ThereAreNoGhostsHere

Her only desire was to gather for her sister a pair of matching snowflakes.
Bess looked out the kitchen window, into the backyard below, and glimpsed at the neighboring yards. Last night’s snowstorm left no yard unburied, each one a mound of blue snow glistening in the early light. It almost hurt to see. She breathed in the clean morning air, watching now a few silver flakes drift across her view of a pale and distant sun.
Yes, she would find her sister a pair of matching snowflakes. That had been her promise to Karla, who died two months ago in December. Karla hanged herself from the third-story platform of the fire-escape, just outside the kitchen window, at night, using one of her father’s steel chains—relics from his previous job—as a noose. Her parents had been away at work. Bess had been asleep. At the funeral, Bess whispered it to Karla’s headstone before her mother pulled her away.
“Aléjate de allí,” her mother had said, tight-lipped, as she dragged her by the sleeve of her coat, stepping out of the thinning grass and onto the pavement. “No eres una pendeja.”
Every morning, every evening, Bess looked out the kitchen window, awaiting snow; but it had been a dry winter, and each gray dawn and dimming sunset seemed only to conspire against her. In February, she was gladdened at the news on TV when the first snowstorm of the season was announced. It snowed lightly the first few nights, and when the storm arrived, Bess leaned eagerly out the window and reached out for the darkly lit snow that tumbled gracelessly from a misted sky. So it was here now, the chance to meet that promise.
Her parents were still asleep in their bedroom. Bess had put on her winter coat and boots, and as she made her way across the kitchen to the living room, she picked up her scarf hanging from a chair and tossed it around her neck. She retrieved her mittens from the sofa and promptly left the apartment. On opening the steel door that opened out into the backyard and whose lock was forever in disrepair, she marveled at the soft white hill impeccably laid out before her. It seemed almost an act of desecration to tread on all that unbroken snow.
After a moment’s hesitation, she made the leap into the open air, stepping ankle-deep in the snow. Bess began her search where a square plot of dirt used to be, in which a neighbor’s wife grew flowers in the spring. She knelt in the snow and dug up handfuls. She scrutinized each lump in her hands before dropping them, making a pile. This continued on for a while.