i got bored possible tw for death Seabird House was painted blue on the outside, with a black-shingled roof. There were roses and lilacs and forget-me-nots all around the house, along with almost every kind of wildflower you could imagine. It was facing the sea, on a cliff where the sea was busily pounding away at the stern rock face. Someday the cliff would give way and the sea would take over. It was quiet, to say the least. There was hardly a sound to be heard by the sheep wandering the hills. Almost as if there wasn’t a soul in the house. There were, though. They were just very, very good at hiding. “Grace! Grace, where are you?” Mrs. Sentinel called, wandering the house in search of her daughter, as she had been for the past few centuries. “The war in Europe will ruin me,” grumbled Mr. Silas Whitehouse, sitting at his desk, unnoticing the years that had passed since his death. Evangeline spun through the house, laughing, as the child she’d been before becoming infected with polio. Generations of spirits, all together, yet unaware both of their deaths and of each other. Seabird House collected ghosts, in a way, as a beehive collects bees. It doesn’t mean to, it just does. Eventually the ghosts fade away to make room for more, and they go to… the place spirits go once they fade away. Nobody alive knows where exactly. Evangeline passed away in 1948, only a couple years before the vaccine, and now spent her remaining days playing in the house. Mrs. Sentinel had died in her sleep in 1899, and was now searching for her daughter, Grace. Mr. Silas had overworked himself, hardly taking any breaks, and even in death was hard at work balancing accounts, blissfully unaware that the business he’d built with his own two hands had been sold by his son only a year after his death. The ghosts of Seabird House were very good at being very, very unnoticable. The newest spirit, a girl named Lydia, wasn’t much like the other ghosts. She could see her fellow ghosts. And they could see her. She walked among them, wading through a sea of spirits, talking to them each in turn, but none of the conversations were interesting. The ghosts were stuck in the past, unable to move on. Lydia sometimes wondered whether the reason none of them were moving on was because they didn’t want to. Shaking away that thought, she’d continue on, until the night came, when the ghosts - and this scared her - disappeared. Lydia had no idea why. The second the sun went down, she was alone, a little ghosty girl in a house made for a family. Poetic.
