, I couldn't see either kind." He smiled. "But I still have seen only one like you, who knew she was Light."
       "And the ones that think they're still alive," I said, "what do they say to you?"
       "Nothing," said James. "They can't see me or anyone. Not even each other."
       "What do they do all day," I asked, "and night?"
       "They usually repeat some task from the past. They walk home from school, they clean the windows of a building that's not there anymore, they look for something they lost or someone they lost."
       It seemed so sad. "How many are there?" I asked. "Can you see any now?" The idea made my skin prickle.
       "You mean this guy?" James nodded to the foot of the bed. When I gasped, he laughed at me.
       "That isn't funny."
       "You're right." He tried not to smile. "There aren't as many as I thought there'd be when I saw my first in the hospital hall way," James said. "I've seen only a dozen or so since then."
       Although I knew that he was not seeing an apparition in the room with us, I still felt unnerved by the idea that one might appear at any moment.
       "Where do you think Billy is now?" I asked. "You said you saw him only once. So he's not attached to his brother or the house."
       James shrugged. "I don't really know, but I don't think he's attached at all." He looked around the room at Billy's sketches taped to the walls. "Maybe he's wandering, like a runaway child."
       I wondered what it would be like to fly from house to house and face to face at will. It sounded liberating but at the same time lonely. I felt overwhelmed suddenly, the way I had in the phone booth, and I moved away from him, into the corner. Too much was new too fast.
       "I'm sorry I tricked you," he said. "About seeing a ghost."
       I couldn't explain my cowardice. The tension whined like in sects around me.
       "How many hosts have you had?" he asked me, hoping to dis tract me from any escape plans, I could tell.
       "Five."
       "How did you choose them?" he asked.
       I told him briefly of each host and how I had claimed them. I left out the envy I'd felt for what Mr. Brown had shared with his bride. The idea of describing my coping with their love life made me want to fold up like a fan and hide.
       "And now I'm host number six," he said.
       "Yes." But I felt confused again. "I need to be alone a little," I told him.
       And he simply said, "Of course."
       I melted out of James's room and wandered through the rest of his house. The rain had slowed to a fine mist. In the living room a man in overalls and a kerchief tied around his head slept on the couch with his arm over his eyes. There were cans, bottles, and crumpled paper all over the floor and furniture. In the kitchen, dishes filled the sink and the faucet dripped. In the other bedroom, Mitch slept, with one shoe off and one shoe on, his pants unbuttoned, sprawled on top of his covers. There was a tiny empty bathroom with the light left on and a small back porch where the roof dripped rainwater onto a shiny black bag of trash. I wished it were not Saturday but Monday so that I might go to school with James and see my Mr. Brown. No, he's not yours anymore, I reminded myself. You have a new host. My James.
       I heard a stirring from the hall. Mitch was walking unevenly to the bathroom. I kept my distance, drifting into the kitchen. There some pictures tacked to a corkboard beside the back door stopped me. In one of the photographs, a child of twelve, a dark-haired boy, was holding a four-year-old brown-haired lad upside down by the feet. The little boy was screaming with laughter, and the big boy was mimicking a body builder's triumphant growl. What stopped me was not only the little laughing face, which must have been James's, or I should say