Really just an opening, this one—dunno whether I'll pursue it.

~

When Mrs Wense died we buried her in the field around the house where the ghost lived. A wall of rain and fog swept towards us as we lowered the casket into the ground. Yellow flowers danced in the tall grass. The field was a shambles of choked weeds and bushes competing for sunlight. Plants thrived there and nothing else, because everything else died.

Mrs Wense used to say that was because of the ghost.

She was a witch, Mrs Wense, at least that’s what people said, although I never saw her ride a broomstick or anything and when I asked her about it she just made jokes. But people would visit her. All sorts did. I know that because I was one of them.

Sundays my mother would send me over to the hut on the edge of the ghost’s field to deliver small cakes and bread and sometimes questions.

I’d wait outside—someone else was often in—and my gaze always tended to wander over to the distant clump of rubble at the centre of that field. If it was night or a particularly cloudy day and the moon was new, you might see a pale light wafting out from the bones of that house. And if it was quiet, and you were downwind, you could hear a girl’s voice singing rather sadly.