Tonight his son won’t take the garbage out because someone is out there, the boy says, moving around in the dark. 

The father tells him to grow a pair, cinches the bag shut, walks downstairs, and pushes out the door into the alley, only to find his son is right. There is someone out here, he realizes, lifting the lid—not a man but a girl, throwing herself against the dumpster walls, falling down and getting back up to do it all over again. 

The child is trapped, he thinks, trapped and confused, so he reaches inside to give her a hand and pull her out. Which he would have done had the girl not sunk her teeth into his fingers and said: I’m not trapped or confused and I’m not a girl, I’m the part of your son you don’t understand, and I beat myself up not because I want to escape but because I want you to see how he feels. 

Too stunned to speak, the father leaves the lid open because he doesn’t know what else to do and because he doesn’t know if this is real. Then, with his good hand, he drops the trash into a separate receptacle, one without life, and walks back upstairs to hug his son. 

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About the Author

Dominic Viti graduated from SCAD’s writing program in 2011. He has written poetry and short stories for Chorus (Simon & Schuster), Harvard Review, The Penn Review, Euphony, Lifelines, Puerto del Sol and Beloit Fiction Journal. His work as an advertising copywriter has won numerous awards including the Gold Cannes Lion, Grand Prix and Gold Effie. He was an editor at the Jack London Society and a guest speaker at Temple University. He saw his first ghost in Savannah.