I’ve always loved playing in the kitchen.

I remember all the times I watched as my grandmother and my mother and all the aunties would bustle around, measuring out ingredients and filling kettles, stoking the fire of the big old coal-burning oven and testing things for doneness.

Sometimes they’d give me some dough to shape. I never twisted it into the classic pretzel-shape everyone expected, though. Instead, I’d outline continents or trace the lines of constellations, then dab on the egg-yolk and sprinkle a bit of cinnamon sugar or salt, as my mood dictated.

I always suspected that they gave me the dough to keep me from seeing what they were really cooking.

But I knew.

Too many things that weren’t food came out of our kitchen.

Aunt Helen, for example, always baked the loveliest quilts, patchworks of strawberry, blueberry, and raspberry with squirts of lemon juice for a punch of color.

Aunt Delia poured galloping horses out of her kettle, and Aunt Patricia blended the most amazing stories – you could taste the voices.

Mom… Mom dabbled in a little of everything, but when she was at her best she’d toss a few ingredients into a hot saute pan, and out would come a complete outfit, inspired by the latest cover of Vogue or Elle or (when she was making something for me) Seventeen.

My grandmother, on the other hand – she had the real talent in the family. She’d layer things into one of the big lasagna pans, singing while she worked, and an hour or so later, she’d pull pots of African violets out of the oven.

She sang to them, too, of course.

But that’s a different kind of magic.

It took me a while to figure out my specialty. At first, I wanted to blend stories like my aunt, but we have different voices and different experiences in the world, so my stories are different than hers.

She blends things from root vegetables and sharp cheeses, red wine, fresh bread, and long walks in misty woods.

My stories… they’re made of other ingredients. Dark chocolate, spicy chili, sometimes a little wasabi, other times a whole, creamy avocado. And I don’t blend. Sometimes I saute, like Mom, and sometimes, I bake, like my grandmother, and often I use the crockpot, because some stories need to be stewed slowly… And I do sing while I’m working, sometimes.

Now, each of us has one, special, secret ingredient that we use when we’re in the kitchen. As with magicians, we don’t reveal what those ingredients are. Or at least, we would never share what others might be using.

But I don’t mind telling you what mine is.

It’s very simple, and incredibly hard to find, both at the same time.

It’s a pinch of stardust.

He would bring them home in buckets. Roses, sunflowers, peonies, mums – whatever flowers were pretty and seasonable.

They were metal buckets. Garden pails, really. He would drop them near the door and call out that he was home, and I’d follow the sound to the foyer, running to his solid embrace.

I didn’t mind the roses, and I liked the tulips and irises and sunflowers.

But it was the gladiolas that I loved.

The first time he gave me glads, it was the night before his first deployment, and they were yellow.

“No ribbons, babe,” he insisted. “You’re allowed to be reasonably worried. But no ribbons. No signs. If you must keep a vigil, do it quietly.”

Well, I really wasn’t the ribbon type.

But before he left, I buried myself in his arms and breathed in his scent – fresh flowers, speed stick deodorant, Old Spice aftershave. I memorized that smell.

The next bunch of gladiolas were pink, brought to the hospital the day our daughter was born.

I asked if he would have preferred a son. “Nawp. Girl or boy, it’s much the same. We’ll raise her and love her, and she’ll know about writing and cooking and embroidery from you, and tools and gardening from me, and none of those pink screwdrivers, either. This baby will grow up knowing the difference between Philips and flathead.”

I laughed at that. “Don’t forget Allen wrenches,” I said. “She has to be the queen of flat-pack furniture by the time she heads to college.”

“And so, she will.”

And so, she was.

And the gladiolas kept coming, their tall green stalks and delicate pastel flowers witnessing every holiday and birthday and sometimes just because it was a day that ended in ‘y.’

And then they stopped.

He stopped.

At his funeral, I tore away the lilies and roses, and laid the gladiolas on his coffin. They looked me, our family, our friends, like I was crazy, but I did it anyway. And our daughter understood. She wrapped her arm around me and said, “Yes, Mom. That’s what he would have wanted.”

I couldn’t be around glads for a long after that.

When I turned fifty, a well-meaning friend sent a bouquet that had gladiolas in it. I gave her my brittle smile and thanked her politely. I also stuffed the whole god-damned bunch of flowers into the trash can outside the restaurant as soon as her leased BMW had pulled away from the curb.

