My mother’s portrait used to hang at the top of the stairs at my grandparents’ house. I loved that house; I picked it out when I was just a toddler. But for some reason, I always sensed a hostile presence between the first and second floors. Not malevolent or evil, just angry. Something that didn’t want me crossing from downstairs to upstairs. But only at night, and only between the floors. Nevertheless, I felt sure that my mother’s portrait, overlooking the stairs, would protect me. Not my parents, not my grandparents – though I know they would have. There was just something reassuring about the portrait being there. I called it “Little Mommy.”<\/p>\n
My mother died in 2002, and her portrait – “Little Mommy” – now hangs at the top of my own stairs. Feels right.<\/p>\n
Goosebumps and a shudder\r\ncoursing down our spines, their\r\nbackstories haunt us,\r\nchill us. We imagine agonal moaning,\r\nclanking chains, clattering bones\r\ndevoid of flesh. Why are the ghosts\r\nwho live in our heads all suffering\r\ntorments of the damned? Why\r\nshouldn't they guide the tired\r\nmother's hands as she shapes dough\r\nkneads it, sets it aside to rise?\r\nAnd why shouldn't ghosts rise, too,\r\nsummoned by faint echoes of sense \r\nmemory, the scent of baking bread? \r\nWhy shouldn't they linger \r\nto amuse the only child\r\nin the guise of an imaginary friend?\r\nHave they merely slipped through time,\r\none warped dimension to the next?\r\nPerhaps the end we fear is just a bug \u2014\r\na glitch, reboot, while version\r\n1.0 continues, processed on a parallel\r\nthread of infinite second chances.\r\nMaybe now and then - or maybe not\r\n(and then again) -\r\nthe wires cross, enjamb. \r\nThat future fate, that death \r\nor worse we fear could simply be\r\nanother haunting verse.<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Why shouldn’t they be just as we knew them?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":137990366,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_has_post_settings":[],"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,7],"tags":[2741],"hashtags":[],"class_list":["post-137990364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","category-writing","tag-a2z2025"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-25 07:29:39","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137990364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137990364"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137990364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":137990367,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137990364\/revisions\/137990367"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137990366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137990364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137990364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137990364"},{"taxonomy":"hashtags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtags?post=137990364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}