Antoinette Suiter

The ghosts are all still here.

We're just no longer there to entertain them.

The “Burger Chef” still stands.

I arrived in town on Thursday and was surprised to see it still running. I ordered  french fries and a soda. They tasted exactly the same as they did twenty years ago.

The signage changed, and the teenagers changed, but the brown brick and yellowish windows somehow stayed new. Maybe there's a warehouse somewhere in Detroit, supplying yellow glass salvaged from abandoned Arby's restaurants. Scrupulously, this ensures that time continues to move the slowest in places where space sprawls the widest.

I was convinced that if I just waited long enough I'd see my grandmother driving down Main street in her blue 80's Buick, and enormous black cataract sunglasses.

Because

she'd have no reason to leave.

It's the drainage and supply piping systems in a residential building that transport water, clean and soiled, cold and hot, throughout the structure. Keeping the basement dry and keeping the used separated from the new.

During the pipe joining process in the construction of these systems, the solvent fumes created are heavier than air and may become trapped in newly installed systems. Ignition of the solvent vapors caused by spark or flame may result in explosion or fire. Caution of this danger should be exercised throughout the assembly process.

Ectoplasm, also, can be heavier than air.

Outweighing oxygen.

In spaces where disbelief remains suspended,

the animalism of emotional attachment somehow materializes

in physical form.

Lens flare on old snapshots, like the hoax-soaked cheese-cloth, outweighs the device capturing it.

The ghosts are all still here.

Traveling on bits of old t-shirts, on hairs hidden in crawl-spaces, and with auditory remnants leaching from building orifices.

They're still here.

Because they have no reason to leave.

They just live on,

humming, and
unbothered.

Antoinette Suiter grew up in Tipp City Ohio, but was heavily involved in the arts community in Baltimore Maryland before moving to Chicago. She recently received her MFA in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was recipient of the Edward L. Ryerson Fellowship. She is interested in the collision between nostalgic extremes, humor, and the uncanny.