A few days later, the bucket appeared near the front door. Metal. Galvanized. Full of yellow glads. I stared at them, convinced they were a mirage, but when they remained after several hours, I brought them all the way inside.

I caught a whiff of speed stick as I moved them through the house.

Being in a relationship with a ghost is a tricky thing. Sometimes, he can be corporeal enough to engage in sexual intimacy, but other times even a simply hug requires more substance than he can offer.

I can hear him speak, but no one else can, though our dog always follows the direction of his out-of-tune singing.

I don’t ask him Why or How or How Long.

He doesn’t push me to remarry.

Our daughter never questions my out-of-the-blue happiness, either. She never suggests I seek therapy, or find a new lover – one who has both presence and a pulse.

She sees the buckets of gladiolas in every possible color.

And she knows.

“The Tree is the heart of the Forest,” they told me. All of them, the old Mothers, the old Wives, spun me their tales of loyalty and devotion, betrayal and desolation, love and loss, and time.

“The Tree is the heart of the Forest and the Mother is the heart of the Family,” they elaborated as the years went by and my marriage remained a barren one.

Despite my long years of adulthood, they spoke to me as though I were a child. They never say it outright, but their tones all imply the same thing. I, who have never carried a growing fetus within my womb, who have never pushed a mewling infant into this cold world, am somehow less.

Less of an adult. Less of a wife. Less of a person.

At home, sitting in front of the fire, I rail and rant and cry, and my husband wraps his solid arms around me, and assures me I am not less, but that I am actually enough.

He kisses away my tears and fury and we make love by firelight, our bodies coming together with no less of a thrill despite the familiarity of decades.

When he brings me to completion, I let my exultation resound, willing the Others, the Old Ones, the Grandmothers and Great-Grandmothers with their brooding eyes and clucking teeth, to hear it.

“Listen,” I think. “Hear this. I am full of Warmth and Joy and Love.

“The Tree is the Heart of the Forest, and the Mother is the heart of the Family.” I hear them chanting it in my head, and I banish their wavering voices and frowning mouths. I cast away their sorrowful faces etched with ancient worry lines.

They’re right, though.

The Tree is the heart of the Forest.

But its roots and branches dwell within me.

I will never be the Mother.

I am the Tree.

I am scared.

I am scared.

I am scared.

Mandy writes the lines in the spiral notebook she uses for a journal, and smiles at the way her jet-black printing looks on the faintly cream-colored paper with its crisp green college-ruled lines. She’s using one of Mommy’s special Onyx roller-ball pens and the ink shines wetly for almost a minute, and she must be Very Careful not to smear it before it’s completely dry.

(Mandy stopped using pencils when she was six, except for math. She moved beyond wide-ruled paper when she was seven, and they sent her to Special Education to learn cursive because the Advanced Reading workbook had bits of cursive in it. She likes writing in cursive, but some things have to be printed.)

I am scared the sun won’t come back.

I am scared the world will stop spinning.

I am scared that the spiders and snakes will come out of the shadows.

I am scared that Daddy won’t come – No! Dr. Morrison says she mustn’t think of such things.

She looks behind her to where Ferguson is sprawled on her bed. His tail is twitching and his big paws are paddling and that means he’s Dreaming, and she isn’t supposed to wake up a Dreaming dog, but she really wants to feel his warm doggy breath on the back of her hand, and see in his big brown eyes how much he loves her.

Dr. Morrison is the one who told Mandy to write it out when she was afraid or angry. To put it in print so she could see it was only words and feelings.

Sometimes it helped.

In school on Friday, Mandy’s teacher promised the class that when the sun went dark tomorrow, it wasn’t Magic. It was only Science that made the moon move in front of the sun and turn day into night for a few minutes.

But on the bus on the way home, Billy kept teasing her that werewolves could come out during Eclipses, just like they could on Full Moons, and Siobhan kept taunting her about how her Daddy must be one of the Dark Ones because they only ever saw him on Skype or Facetime,  and that when Noon turned to Midnight they could walk on the earth and come back to claim their kin.

The thing is… Billy lies a lot.

And Mandy is pretty sure Daddy isn’t ACTUALLY a Dark One. A Creature of the Night could never look so handsome in his uniform with all the fruit salad on his chest. (Except it doesn’t look like fruit salad. It looks like ribbons.)

