*It’s been a while! As a benefit for our paying subscribers, Juke provides full audio versions of some of our most-loved essays. Last time, we heard Toast, a collaboration with Paul Vlachos. This time we’re listening to A Ghost’s House, one of our most-read stories from 2024. (And apologies for the few little gurgles from the humidifier. That thing is making winter bearable here in New York.)
Free subscribers and everyone else can hit play above for a (longer than normal) preview. Then check out the original piece, linked below, if you haven’t read it before… TM*
“It could be so quiet in that house. Quiet as a grave. There were those terrible days when it felt like I was living in a museum. Like some long-closed museum to something completely unimportant. Those days, I sat in the living room and watched the dust blow in around the doors and windows. It collected on the lampshades. On the tops of all the books. An occasional black spider darted out from behind the living room paneling and then retreated again, but otherwise, no one would be visiting. No one would be calling. If someone did call, I wouldn’t answer. I wouldn’t go to the grocery store or wave at my neighbors. Not when it was that kind of quiet.
If I had tried to speak to anyone, the sound of my voice would have given me away. So I didn’t talk. Not on the quiet days while my husband was asleep upstairs. He would sleep away the whole day. Often two whole days and two whole nights, before he finally creaked slowly down the staircase from the bedroom, then along the hallway, and passed through the living room on his way to the kitchen or his office. He needed to come through the living room to get anywhere. And I was usually there, sitting just where he had left me, in my chair by the window…”
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