Marina discovered the ghost on a Tuesday, though technically the ghost had been discovering her for weeks. It lived between the baseboards and the beeswax candles she burned during her morning yoga sessions, feeding on the sage smoke and fragments of manifestation journals she tore up when they didn’t work fast enough.
The apartment had been suspiciously affordable, even for this neighborhood where coffee shops still served drinks in mason jars and every third person claimed to be an energy healer. The landlord, Mrs. Chen, had mentioned something about the previous tenant being “very quiet,” which Marina now understood was code for “ceased to exist in the traditional sense.”
The ghost’s name was Temperance, which she learned when it rearranged her magnetic poetry to spell out T-E-M-P-E-R-A-N-C-E W-A-S M-U-R-D-E-R-E-D F-O-R H-E-R S-O-U-R-D-O-U-G-H S-T-A-R-T-E-R.
“That’s oddly specific,” Marina said to the empty kitchen, where her own starter bubbled innocently in its jar.
The magnets reshuffled: N-O-T O-D-D. T-R-U-E.
Marina had moved here after her sustainable fashion boutique collapsed, taking with it her savings and her belief that hemp could save the world. She’d been trying to rebuild through a combination of micro-dosing, vision boards, and selling vintage finds online to people who called everything “cheugy” or “a vibe.” The ghost situation complicated things.
Temperance turned out to be surprisingly good company. She had opinions about Marina’s dating app matches (she’d blow out candles whenever Marina swiped right on anyone with a fish photo), helped her stage product photos (invisible hands were excellent at holding ring lights), and had an encyclopedic knowledge of reality TV drama from her decade of being stuck between dimensions.
The murder story emerged in fragments, spelled out in steamed bathroom mirrors and spilled matcha powder. Temperance had been a food blogger in 2013, back when mason jar salads were revolutionary. Her sourdough starter, a 150-year-old culture inherited from her Lithuanian great-grandmother, had developed a following of its own. People would pay hundreds for a tablespoon.
Her downstairs neighbor, a failed molecular gastronomist named Richard, had broken in one night to steal it. Temperance caught him. Things escalated. The police ruled it an accident—she’d slipped on some spelled flour, hit her head on the counter. Richard moved to Portland the next week with the starter, where he opened what was now a James Beard-nominated bakery.
“We need justice,” Marina said one evening, addressing the cold spot near the window where Temperance liked to lurk.
The ghost’s response came through Marina’s phone, which started playing a true crime podcast at full volume.
They developed a plan that hinged on the modern economy of attention. Marina would document everything—the ghost activities, the murder story, the stolen starter’s legacy. She’d build it slowly, aesthetically, letting the algorithm find the right audience. Someone who knew someone who knew someone would eventually connect the dots to Richard.
Marina started with subtle videos: her coffee mug sliding across the table, doors opening on their own. She hashtagged them with words like “haunted” and “spiritual” and “apartment tour.” The views trickled in, then flooded. People were obsessed with what they called her “emotional support ghost.”
Temperance revealed more of herself as Marina’s following grew. She’d manifest as a glitch in ring light reflections, a shadow doing different yoga poses than Marina, a second pair of hands kneading dough that wasn’t there. The comments sections became archaeological sites where internet detectives pieced together clues Marina strategically dropped.
The breakthrough came when someone recognized the sourdough starter in one of Richard’s promotional photos—the distinctive bubble pattern that Temperance had documented obsessively in her old blog, still archived in the wayback machine of the internet.
Richard arrived at apartment 7B on a Thursday, sweating through his expensive linen shirt. Marina had him sit at her small dining table while she prepared tea. The ghost’s presence was a pressure change, a gathering storm in the corners of the room.
“I want to buy your silence,” he said, not even pretending ignorance.
“It’s not mine to sell,” Marina replied.
That’s when Temperance finally showed herself fully—not as the horror movie specter Richard probably expected, but as she’d been: a young woman in flour-dusted jeans and a vintage band tee, looking exactly like she’d just stepped out of 2013, still holding the sourdough starter that had never really been his.
Richard’s scream was less dramatic than Marina had hoped, but his confession, recorded on three different devices, was everything they needed.
Later, after Richard was gone and the police reports were filed, Marina found a message in her journal, written in handwriting that wasn’t hers: “Thank you for seeing me.”
The apartment grew warmer after that. Temperance began to fade, not vanishing but softening, becoming more memory than manifestation. She left Marina the starter—the real one, somehow, mysteriously materialized in a jar that hadn’t been there before. Marina named her first successful loaf “Justice” and sold it for two hundred dollars to a collector of infamous baked goods.
The last time Marina saw Temperance clearly, the ghost was sitting in the window watching the sunset, looking like anyone else who’d finally finished what they’d stayed behind to do. She raised a translucent hand in goodbye, and Marina raised her coffee mug in return, a toast between the living and the almost-gone.
Marina still lives in apartment 7B. The rent never increased, Mrs. Chen considering a successfully exorcised murder ghost to be worth the discount. The starter thrives, dividing endlessly, shared with anyone who asks. Sometimes, on very quiet mornings, Marina can still feel something like companionship in the empty spaces of her home—not a haunting, but a gentle reminder that every space holds stories, waiting for someone to believe them enough to set them free.
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