After all, Mommy says that it’s normal for Mommies and Daddies to do bitey things sometimes. (She says it was the way grown-up people kiss.) And Daddy isn’t dead or anything; he was on the Other Side of the World doing his job in a place they call the Sandbox. And that time she’d seen him looking all foamy and frothy coming out of the steamy bathroom, he’d smelled nice, like mint.

So… maybe Billy and Siobhan were just trying to scare her because they were Stupid Idiots who didn’t know any better.

Mommy will be there to hold her hand when the sun went away. And Ferguson will always be her protector.

And Daddy’s deployment will end before Christmas.

Mandy looks at the sentences she’d written at the top of her page. Then she trades her black pen for a red Magic Marker and draws bold lines through them all.

She isn’t scared anymore.

“There, just… a little to the left… now a tad to the right… oh, yes! Aahhhhhh!”

The boy with the pitchfork had finally managed to reach that infernal dry spot right between her primary wings.

It seemed almost a pity to eat him. But, Tradition, and all that.

She’d roast him first, of course. Dragon-fire killed the pain and added a crispy outer shell that was just so… She was distracted from her search for the perfect word by another irritating itch. This time it was just above her left ear-slit.

“Boy,” she growled, as sweetly as she could. “I need your assistance again.”

He went to work, raking the tines of his fork up and down the specified quadrant of her body.

She knew it was bad form to play with her food for this long, but she couldn’t help it!

Ever since Blood of Bathory had switched to GMO virgin’s blood in their moisturizer, it had been SO much less effective.

Fifty years after its initial run, HAMILTON was still going strong.

Of course, they’d made some minor changes to keep things fresh and appeal to the Post-Apocalyptical generation.

Still, having one of the Previously Living (‘undead’ wasn’t PC) playing King George III had been an inspired choice.

Critics even said his performance of “You’ll Be Back,” rivaled that of Jonathan Groff.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Every night, at precisely twelve minutes past ten, the rhythmic tapping begins.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

It starts at the back of the house, at the kitchen door. Three taps, then a pause. Sometimes the doorknob rattles slightly, but most nights it’s only the tapping we hear. The quiet lasts for the space of four deep breaths, and then it continues down the hall to the French doors in the living room.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

These doors don’t have the kind of locks that rattle, but if we’re sitting in the living room, just reading by the fire or maybe watching television (I admit, we watch far too much television) we sometimes feel a faint breeze, as if the seal between the two doors has been tested and found to be slightly lacking.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

Five times we hear the sound, until it reaches the laundry room door –  the mud room, really, that leads to the garage. That pause is longer. We used to think it was because it was a double door, but one night when I was changing laundry loads so we’d have clean underwear the next morning, I thought I heard the tapping continuing across the garage floor. I even opened the door to look, but all I saw was our cars and piles of boxes that haven’t been opened since we moved into this house, five years ago.

Tap. Tap. Tap… Tap.

There’s always a pause when the noises approach the front door. I’m not sure why. My husband says it’s because the foyer of our house was remodeled about a decade before we bought it, and clearly Charles – that’s the name we’ve given to our tapping ghost – is a bit confused.

I see no reason to argue the point.

Tap, tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap Tap. Tap… Tap… Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

The sound recedes, as if someone’s ascending the stairs… and if we strain to listen we can hear it continue beyond the second floor, up the final five steps that lead to the attic.

And then they stop.

We’ve explored the attic, of course. There’s nothing up there except our Christmas decorations, the box that holds our plastic tree, and a few odds and ends we unpacked, but never found places for.

In any case, the tapping always ends at ten-thirty exactly.

We live with it for a year, then two, then ten.

At some point, it morphs from being a curiosity into an annoyance, and finally, it becomes one of those ‘house noises’ that you learn to ignore, like the refrigerator hum you only really notice when it’s absent because of a power outage or something.

Years later, we’re participating in the neighborhood garage sale, when a young man comes up to me carrying a black cane with an eagle for a handle. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he asks, “how much do you want for this?”

“Oh… I don’t know,” I begin.

My husband interrupts. “That’s not actually for sale,” he says gently. “It’s a family heirloom.”

We don’t tell him neither of us has ever seen the thing before.

The potential buyer is polite. He even ends up buying an antique metal milk can we bought at a flea market and never found a use for.

Later that night, at twelve past ten precisely, we hear it begin in the kitchen. Tap. Tap. Tap. And we look at each other and smile, because somehow we know it’s just Charles, checking the locks.