No Such Thing as Haunting

“Ontological Undertakings” by Juan Sebastian Restrepo

On your yearly summer visit back home to Michigan, your grandmother tells you how she’s been seeing your dead mother, how she’s come back as a monarch butterfly. While washing the dishes, out the window, in the backyard, a border spotted with black-eyed Susan’s and blanketed with Queen Anne’s lace, she saw mom dart deep in the pink spiky-haired thistle. She said she opened the window, thought to call out her name, but after she rinsed the last dish mom had flown into the sun as it burned out over the apple orchard. 

Foolish to think, she admits.  But it brings me comfort. 

You want to believe, to think she could come back as a butterfly, to think you can feel her presence.  But the dead don’t come back to visit loved ones. Certainly not as butterflies, or angels. Sometimes you think you see her. A woman, in her fifties, wearing a red bandana, the way mom did after the chemo, when she lost her hair. The woman smiles at you, you smile back. Then you’re on your way, feeling good to be reminded, even if for a second, you got a flash of your mom, smiling, happy to see you. But that butterfly is a butterfly. The darkness is dark. Nothing hiding. No such thing as haunting. That breath is a draught. That sound is the wind. That heartbeat is your own.

About the author

Kristian O'Hare's writing has appeared in Third Coast Magazine, The Citron Review, San Francisco State University's Fourteen Hills, South 85 Journal, Mud Season Review, New Orleans Review, The Indianapolis Review, Foglifter, Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, Hobart, and Reservoir Road Literary Journal. Upcoming: Blood Orange Review and Raleigh Review.

About the Artist

Juan Sebastian Restrepo (b. 1989, CO., Barranquilla) lives and works in Miami, Florida from his studio in the Birds Roads Arts District.  Sebastian is interested in the following topics, migration, memories, simulations, deconstruction, reality and the everyday. Sebastian has presented his work at New World Gallery, New World School of the Arts, intersections(2023); Belen Jesuit Preparatory School, Carlos and Olga Saladrigas Gallery at the Ignatian Center for the Arts, Miami, FL, Outside the Lines (2023); Club Gallery Miami, Miami, FL, Art Deli:  Blue Chips (2023);  Edwardsville Arts Center, Edwardsville, IL , Hybridity (2018). Also, Sebastian received a Research Grant for Graduate Students from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, IL (2020).