Late in the afternoon, the auction nearly over, the bottled ghosts are offered for sale. Two of them, each in its own tightly sealed jar. The room divides into laughter and silent attention. One is an old man, the auctioneer explains. The other a young girl. 

When bidding begins, the old man is offered first. Tentatively, paddles are raised for his glass-encased ghost. The bidding, though, is lukewarm. Every gesture is scrutinized by a dozen smirking faces. The successful bidder, however, believes his purchase has come so cheaply that the hammer price is a bargain.

But he is dismayed when the bottle that holds the ghost of the young girl stirs the room, the price rising in ten-percent increments that leap into the thousands. Determined to complete a set, he outbids everyone, claiming, at last, the young girl’s spirit, regretting nothing about the enormous cost.

At first, he displays the bottles on a living-room shelf, like trophies. A few visitors laugh, and he smiles patiently. When, inevitably, someone asks, “How do you know which is which?” he says, “By looking closely.” When everyone, before they leave, asks what he paid, he answers, “I never discuss business.”  One night, a woman touches the young girl’s bottle, beginning to lift it, and he tells her to put it down in a tone that makes her husband say, “Wow. Just wow.”

The next day, he moves the bottles to his bedroom, replacing the originals with facsimiles. After he tells a friend that the ghosts are happier now that they feel safe, the news of the fake bottles spreads until he has no more visitors.

He coddles them, trying to coax them visible, setting the bottles where the morning light will strike them as early as possible. He is patient, giving them time to recognize that he is no longer selfish, that he understands their privacy is important. Someone, he believes, must have threatened to shatter those bottles, furious because the ghosts refused to reveal themselves. When their miracles were put up for auction, they must have arrived like the adopted from a foreign orphanage where fear was as persistent as an arctic winter.

He listens for voices.  He watches for the light within to change. He encourages the faint fog of breath by lowering the temperature of his bedroom, squinting for the possibility of the tiniest of etchings that will transcribe the unspoken desires of the dead, the differences age and gender make in their afterlives. 

Months pass. Then years. At last, he carries those prizes to bed each night and lies awake in the dark, pressing the glass to his chest, devoted now to dreaming of uncapping those bottles, the girl’s first, joyous, the incredible brief breath of escape brushing across his face. Then the old man’s, how his flurry will teach him the importance of what he once purchased—observing the future, tracking the invisible to discern just where the dead disappear to when they are freed.