GHOST SWING
Riley’s the kind of kid who less likes to ride the swings at the playground than wait until I’m distracted and push one. From there, he summons my attention to point out the swing’s in motion, claiming—what other explanation could there be?—“The ghosts are swinging.”
He runs off soon after. My wife Heather read that, for some kids, physical movement is a necessary component to thinking, and she repeated it enough around him that he internalized the point, regardless of whether the original thesis were true. Running back and forth across the house, across a hotel room, across this playground is one and the same with thinking and any insistence he stop is met with a plaintive, Are you telling me I can’t think?
And here of all places, of course he can think. He can run. Other kids run, too, in a game of tag. One even invited him to join, though he demurred. He doesn’t like to touch or be touched, and learned to fear tag because the game all but necessitates that kind of contact. Still, he runs. Thinks. I suspect he thinks of ghosts now, maybe that they’re chasing him, maybe that he’s chasing him, or maybe there’s no chase at all. He simply needs the motion to keep his mind whirring.
Who am I to blame him for embracing his imagination and the supernatural? A dark period in my twenties , after watching my umpteenth adaptation of A Christmas Carol one lonely holiday season, hadn’t I gotten hung up on wishing for my own Christmas miracle. I wanted the magical windows into the past and future—the present, too, if only to eavesdrop on what others might say about me—and felt a keen disappointment when December 25 came and went without a magical turn. No new insight, but that I’d be better served to take charge of my own mental state.
No ghosts.
Heather believes in ghosts, and, to be clear, I do too. But I don’t think they’re real. Mine’s the classic skeptic’s dissonance—to doubt, to poke holes, to contend there’s no logical way apparitions could be. All of this thought gets shaken to its core when I spend a night alone and watch a shadow move across the wall after I’ve turned the lights out, catch an ephemeral whiff of nutmeg, hear a creaking floorboard. Late enough, my imagination supersedes my reason. The truth: I love horror movies for the immersion they offer, the ability to lose myself in the fantastical from the comfort of home. Whereas the feel-good final kiss of a rom-com tends to leave me minutes after the credits roll, horror digs its claws in deeper in ways that defy thought, that cling tight to belief. I love Nightmare on Elm Street, less for the ghost of Freddy Krueger haunting dreams than the premise no one believes the final girl’s claims about the man with burned skin and knives at the ends of his fingers, even as the body count rises. I love Scream and its chief villain Ghostface for the opposite reason: everyone thinks, knows, and believes the threat is real and yet no one can keep these teenagers safe.
“I saw an old woman at the foot of the bed,” Heather told me the first time she spent the night at my place. She thought it might have been my grandmother, because we’d been talking about my grandmother and how she was my favorite person in the world the first twenty-ish years of my life. It wasn’t the first time Heather’d observed a figure like this—other partners’ relatives and friends years gone. Heather can see them.
I was skeptical even as the little hairs on my arm stood on end.
Riley comes to a stop by the swings again. “Look over there,” he commands so I look over there, toward the splash pad. I put his water shoes on him today, in case he wanted to go in. He never wants to go in when he’s properly attired, the way it never rains on those cloudy days I remember an umbrella, the way a camera’s prone to glitch out, even when it’s ready at hand, anytime someone claims to have seen a ghost.
“Look!”
When I look, the chains suspending the swing are all twisted, a tight braid, spinning to unravel. We watched teenagers screw up the swing like that a couple weeks ago, making a game of jumping into the seat as soon as the chains were untangled, then one smaller girl among the pack leapt into it before it had finished spinning and let it spin her in her seat and she laughed like a lunatic and they all laughed and more of them tried, but it didn’t work as well with bigger, heavier bodies, and I worried the force might break the chains, ruin the swing for the kids whose mass it was built to support.
Now, I worry Riley will try to the leap but he doesn’t, only watches the spin until the chains are separate again and the seat of the swing shimmies from side to side, steadying.
“The ghosts are dancing,” Riley proclaims, and I try to remember what it was like to delight in such a simple thing, to think I’d pulled one over a grownup, to not worry about parsing thought from belief from imagination.
“You’re right,” I say. “They’re dancing.”
Michael Chin was born and raised in Utica, New York and currently lives in Las Vegas with his wife and son. He’s the author of seven full-length books, including his novel, My Grandfather’s an Immigrant, and So is Yours (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2021) and his latest short story collection This Year’s Ghost (JackLeg Press, 2025). Find him online at miketchin.com. His instagram profile can be found at the following link. https://www.instagram.com/michaelthechin/