The Year in Review: The From the Scraphead Edition

"They say our office building is full of old ghosts. You can hear them if you stay late, later than even the cleaning crew stays. After the lights are mostly off and the conference rooms are all dark. When the phones stop ringing and the last forgotten cup of half-drunk coffee has gone completely cold. You can hear them inside the walls, clicking against the insides of the walls, crawling up through the building's insides, like parasites through the inside of some mute, dumb corpse. You can not mistake the sound of a vice president's pinstripe skirt shifting against the surface of her leather chair as she checks her e-mail at one in the morning for the sound one of our building's ghosts makes as it seeks desperate purchase on surfaces now beyond its reach. Of the hissing of hot water flowing through pipes for the whispered songs of the forever keyless. Of regret for lament."

- opening paragraph to a story I'm certain I don't know how to write