He doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he does believe in haunted places.

Some towns, he can’t even visit, because it seems every street corner is inhabited.

Apartment buildings, parks, even bus lines seem to call to his sensitivity, his strongest mental ability.

He had never asked for a photographic memory, and nothing he could do would numb the feeling of those places, each one trapped in time, like structures in snowglobes.

The ghosts only shake him instead, from head to toe. Cold spots not in temperature but in his stomach. Spiritiual voices, the clinking of glasses, laughter, all in his head, heard only by him.

It’d have been better that he believed in spirits: things that could be communicated to, things that could potentially be put to rest. Souls that could forgive.

Instead of memories that never will.