HONORABLE MENTION, SUMMER 2020
The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award
Illustration by Andy Paciorek
. . . Five Easy Steps
BY MAY KIM
1.
When I changed my girly name to the one I have now, I guess I wanted to be something more than a girl. Mother always said, in her cotton-candy voice: Well, your father, I know he’s troubled. But he’s a man.
What does that mean?
He’s a man, Alice.
So I don’t want to be Alice anymore. When he left (it rained beer for a whole week afterward) and she died and we found ourselves thrown into an orphanage where things leaked in brown everywhere, I decided I would be a man too. I tell my little sister Clara to call me Alexander from now on.
“Why, Alice?”
“I’m not Alice, I’m Alexander.”
“But your name is . . .”
“I’m changing my name.”
Clara makes her lips into a thin line and says nothing. I ask her if she wants to change her name too and she says no, she’s happy being Clara. What a thing to say.
And I guess I was thinking, this little girl me, that if I changed my name I’d change how I thought about myself and then I would gradually turn into that strong, majestic, conqueror-like being that my new name suggested. I don’t know where I got the name Alexander except that Alice also starts with “A” and I was thinking about people who never die. When I became Alexander I wouldn’t be afraid of anything. And Clara would never have to be afraid either because I would protect her from everything.
Clara breaks her bread and gives me half, since I’m crying and need consolation. The plastic chair is rickety and cold. The bread tastes like a tooth.
“Can I at least call you Alex?” she asks.
I think about it and tell her she can, as long as she knows it’s really Alexander and not Alexandra or Alexis.
2.
When I meet my future husband for the first time, he is looking under a vending machine for a missing child ghost.
But of course he doesn’t come right out and say that. Not at first, anyway. He asks me if I’ve seen a little girl, about yea high, with angelic hair and a red bow. Fish eyes, he adds. She’s got silvery fish eyes. This is after I nearly kick him in the rear for getting in my way. All day I’ve been trying very hard not to think about unpleasant things like work and Captain Asshole, but look at this guy, ruining all that. Captain Asshole has a slimy face, and when the guy says “fish eyes” it makes me imagine the captain scratching his forehead with his reptilian fingernails.
I need a Coke, something sweet. He’s in the way of that.
“What’s angelic hair?”
“Like—curly. Golden.”
“That’s assuming a lot about angels.”
He has a weird face. Not exactly ugly, but you feel like there could be something more there—a sort of glazed quality about it. Maybe because of his eyes, which, far from being fishy, are so big and transparently blue. He stares at me for a moment, with that something-missing face. I’m just about to ask him to move his ass somewhere else, when he says, in a deep and soulful voice: “You are angry.”
Oh, I am angry. I am angry? You think? What’s with the knowing voice, asshole?
I breathe. Clara taught me this breathing technique that’s supposed to release your negative energy and she told me it’s worked wonders for her too. Which is a lie, because I’ve never seen her angry, not once. Not even with little shits like what’s-his-name with freckles and sticky fingers, who think that people’s angry faces signify love and attention. Kids.
That is to say, Clara became a teacher, and I became a soldier. This is how life is.
“And you’re looking for your missing kid under a vending machine, loser.”
“It’s not my kid. It’s, uh, my friend’s. My male friend. I mean, I don’t mean . . . ”
“What is he, a Lilliputian?”
“I don’t understand.”
I give up. I don’t even feel like getting a Coke anymore. I start to walk away. Somehow the absurdity of this guy has made me feel a little better about myself, like everything could be a joke if I tell it funnily enough. I try to think reasonably (humorously!) about what Captain Asshole might have meant about my vacation. Probably nothing much. His brain is too flabby to mean anything other than what he says, and what he said was—
“Why are you angry?”
“Why are you following me?”
“I’m not. I’m just going this way.”
“And why do you care? You a therapist or something?”
“No,” he says. And I believe him, because no therapist could be this dense and not get fired. I look at him and it irritates me how soulful he looks, like his whole face is nothing but a big wobbly pool of feelings. Is it the gigantic eyes? The sad wooly cardigan?
