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van floated closer. I wondered miserably if there was any way I could cram my feet into any of Dad’s shoes and make it home, maybe the grey nylon webbing of his Clarks Wayfarers would be stretchy enough for me to get them part of the way on and I could stamp down the heels and wear them like a kind of synthetic clog and shuffle up the road to the station. Even more miserably I wondered how things would feel if I went to work in the morning and sat down at my desk and prepared to begin the day, and then through the hum of the lawnmower and the weird off - kilter tinkling of the ice - cream van there came the ringing of Dad’s phone from downstairs in the hall where a week ago I’d picked up his bat - sized magnifying glass and peered through it at the world, and it was Jakub.
    â€˜Mr Philip, sorry.
    â€˜Mistake.
    â€˜Shoes stuffed in box with kettle. I am work now with car but OK, sister take train. She have shoes. Vlad e ˇ na, yes. She very hurry, ask me call you. Tell you stay there please.
    â€˜One half - hour only, Mr Philip. Vlad e ˇ na promise, she with you.’

LEVITATION, 1969
    Jo Mazelis
    Rising up in the air, the dead girl feels … dead. Her eyes are closed; for a moment she has forgotten everything. She is dead.
    Then alive again. They have set her down on the concrete wall and the ceremony is over. They do not misuse the levitation game – weeks and even months go by and they don’t do it or even think of doing it – as if it’s a dream that occasionally reoccurs, but is forgotten when the sleeper awakens. Then at some point in time it stops. They never perform the act of levitation again.
    The game arrived in their lives after the circle games of ‘The Farmer’s in His Den’ and ‘Oranges and Lemons’ had fallen away, but before the long passage of no - games - at - all enveloped them forever.
    The reign of levitation is also that of puberty. Is it not said that pubescent girls and boys, those on the cusp of change, are the most vulnerable and attractive to the spirit world? That in homes where poltergeists are active there is usually in residence a child in their early teens?
    The dead girl (who is not really dead) lives in a home with such a poltergeist. Objects are broken; china smashed into many pieces, the old black Bakelite telephone – the one whose weight and heft suggested unalienable permanence – is suddenly and mysteriously transformed. It catches her eye when she comes home from school. It is in its usual place by the front door, but something is different about it. She looks closely, sees an intricate pattern of lines and cracks all over it and, in places, evidence of glue. The phone has somehow been broken into a hundred jagged shards and then someone (she knows who) has painstakingly, with his Araldite and magnifier, tweezers and spent matches, put it back together again.
    Such an event should come up in conversation in a small family like theirs, but no one says a word. The destruction was the work of an angry spirit; the reconstruction was performed by her father, who is often to be found with a soldering iron in his hand, or a pair of needle - nose pliers, an axe or hammer.
    One autumn day years before, she came across him in the garden, tending a fire of fallen leaves. Such a fire is always an event for a child of eight or nine, so she stands at a safe distance to watch how he rakes and prods it, how the flames change colour from red to blue to white to yellow.
    He stirs his pyre of smoking leaves and suddenly the centre gives way and something hidden is revealed: first, brown paper that flares away to black tissuey fragments, then white fabric pads, some folded in upon themselves, others that boldly show their faces with their Rorschach - test ink blots of red and rust - coloured blood. Her mother’s blood, her mother’s sanitary towels – which belong to the secret places of locked bathrooms – are