It started the day I got my negative pap results back. Slowly. At first it was just one, a toddler. The toddler seeped in under the kitchen door one evening like a sweaty fog while I was microwaving a chicken pot pie. The toddler went and stood in the corner, swaying and staring at me. I say staring, but there were no eyes, just dark holes where eyes should be. Every other part of them was intact. I wondered how they got around.

I offered the toddler some pot pie and said, “Winner winner chicken dinner,” but they just stood there teetering unsteadily until they fell forward, landing on their hands. I guess they were just learning how to walk when they died.

It wasn’t but a day or two later when a few more children started clogging up my kitchen. Within a week the kitchen was so full that I started picking up take-out after work and eating it on the front porch so there’d be enough space for all of them to mill about. That’s about the time they started following me to bed.

There were so many of them, different ages and sizes, but all children. I tried to talk to them, but they didn’t either seem to understand me or want to engage with me. Maybe they just liked my company, the silences between us, so I let them be. It’s not the first time that I was in a relationship like that.

Right next door to my small house is the old orphanage, which they are currently renovating into lofts. I’ve heard talk that several children are believed to have gone missing from there. This place is rampant with these stories, these truths. Unwed mothers shamed and shunned. No one knows what really happened to them, or is willing to say, willing to admit their complicity. It’s just whispers in the cracks of the sidewalks, out of the corners of mouths, stains on old linens. There are no happy stories about places that hold children captive.

I wonder if this happened to me because my step-sister is terminally ill. She doesn’t like me, so I didn’t reach out to her. My father had told me and every night I go to bed I feel guilty. She has children. She’s probably a great mother, the kind of mother that dotes, that buys well-made under garments for their child, that spends her evenings when the kids are in bed, barely able to stand, reading online how to be a better parent, always putting them first. She probably has their entire lives, afterlives, and potential reincarnations planned out in minute detail. I feel as though someone was choosing who should live and who should die, they should have switched us up. I’m like a cat lady without even the cats.

A pregnant woman has started walking past my house everyday. I think she’s checking the work on her loft. She’s probably impatient. She is about to blow a baby. She’s got to be uncomfortable being that many people at once. She shines as she walks past my house, and since I like shiny things, I open my front door and ask her about her loft. ‘Is there anything strange about it?’ ‘Do the walls occasionally look like they’re bleeding?’ ‘Do you ever see dead children?’ ‘Did you pay way above market value?’ She doesn’t even look at me.

“Wait!” I call out to her, but she doesn’t stop. She disintegrates into the exposed brick facade of the old orphanage. I mistook her old attire for retro hipsterism like someone who was going to move into an overpriced loft. I’m always too quick to make snap judgements.

I don’t believe in ghosts, so this situation is especially trying for me. I don’t know what to think, so I start to think that it’s something in the water and I make some calls. Nobody has heard anything strange about the water in our neighbourhood. My neighbours on the other side of me say that they don’t hallucinate and looked at me strangely when I asked. I change my diet, maybe it’s what I’m eating. I don’t know, I just know that I get rid of everything I have in my fridge and cupboards and start from scratch.

It must be the renovations that are shaking all the ghosts loose. Rattling them out of the woodwork. They don’t know where to go, so I suppose it makes sense that they come to my house first. Every day there is more and more of them. They are crowding my room when I go to bed. Their socketless eyes all seemingly staring at me. I ask repeatedly what they want me to do, but they don’t answer. I’m not sure that they can hear me. They just stand there. I have sleeping pills now.

It is on the third week of this that Chloe shows up. She’s probably seven or eight. Thin like a magic wand. She’s like Renée Jeanne Falconetti in the Passion of Joan of Arc and has a similar intensity to her as well, but I don’t know if that’s just because she’s a ghost and in sepia. Chloe is more animated than the other spirits, more alive. She chases them out of my room at night. Like an innocent game of fisty cuffs, she wields her balled hands at them. I wonder how she knows where they are.

We named her together. I asked her if her name was Sue, or Mary-Ann, or if it was Louise, or Alexandra, or Monica, or Jean. When none of them appeared to be her name—because maybe she just doesn’t remember anymore—I asked her if she wanted to be called any of them. I asked her a lot of other names that maybe she’d like. In the end she chose Chloe.

I asked Chloe where they all went, all the other ghosts. She just pointed down the street, away from the orphanage, north maybe. I wonder if they’re with my neighbours now or going to Santa’s Village. I’m afraid to go ask my neighbours any more questions for fear that they will look at me strangely again. I have enough on my mind without having the neighbours’ gossip.

Chloe learns how to use the stereo. She listens to records and books on tape when I go to work. She especially likes ghost stories and Wuthering Heights and the Spice Girls. I tell her one day, “There’s a cowboy on a horse. They leave on Friday and come back three days later on Friday. How is that possible?” She gallops through the living room on her imaginary horse, hitting the horse’s imaginary bottom as she hurdles the couch.