People are rushing by us to catch their trains. A ringing voice from the ceiling reads off city names. Time is everywhere, in your face, in fancy analog clocks and digital screens and people’s blinking phone lights. But me, I’ve got nowhere to be. I only come here to feel like I could be, you know, somewhere, could be going, on my way, somewhere different. It’s weird and sad.
But not as sad as a man looking for his friend’s missing kid under a vending machine. When I stop walking, he stops too.
“Hey, what’s your name?” I ask.
“Uh, it’s Tony. Tony . . . Stark.”
“As in Iron Man?”
“ . . . I guess.”
I give him a hard look. He confesses that his real name is Anthony Morello, but everyone calls him Tony. Then he asks my name, and I tell him it’s Alexander. He asks me if I’m kidding. I say I’m really not. He looks surprised for a second, but then nods and accepts this without a fuss. This makes me feel fond, and I decide to humor him. I ask if he needs help finding this angelic girl. Has he tried the station’s service announcement? He shakes his head, says that’s no use, because . . .
“What do you mean people can’t see her?”
“Because she’s a ghost.”
All right, nutjob. I reevaluate Anthony’s place in my mind: is he a comedian, liar, or a mental case? Maybe all three. But even as I’m thinking this, I am also grabbing his arm and dragging him to one of the big columns at the side, so that we’re not standing so in the middle of things, life, people, everything. You wanted to know why I was angry? I say. He nods. So I tell him about Captain Asshole, and Anthony listens with a very grave, very solemn face. Nods a little excessively, though, like he’s learned that technique from an online article on How to Be a Good Listener (with pictures).
“All right. Now I’ve told you.”
“That’s, uh, hard. I’m . . .”
“Yeah, whatever. Now you tell me the truth about the girl.”
Anthony gives up trying to chew out his own tongue and looks at me, big eyes even bigger in surprise and wonder. I notice how pretty his eyelashes are—kind of fluttery and transparent, like they’re made of gold.
Then he says, very sincerely: “I haven’t lied to you, Alexander.”
I remind him about the Tony Stark thing. Oh, he goes, contrite-like.
“That’s only because we’re supposed to be, like, clandestine.”
“We? Who’s we?”
“But I’m not lying about the girl. She’s really a ghost.”
“And you’re what, a ghostbuster?”
3.
A ghost hunter, officially, but it’s more like ghosts are unruly children who run away all the time and ghost hunters (there’s apparently a bunch of them—they have chat rooms and everything) run after them like underpaid nannies or teachers, trying to talk, to convince them to move on to their Eternal Resting Places. Sometimes the ghosts get petty or aggressive, though, and that’s where the real fun begins. This last bit is according to Leon. Leon is Anthony’s best friend, a fellow ghost hunter, and now my brother-in-law.
Clara didn’t so much find a husband as pick him up, conveniently enough, at my wedding. She also quit her teaching job and moved on to journalism. She says she’d hoped to change the world by brainwashing the next generation into kindness and love, only to find that fourth grade was already too late. So she’s going to appeal to the reasonable minds of fully-grown humans and get them to change the world. Everyone saw the logical flaw in this argument but Clara.
I’m still a soldier, and so is that asshole with reptile fingers. Only I don’t hate him so much anymore, because I learned after I got married that everything he said that drove me nuts was actually his sad and awkward attempt to get me to like him. My friend Valerie told me this, and she said it was the funniest thing in the world to see him try so hard and me not get it at all. I said she might have said something. She said, Honey, we weren’t friends at the time.
I once showed the captain a picture of Tony. He got very angry, I don’t know why. I think Tony looks very adorable in that picture. Leon took it at an animal shelter Tony volunteers in, and you can hardly tell the difference between the human and the sad puppies surrounding him. Valerie said it probably had something to do with the bully thing.
“What bully thing? You mean Tony looks like a bully?”
“No,” Valerie said. “The opposite.”
Anthony can wash dishes very efficiently but everything he cooks ends up tasting like mushrooms. He pushes his stuff around and calls it cleaning but he does our laundry with surgical accuracy, colors sorted and all that. Leon and Clara moved in with us after their apartment developed giant rats, and although I worry that it’s a long commute to the city, Clara insists that being in nature is better for her in the long run. For, you know, your nervous system or your eyes or something. But actually I know it’s really for Leon’s benefit that she moved here, which is the middle of nowhere. Leon likes to fish and drink cold beer and watch sunsets. Big city life agitates him. I sympathize with him because I’m the same way.
