With Socks of Lace.

It is the summer I turned seven, and everything is insufferably hot. My pillow is drenched with sweat, and even the breeze propelled through the living room with the two noisy box fans, which must be older than my parents, does nothing to help with the heat. I wonder, as I toss and turn, blanket tangled about my feet, whether it is possible to die of heatstroke in your sleep or whether you would wake up first.

I seem to be the only one having trouble sleeping. My cousins lay sprawled out across the living room, limbs every which way. Briefly I wonder why the heat does not stifle them as it does me. For a horrified moment I wonder if they have not died already, and I sit up with a shock, but then Sophie snores and rolls over, and I can see the gentle rise and fall of breath as each of them slumber dreamlessly. All in a rush my own breath comes back, and I sit quietly for a moment, just taking in slow gulps of air.

After a moment I decide that maybe a drink might help. I stand up quietly and patter on bare feet to the kitchen. The linoleum feels hot and sticky, so I stand on my tiptoes so I do not have to touch it. As I reach into the cupboard for a glass, barely at the tip of my reach, a flash of color from the kitchen window catches my eye, and I freeze.

Petrified, I turn slowly to look out the window, but nothing is there. I tiptoe to the kitchen sink to fill my glass. The pipes thumps three times before the water turns on, and I wince. As the glass fills, I peer intently out the window, but I can't figure out what it was that I saw. Nervous, I turn the sink off and take a sip from the glass. Even the water is disgustingly warm. I spit a mouthful into the sink, and then the light flashes again. It's a ghost! I realize with horror.

An empty nightgown flaps slowly in the breeze, lit as if by a flashlight, glowing purple and green and sickly in the night. My legs feel as though they have been frozen in place. Almost as soon as I realize what it is, the light seems to twist off the nightgown, and it disappears into the black. My legs tremble. Slowly I regain my courage and slink towards the kitchen door. I wonder what will happen in the morning, when my cousins and grandparents discover that I have gone missing.

The screen door opening seems to be the loudest noise in the world. I slink as far out onto the porch as I can, still holding the door to keep it from slamming shut, and stand for a moment, bewildered. Nothing there. The breeze on the porch was a bit cooler than inside, but there was no sign of the ghost I could have sworn I saw just a moment ago. Disappointed, I turn to go back inside, only to slam into someone. I try to scream, but a hand quickly covers my mouth. "Shhh!"

It is only my cousin Steven. Air fills my lungs with a gasp as he lets go. "You scared me!" I whisper angrily.

He responds with a question. "What are you doing out here?"

"I saw a ghost!" I insist, and as I speak light fills the air, and the nightgown appears again. There are two of them this time, fluttering lightly in the breeze, all blue and green and yellow. Light dances on them in ways I do not understand, and I wrap my arms around Steven's waist with a yelp. "There they are!"

A low chuckle escapes him. "Ghosts, eh?" He turns me around so I can see the brake lights of the car disappearing around the bend, the source of the eerie light. When I turn back to look at where the nightgowns had come from, I saw them, dangling from grandma's wash line. "But," I insist, "The colors! You saw! They were rainbows!"

Wordlessly, Steven points to the crystal dangling from the end of the porch. "It's a prism," he explains. "When light shines through it, it breaks into rainbows." I frowned, and then for the first time noticed grandpa sitting at the end of the porch with a bottle of whiskey in his hand and his boots still on. It looked as though he'd fallen asleep there. I went to go wake him up, and Steven stopped me. "He's asleep. Dreaming." Grandpa twitched a bit. I watched him curiously. My cousins told us of their dreams sometimes, of missing the school bus and running to class, of forgetting to write a paper.

Their dreams were not interesting, not like grandpa's. Grandma said it was because when he was younger he was a sailor, and he had been all over the world. He had seen lots of things, she said, and that was why he sat quietly at the dinner table while the cousins all chattered away. Late at night, once he'd drunk some of his whiskey, he would sometimes tell stories that made a chill run down my spine. I wanted to wake him now, to ask him about his dreams. Maybe he would share them with me, and I would dream of those things too.

But Steven took me by the shoulders and led me back into the house. "Let's not wake him. He's probably back in India, hunting tigers again."