I wonder if this is happening because I was briefly in an orphanage. I was Chloe’s age, and they came and took me away from my mother, said she was unfit. They weren’t wrong, but instead of sending me to live with my father right away, they sent me to the orphanage until they found a foster home for me. It was old and run by nuns, but it wasn’t the orphanage next door to me now. It was in another place, but in a place not so dissimilar. In both places there is always grey and rain and wind that bites your cheeks. Always.

Chloe’s been curling up in bed with me at night. I can’t feel her, but I know she is there. Her little form is like a wrinkle in the sheets. Sometimes I hear her whimpering in her sleep.

It wasn’t until I was well into being a teenager that I met my dying step-sister. We only lived together for a few months. She was Chloe’s age then. I tried to play dolls with her and talk to her about cartoons. Her eyes were always large. She didn’t seem to like me from the start. I guess she was going through her own drama.

Chloe is wrapped around my feet like a cat as I sit on the sofa and write my step-sister one night. I tell her I’m sorry to hear about, about what? About imminent death. There was an illustrated book I had as a child about Louis Pasteur. A child with big buggy eyes is bitten by a dog and rabies runs through his blood, depicted as little, also bug eyed, enemies. Everything is dire until Louis fills a needle full of soldiers and injects it into buggy-eyed boy’s arm. And everyone lived happily ever after. As I close my eyes to let my thoughts rest, they come pouring in torrentially. Cancer cells dressed in top hats and feather boas dance through veins, fucking and frolicking and taking over the whole show. When they take up permanent residence on your spine, it’s game over. Chloe whimpers and I tell my step-sister that I’m sorry about her illness. I can’t say I love her, because I don’t. I don’t even really know her. In the end I don’t send the email.

My mother wasn’t allowed to visit me when I was in the orphanage. During the day the other children went to school, and I stayed in the common room alone. The nuns weren’t mean to me, but they weren’t attentive either. There was much to be done. Nun business. When the other girls came home, we would play together, but now I don’t remember any of their faces. The nights were the hardest when the pipes creaked as I lay awake, and the cross threatened to jump off the wall and stab me through the heart.

The next morning there is an email from my father that says my step-sister has passed in the night.

There’s a sign that reads “Females Only” on the door in the old wing of the hospital. You’re told to grab a green bag off of the tray in front of the reception, strip from the waist down. There are two hospital gowns to be put on, mint green, adorned with floral prints, and a pair of blue booties to put over our shoes. One gown tied at the back and the other used as an overcoat. The nurse, as she calls people in, tells us to not lock the bathroom door after seeing the doctor, that we might be disoriented, that we might fall down. I imagine that happening to me. I’ll hit my head on the sink as I fall. I might die. I might be dying.

It’s a theatre of repetition. We come out standing and waiting after seeing the doctor, strangely named Dr. Cherry. I feel like it’s a stage name. It has to be. This is a set for an avant-garde theatre production from Sweden. It is the story of humans with female genitalia in a state of metamorphosis. We are mostly silent. Our faces reveal our lines. The waiting room is full of us clutching our dark green plastic bags filled with our civilian clothes. Inside are our curated outer shells, replaced with uniform costumes. We become one, though our stories differ. There is only one bathroom to change in. We wait in a line, 2-3 strong. We look like a caterpillar. Chairs of our fellow sistren circle us. We may all start chanting, hold hands, join forces, smite the sinners, but we don’t. We could break out in dance, but a slow-moving dance as though time has been stretched out. There’s a poster on the wall that tells us HPV causes cervical cancer.

A young woman comes out from seeing the doctor. She appears to be with her mother, or perhaps an aunt. She is upset. She talks loudly about having to come back in six months, that it’s not completely gone away. I look at her and her eyes are watery. A teardrop tattoo has already started to roll down her cheek. I want to ask the woman next to me what she’s in for. Maybe it’s just something cosmetic. There is so much we don’t talk about. People don’t like to talk about appointments for a colposcopy. We don’t talk about colposcopy’s history with the Nazis, that many of our lives will be saved by the experiments done on women in Auschwitz’s Block 10.

It was probably the DJ who was named after some sort of breakfast cereal who I slept with a zillion years ago that led me to this moment here. I remember that because I took a morning after pill the next day. I was so young, I thought I’d live forever. I don’t offer up this information to the woman sitting next to me. I hope nothing serious is happening to her. Her eyes seem kind.

Chloe doesn’t come inside the hospital with me. She’s waiting outside the hospital when I’m done, crouching and holding her hand out to a squirrel that doesn’t see her. Maybe it was the giant cross above the main entrance that kept her out. Bad memories. I wonder how she knew it was there. The woman who registered me in the hospital, who gave me a white bracelet and told me she was tired, said she needed to step outside for some air as she told her younger co-workers to hope to never get old, as though there is any way to stop it. Hope or not hope, it doesn’t make a difference. It will happen unless you die first. That woman asked me many questions. She asked me what my religion was. Maybe because there is Saint in the hospital’s name she is obliged to do so.

I try and take Chloe’s hand to let her know that we are going home now, but my hand just passes through her. I feel the coolness where her hand should be. It’s comforting. It’s strange. I tell her that I will be ok. She looks up at me. I tell her that I love her. I tell her that she is my family. I’m sure she smiles at me. I’m sure. I’m really sure.