So here’s the four of us, living together, a weird fusion of family-and-friends. I keep the place tidy, and Leon does all the cooking. Tony does the laundry and Clara goes out and saves the world. It’s a nice life. Sometimes on the weekends we watch the sunset together out on the porch, all four of us, and Tony gushes about the pretty colors until I forget how weird it is that he knows twelve different names for red.
One day, it’s my day off, and I find myself alone in the house. Leon’s out fishing with his buddies, Clara is at work, and Tony is volunteering at a soup kitchen downtown. I sleep in until lunchtime and decide to spend the afternoon organizing our bookshelves. Leon and Tony are not very big readers but Clara and I have tons of novels from secondhand shops we’ve accumulated over the years and could never throw away, I don’t know why, even the books we didn’t really like. At first I think I should do it by size, you know, small paperbacks at the top, taller books at the bottom, but then I decide it’d be more prudent and useful to organize them by author names. I take everything out and make 26 piles on the living room floor. I had just finished with section C and am picking up Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe when I hear a swooshing sound behind me.
Chills all over my skin. Like a spider trying to crawl under your shirt. I drop the book and whip around, but I know what it is already: I’m about to see a ghost for the first time. And you know what’s running through my mind at that very moment? It’s the absurd, impossible realization that I’ve never really believed my husband all this time.
What?
I mean, I knew he said he was a ghost hunter and so was Leon and I heard all their stories a million times, and I guess I thought I believed them because why wouldn’t I (why wouldn’t I?), but turns out, I never actually did. And I never even knew I never did.
So shaken am I by this revelation that I’m not even surprised, or upset, when I turn around and see my father staring back at me.
“Hiya, Alice. Baby girl.”
“Daddy.”
“How’ve ya been? You look good. You look just like your mother.”
I’m nothing like my mother. My mother was always in a frilly dress, like she breathed flowers instead of oxygen. My mother could cook a goddamn feast all by herself, whereas I can’t even put a salad together. My mother was nice, and sad, and dead. I am sullen, and content (more or less), and alive. I decide I should call Tony or Leon.
“What do you want?” I say, slowly reaching into my back pocket for the phone. It unnerves me to see him so unchanged, and so—lifelike. He isn’t floating off the floor or see-through or anything like that. He looks just like a living person, if a little blurrier around the edges. He even looks younger and handsomer than I last remember. But then the last time I saw him he was drunk and angry, so that’s a low bar to clear.
“To see my beautiful daughter, of course,” he says, smiling. When he’s like that he looks like an angel, even though his hair isn’t curly or golden.
“Well, now you have.”
“Now I have.”
I really don’t know what to say to him. But for some reason, I’m not trying to get to my phone anymore, either. For a moment we’re just standing there, silent, looking at each other. Daddy looks around at the piles of books on the floor and comments that the house looks nice. Sturdy. Homey. Nature-y.
“I got married,” I blurt.
“I know. We saw.”
What the hell? Has he—have they—been watching over me or something? This thought is beyond creepy and I don’t want to think about it.
He continues: “We’re happy for you, your mother and I. Your husband seems like a—ah—a gentle spirit.”
“He’s a ghost hunter.”
And it’s complete bullshit that they’re happy for me. No way they’re happy with Tony, who is unlike Daddy at all. Daddy can walk out of a bar, soaked head to toe in beer, and still look effortlessly cool like he’s a beer god. Daddy is the man at every party, yo, look who’s here, Frankie my man . . . And Tony is, he is.
“You’re not gonna hunt me, are you, Alice?” he says, jokingly, charmingly, flashing his perfect teeth.
“I don’t know how,” I admit.
“I see Clara’s become a journalist. You’ve done a good job taking care of your sister. I’m, uh, proud of you.”
I say nothing. Obviously he’s trying. Maybe death has opened his eyes (metaphorically), made him honest in a way he never was. I wonder if ghosts have internet too and if he’s looked up How to Reconcile with an Estranged Loved One. I know I have.
