Things Go Flying by Shari Lapena

catapulted him right back into his unhappy past, to one striking night, when he and his mother were sitting at the kitchen table finishing up their supper.
    His mum had shifted her eyes to stare at a china teacup on the counter with an expression of such intensity that Harold stopped chewing. Then the cup flung itself against a cupboard and shattered.
    â€œShit!” his mother said.
    Harold was terrified.
    His mother calmly surveyed the damage and then turned to him and said, “Don’t worry, most spirits are harmless.” As she swept up the broken china, she added, “I can’t say I’m surprised—the same thing happened to my Scottish aunts when they were about my age.”
    Harold had never met the Scottish aunts, and after that he didn’t want to.
    They’d lived in one of those tall, narrow, nineteenth-century Victorian houses in Cabbagetown. Harold could actually walk from where he now lived to Riverdale Park, cross over the pedestrian bridge that spanned the Don Valley Parkway, walk up the steep hill and through Riverdale Farm and come out at the park at the other end—the very same one he’d played in as a child. From there, it was just a couple of short blocks to the house he’d grown up in. He never made that walk, but he could if he wanted to.
    Harold thought he could remember being a happy kid once, but after his father died, at the breakfast table over his bacon and eggs, things had changed. There wasn’t enough money, and his mother had been forced to take in boarders, and to cook and clean all day. That was bad enough, but after a couple of years of this, when he was about nine years old, his mother’s “gift” had arrived, announcing itself that fateful night. Not long after, she began to make a little extra money as a medium. She let it be known through word of mouth that she was willing to contact “the other side” in her own home, for those wishing to communicate with lost loved ones, and Harold’s life had changed forever.
    His mother really could reach the dead. Harold had seen it with his own eyes. One evening, early in her new career, an older couple had come in—her clients usually seemed to be older, because, Harold assumed, they knew more dead people—and Harold, against his mother’s orders, and in spite of his own timidity, had snuck down to the landing and tried to hear what was going on behind the closed double doors of the front room. He heard his mother’s murmuring voice, and then she began to moan, and he had to see.
    He crept down the staircase and put his eye to the keyhole. The room was dark except for the flickering light of a single candle burning on the mantelpiece. The tall, narrow windows were heavily curtained in dark velvet, shutting out the light from the street. In the centre of the room was a round mahogany table, with four high-backed chairs around it. Three of the chairs were occupied, and his mother was leaning slightly forward, reaching across the table and grasping one hand of the man and one hand of the woman on either side of her. The man and woman also held hands, so that the three of them created a circle.
    His mother’s eyes were closed, and she was moaning as if in pain, while the other two stared at her. The woman looked eagerly expectant, fearfully hopeful; the man looked as if he were having second thoughts, especially as Harold’s mother’s moans became louder and her head began to roll around on her neck. The man leaned back in his chair as far as he could, as if to distance himself from the proceedings. Harold’s mother’s eyes began to flutter beneath her closed eyelids; it was a disturbing sight, and Harold almost turned and ran. But then his mother began to speak, and he found he couldn’t move. Because it wasn’t her own voice that came out of her mouth—it was the voice of a man in the prime of life, deep and confident, a trifle