Claudia Monpere: GHOST ROOFERS • Cleaver Magazine

Flash by Claudia Monpere
GHOST ROOFERS

Their bid is high. But I sign. I’ve never worked with a ghost company before. And Ghost Roofers offers a special product; on scalding days their roofs spray cool mist through ceilings and walls. Supposedly this mist hovers over floors and furniture, touching only skin. Yelp reviewers rave about how refreshing it is; a handful say it’s creepy. My husband would have said something like that, but more precisely. He loved writing negative Yelp reviews—although he was always accurate in his criticism.

Me? I yearn for my skin to be touched by cool mist that comes from roofer ghosts. The foreman for my new roof project is beautiful. Although his face appears wispy, I can make out eyes and a mouth that are intense but kind. He and his crew are not white like movie ghosts. They’re a beautiful shade of light blue, blending to rainbow. Their faces, arms and chests are somewhat visible, but then they begin to fog and blur: red to orange to yellow to green, blue, cobalt, violet.

They move like pastel watercolors. I love to watch them work. Their tools prism, the hammer blue, indigo, plum. The nail gun, a fiery scarlet, amber, rust. The ladder is my favorite. A plain gray metal extension ladder, but when one of the ghosts steps on it, all the steps transform, each one shimmering a different color.

Like my husband’s aloha shirts. We rarely took vacations; he was wedded to his work as an anesthesiologist. But I talked him into a week on Kauai for our twentieth. My husband, whose most adventurous clothing was L.L. Bean’s plaid flannel shirts, my husband bought three aloha shirts in wild tropical colors and prints. And that pineapple print—he bought me a pair of matching wide legged pants.

Our trip was heaven until a rogue wave swept him off a rock.

After three weeks, my new roof is nearly complete. What will I do without the ghost roofers’ steps above me? One ghost moves like the sound of rain, mostly gentle drops with occasional downpours. Another is static. The foreman’s movements are all violin: the strong rhythm of portato; the slow, smooth movement of legato; spicatto when he moves quickly across the roof. My husband kept a violin in his hospital locker; it soothed him to play when things were rough. Once he played for a terribly anxious boy about to go under for a high-risk operation. He was so excited to tell me how it calmed the boy. I wish I could remember the details, especially what he played. I swear, when the ghost foreman is on my roof, I hear Bach, Ysaÿe, Bériot.

His last day on the job, I take the foreman aside. I tell him I want to ask about my husband. He nods. I can’t control how many questions I have, how quickly they form. Have they met? Is my husband happy? Does he get to play the violin? Can the foreman deliver a message to him from me?

After a moment he answers. Intensely. Kindly. “Would you like me to lie?” he asks.

“Yes please,” I say.

Claudia Monpere’s flash appears in Cleaver, Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, Craft, Flash Frog, Trampset, The Forge, and elsewhere. She won the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize from New Flash Fiction Review, the Genre Flash Fiction Prize from Uncharted Magazine, and the 2023 Smokelong Workshop Prize. She has stories in Best Small Fictions 2024 and 2025 and Best Microfiction 2025. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her website is https://claudiamonpere.com/