I go back to organizing my bookshelf. He watches me, silently, patiently. Obviously death has taught him that too, since as far as I can remember he never could stand thirty seconds of nothing, let alone thirty minutes. But life is mostly waiting. I’ve learned that over the years, which is something Daddy never figured out. I guess that’s why he never lasted long in it. He never fit. He wanted life to be glittery and bright all the time, like a fireworks show that never dies.
“You know, Alice . . .”
“My name is Alexander.”
“Ah.”
We don’t say anything else. Eventually Leon comes back from the fishing trip and balks at the sight of a ghost in our living room, and dives for his ghost gun or whatever it is. I tell him after he’s banished Frank into the eternal void that the man used to be my father.
“Oh, shit. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right,” I say. “We had a good talk.”
4.
After that, I start seeing ghosts everywhere. They’re mostly a wisp of something in the corner of your eye, empty and wandering, but some are very corporeal-looking. Once I got into trouble at work because I mistook a ghost for a civilian and refused to land a plane until he’d been cleared off the landing strip. Everyone was shouting at each other, our respective realities making us extremely confused. Eventually I realized what was going on and calmly landed the plane over the ghost’s grinning head. Valerie defended me by saying I was testing out an emergency situation. I got suspended from active duty for an indefinite time.
So, with nothing to do, I start tagging along on Tony’s jobs. He explained how it works: he would get his commissions from the chatroom I mentioned earlier, or someone who knew someone would call him for “special services,” or he’d just looks through the news for anything weird and disturbing. Then he would drive to the house or the school or the hospital or wherever the ghost had appeared, and when he got there, he’d try to figure out what to do about it.
Admittedly, this willy-nilly system disappointed me at first (What is it, a joke? Is death a joke to you?). But then after a job or two, I began to see the appeal in this messy process. No two jobs are ever alike, because no two ghosts are ever alike. Each time we set out in Tony’s old jeep, it’s a new adventure with no rules except Be Nice, but when Leon comes with us he vetoes that one too and then we are left with no rules at all. No college in the world offers Communicating with Ghosts 101, so everything has to be improvised. I learn that Tony is actually quite good at that, improvising. I wouldn’t have expected it from our marriage, but there he is, with his big, melancholy eyes, singing out words like hope and redemption and forgiveness until the ghosts are crying and begging him to send them off to the next world, which Tony promises will be a place of everlasting peace.
Once I got talking to a ghost, a young woman with a big purple bruise over her eye and a partially collapsed skull. A slash from a knife on her forearm. She told me that her fiancé killed her, drunk out of his mind. He didn’t mean to do it, she said.
“Well, if he didn’t mean to do it . . .”
“I know, I know. But I’d feel so much worse if he actually meant to do it. Wouldn’t you?”
She had a point. Men are assholes, she said after a pause, and I agreed, thinking of my father. And then Tony came in with two coffees and called me honey and the ghost woman looked at me like I’d stabbed her in the back, myself.
I didn’t know it at first, but soon enough I realized I was looking for someone in particular. Well, you can guess who it was. And on my eleventh hunt, it finally happens.
“Alice, honey,” she says, smiling with her cherry lips.
Mother is an exceptionally beautiful woman, which of course is no coincidence, because Daddy was a man of high standards for everyone but himself. She has glossy black hair that curls at the ends, like me and Clara. Ghosts don’t really glow or anything but she looks like she is, like Jesus’s mother in holy paintings.
“Mama,” I say, and then I choke. Mama. . . . I try to muster up the courage to say it. Seeing her face makes me weak, but I have to say this. It’s been on my mind for more than a decade now, and left there any longer it will burst through my chest and everything will fester and then what kind of creature will I become?
“Mama, I changed my name.”
“Yes, dear. I know.”
Of course she knows. I try to see in her face whether she is disappointed or angry or sad, but she only glows. I explain in a stuttering voice that it was a resolve I made to myself, to protect my little sister better, to be a better bigger louder stronger version of myself, not to be afraid of anything. . . . And I don’t know why, because these are all just facts, but I begin to cry as I say this. I haven’t cried in years and years and didn’t know I still could. My mother hovers near me but doesn’t touch, because ghosts can’t touch. She is emanating cold ghost-stuff but I feel warm in that chill, like the way your head gets so cold sometimes snow falls hot over it.
