I don’t know if Denver is especially haunted, but it’s a boomtown that keeps rearranging itself, piling new glass on old brick, stitching old-money neighborhoods to working-class blocks and industrial edges. Some things are reanimated. Others are buried, given up. Some ghosts aren’t spirits. They’re double exposures: a street corner that keeps showing you what used to stand there, a name that still hits like a hand on the shoulder.
Put your ear to the ground out by the airport and you might hear the phantom barks of small-block V-8s. In Castle Rock, you might catch burnt rubber on the breeze or that hot-metal brake-dust bite, like the patron saint of the backstretch is still clocking laps at Continental Divide.
Last year, I found myself hiding by the kosher endcap at the Sprouts on East Colfax. It had been fifteen years since I’d seen Shorts McGraw, but it was him. The posture. The skateboard tucked under his arm like an extra appendage.
I’d just come from reading an essay at Lighthouse …
