Everything is on fire and now we have ghosts, too

Home for a few days while the babysitter takes a short vacation, I logged off to spend the morning working on my book and hanging out with the sprog. When I logged back on to check for messages from my other kid, the EPA and National Parks had been silenced, the pipelines are back on, the global gag rule had been reenacted, the White House is straight-up lying about things we saw on live television, the Pope is giving warnings on the rise of the next Hitler, and Oklahoma decided that oral sex is not rape if the victim is unconscious.

But then, March won 4 literary awards, so that stopped me from taking a hammer to my phone.

As I was sitting staring hollow-eyed at my news feed, I caught sight of something orange on the table in front of me and slammed my hand over it, "AHA. GOT YOU." It's a little plastic clapper toy, the sort that falls out of a piñata at a kid's birthday party. It's old and has been repaired with a little fraying rubber band where the hand fell off from overuse. And it's fucking haunted.

Last night, at 3:02 am, I woke up because the soft drips and patter of rain on the patio had changed. Above it was an erratic clatter, artificial-sounding and moving, like a person with a little plastic hand clapper. It was coming from the dining room. The cats were up on the dresser with their ears in varying angles of unhappiness. I got out of bed and tripped over a spilled lego bin, which had not been in the middle of the floor when I went to bed, but that is the nature of spilled lego bins. The clatter stopped when I crashed into the hallway. I walked through the house, looking out all the windows and straining my ears for the clattering sound. When I couldn't find it, I checked on the kids and went back to bed, and the moment my head hit the pillow the chatter of plastic started up again. The cats ran under the bed. I listened to it for a full minute - rattling carefully, slowing down, pausing, rattling frantically - and then I very quietly swung my legs out of bed and sneaked into the hallway. The rattle stopped. I breathed quietly and stood still, and after a few seconds it rattled tentatively. The cats panicked and charged out between my feet, skidding on the hall runner, and I ran through the kitchen and into the dining room under the cover of stampeding paws, but it was too late. The rattle stopped, and for the rest of the night I lay in bed half asleep, dreaming lucidly about defending the house against burglars with an enamel sink. (Not the most practical weapon, probably, but it swung really well.)

And then there it was this morning. The little orange plastic clapper, right there on the dining room table. The table had been cleared for dinner and the kids had been playing Jenga all evening, so how it got there I DON'T EVEN KNOW.

So. Ghost. I don't know what that was about, but you are welcome to sort the cutlery or straighten the book shelves if you are bored at 3am.

I'm going to leave the clapper and legos out again tonight to see if they act as a spectral lure, and then chuck cats at the ghost until they learn how to be better paranormal investigators. I've read that ghosts need high amounts of energy to manifest, and it seems to me that an angry cat should do the trick pretty neatly. 

Will report. If the internet is still up in the morning.