This is a barn and I know it's haunted...

I sit on the crumbling stacks of musty hay, far enough back that anyone coming into the old barn would have a hard time seeing me. Not that I expect anyone to appear. This barn is abandoned, used only to store long-forgotten shreds of someone’s past. Harnesses hang on the wall, stiff and gray with mold and age; the pitchfork in the corner has only two tines, both rusted nearly away. Cats slink through the hay, skinny and wild, and I have sat here long enough on more than one night to see the barn owl drift in on silent wings, eyes huge and black in her white round face. Ghosts live in this barn, tattered memories, and sometimes I think I can see them -- one sits among the cats, blinking colorless eyes, and another hangs from the rafters, echoing the owl as she mutters to herself.

If I close my eyes, I can imagine the barn like it must have once been, full of sunlight and the smell of horses, men talking about the old bay mare ... she’s lookin’ a mite thin these days ... yeah, her teeth ain’t what they used to be, maybe some hot bran mash would fix ‘er ... in the distance children laugh and a dog barks, and a horse stomps its hoof to get rid of a fly. The cats are sleek and twine around the men’s legs, and the ghosts hide small and weak in the corners, no more than scraps of cobweb, to be swept out one of these days with the broom.

I open my eyes once more, feeling the shadows draw tight around me; outside the rain falls, a steady silver curtain on the ragged field of weeds -- no, it’s a field of rain, growing clean and cold from the rich ground, and at the edge of hearing the ghosts sing, a low sad melody that blends with the rain and the beat of my heart in the darkness.