I know, I know, she keeps saying, soothing me, because she really does. She knows everything. I was a fool to think she never did.
Your lungs, Mama, are they still stinging you? Are you still in pain? And she shakes her head, in that soft, elegant way she has, like a dainty bird.
“No, Alexander, they are not.”
I cry again, because she called me Alexander. My tears taste like sugar, for some reason.
After waiting quietly for me to settle down, Mama floats (I said ghosts don’t float, but Mama’s floating has nothing to do with her immaterial state) next to me and sits on the sofa, legs together and to one side, hands folded prettily on her laps.
“You know, darling, it’s the strangest thing.”
“What is?” I say, all swollen eyes and tear-thick voice.
“In life, to tell you the truth, I was bitter at times. Not always, but sometimes. Sometimes I found humanity to be cruel and incomprehensible.”
In her sweet voice, this sounds like a song. I have to strain my ears to hear through that and understand what she means. And it breaks my heart to understand, to hear in her own words what I’ve always (never) guessed. My mother is wearing a summer dress, even though it’s December. A button-up linen dress in pastel green and white lace that you don’t see women wear anymore. The skirt falls just below her knees, and over her stockings she is wearing a pair of low-heeled shoes with ankle straps.
“And now?” I ask. “In—in death?”
“I find that I have unlimited sympathy for everything and everyone. Isn’t it strange?” She smiles. “Is that how death is, do you think?”
I think back to the ghosts I’ve seen, the ghosts that Leon said had to be “removed by force,” ghosts that made Tony cry. I shake my head. “Not for everyone.”
Mama thinks about that for a little while. When she thinks, she tilts her head to the side and purses her lips. It’s very lovely to see.
“Well, then,” she says, after a moment. “I suppose I’m blessed.”
5.
I go back to work eventually, and they give me stink-eyes for a few months but after that the incident is mostly forgotten. Valerie introduces me to her new best friend, Charlie, which is short for Charlotte. She is unbelievably smart and has grand plans for the future of the human race. Coincidentally, Leon’s little brother is also called Charlie, short for nothing, and he’d bailed on the ghost business (Leon tells me this one night, drunk and weeping over a pizza) to become a head doctor, because he had grand plans for the future of humanity too. He wants to save people and make a difference.
“Well, shit,” I say, and we clink glasses. I tell Leon what he already knows, which is that Clara is doing really well too and would probably be running the news sometime in the future, I’m not kidding. We trade our kid siblings’ successes and feel stupidly proud of everyone for a second, even ourselves. Tony is in the other room, binge-watching Game of Thrones and eating peanut butter on crackers. We feel proud of him too.
Sometimes when I have time off from work, I still go along with Tony on his jobs. Or even when I don’t, I sometimes stop and talk to ghosts when there is no one around to see me. I’ve never been (and will never be) friendly in “real life,” but I’ve found that talking to dead people is much easier for me.
The ghosts come in all flavors. Some are angry and righteous, some sad and confused, some already at peace, and some even exhibit the ocean-like compassion that my mother tried to explain to me. They tell me about their lives and deaths. I learn that people die in all kinds of ways (there was a girl who ate a flower on a dare and choked on it), and that they live in all kinds of ways too. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly, sometimes just plain. I listen and never know what to do with all that listening, but I keep doing it anyway. I never learn how to get them to move on to their next life (heaven? eternal nothingness? nobody knows for sure), which is harder than Tony makes it look.
It’s really something to watch him work, I tell you. He’s not a man, normally, who inspires a lot of respect and admiration from other men (I say this with the utmost fondness in my heart), but to hear him talk to these ghosts—the way he makes them understand, makes them feel again—it’s really remarkable. Why are you angry? He asks, like he asked me the first day he met me. Why are you sad? How is your mother? Who do you want to be?
I love you, I say to him, in my head.
“I love you,” he says to me, out loud, all the time.
___________________________________________________________
May Kim lives in South Korea, where she is completing her Master’s degree in English literature at Seoul National University. She spent her middle-school years abroad at an international school in Wroclaw, Poland, and ever since then has always wanted to be a writer in the English language. Her professional life has included work as a translator of literature, both from Korean to English, and English to Korean. “How to Reinvent Yourself: Five Easy Steps” is her first published story.