Mary Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
by Courtney Preiss

On a Saturday morning a few summers back, I wore a purple dress so my dead grandmother would recognize me. In the already relentless heat of a Monmouth County July, we awaited the arrival of a medium my mother invited to the house I’d grown up in, a woman who could pull messages from the stratosphere of that great otherworldly realm. “Heaven” was convenient shorthand for the place where, I was told as a child, all my dead relatives had ascended to. I used to imagine them floating around up there, covered in white powder and draped long cloth—like Jacob Marley or Stevie Nicks.