Search: Andy Paciorek

THE COBBLER’S DAUGHTER

by Editor on October 30, 2023

HONORABLE MENTION, Fall 2023
The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award

BY JOSEPH BATHANTI

My dead grandfather was in the house.

He had pried open his tomb at Mount Carmel, paced, hands clasped behind his back, down Cemetery Hill, to Lincoln Avenue, made a right on Meadow Street, doffed his fedora at Our Lady’s—where he’d taken the sacrament of Holy Matrimony, where my mother and her brothers had been baptized, where he had reposed in his closed casket during his Requiem—and paused there at the church an instant before crossing Meadow Street Bridge—from which suicidal East Liberty legends occasionally leapt—over the abyss of Basa La Vallone to our duplex on Saint Marie Street and let himself in through the back door.

In the bathroom, my mother, scrubbed with fury. Dove on the rag again and again until her face, diaphanous in the inquisition of the sputtering, naked bulb, screwed into the wall above the bathroom mirror, gleamed like a skull: suspiciously high cheekbones, exquisite buckeye-brown eyes. A fiery eruptive complexion as a girl—doctored by her gypsy mother with pumice and witch hazel—had left her face porous, punctured. Pregnancy with me had leached calcium—her teeth, silvery shale—yet she desired another baby that refused to root, as if cursed, in her womb.

Her hooked nose. Aquiline. Roman. Those were pretty words for it. Rita can smoke a pack of cigarettes in the shower and never get one wet—the joke her brothers, my sadistic uncles, fell apart laughing over. Piss on them. Piss on everyone. She wasn’t so bad. She could certainly hold her own with those washed-out housewife hags hunching down the avenue with their Giant Eagle shopping bags. She permitted herself an instant to gaze at her likeness. She wished she were prettier—her mother, my grandmother, had been exotically beautiful—but piss on that too. Piss on everything. Pretty is as pretty does, and she didn’t do poor-mouth, wheedling pretty, wouldn’t-say-shit-if-you-had-a-mouthful pretty. She was pretty enough to tell any man on earth he could kiss her ass.

At that moment, as she looked in the mirror, she knew my grandfather was in the house: her father, Federico, Fred the shoemaker, my grandfather immolated when his shop took fire in 1942, when she was nine years old. That son of a bitch, after whom she had named me, her only child, that son of a bitch she imagined she had murdered by somehow causing the fire, even willing it.

How the memory construes memory has never been determined, and my mother, since 1942, nine years old, had settled on a rendition—perhaps true, perhaps not—of what might have happened that afternoon on Station Street. It became her world, the cruel world. It sat upon her: a planet of grief and regret, revoltingly sentimental, authored so exquisitely that she had forgotten what had really happened—as we all must, in our fictions, to forge ahead in daily toil. Thus she simply did not know how to stop blaming herself for her father’s death, and for every calamity that transpired in her orbit.

She swept into a knot her crown kinky, dyed blonde hair—taut black roots clutching her scalp—and tied it off with a claw-clip, whipped out a Chesterfield, lit it with her Zippo and puffed it held between her lips, as she caked Pond’s over her faccia brutta. The bulb fizzed, then expired with a flash, leaving a stench of fried wire and rubber. Bulbs were always blowing. The plumbing was the same, patched and taped, the fetid reek of rust, bealing antique fixtures. The landlord was an animale.

She stepped into the hall, where a nightlight burned, and stood between the two bedrooms. My dad snored unmercifully, something that typically infuriated my mother—she frequently threatened to murder him over it—but that night it oddly comforted her. In the glow of the light into the opened room, she made out his draped body, wrist-watched arm dangling over the edge of the bed. Then, like the refrain of her life, came the keen of a freighter loaded with coal, heaving through the crossing, a half-mile off, on Penn Avenue. The furnace kicked in and our entire duplex shuddered.

She buttoned the top button of her white flannel nightgown, stepped to my open bedroom door, and listened prayerfully for my breath. In green flannel pajamas, I lay uncovered, on my back, ankles crossed, arms spraddled, palms up, mouth open. My mother tiptoed in, spun a flame from the Zippo—the sudden odor of Butane—and held it above me. My eyelids fluttered. I moaned. She doused the flame, pulled the bedclothes to my chin, and bent a kiss to my forehead. I had been asleep, dreaming of my grandfather, down in the kitchen. But I woke the moment my mother stepped into the room. A thrumming urgency, near danger, habitually accompanied her; her lips against my forehead crackled with electricity.

She fastened my bedroom door behind her, then the door to her and my father’s bedroom, and walked barefoot down the stairs to the first floor, assaulted by the stench of char and smoldering, leather, and slightly sweet, turned earth. I smelled it too. I lay there another moment, then followed her downstairs and remained, in the dark, on the landing that split our dining room and living room.

At the kitchen table, in the halation of a gold cobbler’s lamp, slouched my grandfather: cobbler’s apron over a white shirt and necktie, head bent, strands of white hair, escaped from pomade, fallen over his brow, the bottle of Old Granddad from under the sink next to a half-filled glass. A skinny black De Nobili simmered in the astray with a dozen of my parents’ stubbed butts, my mother’s bloody with lipstick. His fedora smoked on the table. He sweated. The air about him sizzled.

On his left hand, he wore a metal palm thimble. With a rosewood knife and lethal copper cobbler needle and thread, he repaired the high white patent-leather go-go boots my mother had left at the door when she’d come home, with my father, from the slush and filth, in the early hours, that same morning, from her job as a hostess at The Suicide King. Between his lips spiked half a dozen brass clinching nails.

At my grandfather’s knee sat our lost dog, Fred—a year wandered gone—named after my grandfather, as was I. My mother, as overcome at the sight of Fred as of her father, moved instantly toward the dog. But he cowered and sidled against my grandfather. Clearly hurt, a little pissed, she withdrew a step, and determined not to cry. Since he’d disappeared, Fred had aged seven, as dogs must, in a lone year. Grifting back to the streets, he’d grown a second-hand ratty thrift coat, and gone gray at his muzzle. He’d been in fights. He looked worse than he had the nocturnal snow-blind morning my parents discovered him outside Foxx’s Grille, put him up front with them in the Impala, drove home and woke me with the crazy proclamation that we had a new dog, and his name was Fred.

He’d been about two years old then, fourteen in dog years. About what you’d expect of an abandoned, starved, scared fourteen-year-old left to the streets of East Liberty in 1968. Pack mutt. Low self-esteem. But not without honor. He needed a bath, a doctor, a bed, good food, and my mother’s pathological adoration, which Fred returned with equal pathology. He slept in my parents’ bed, which my father tolerated and tried to keep his mouth shut about. Fred had been my companion and confidante. I spent evenings, long nights, with him as we waited for my parents to finally arrive home from their restaurant and bar jobs at the top of Baum Boulevard. I had been fourteen too.

My mother blamed herself not just for the death of her father, but also for the loss of her dog. One night, after a brilliantly destructive episode of The Travis and Rita Show—she had wanted to hurt my father and me; but, more than anyone, herself—she had pigheadedly, belligerently, insisted on taking Fred for a walk at dusk in a vicious snowstorm. She’d suffered a steep hard fall, was knocked witless, and lost her grip on Fred’s leash. We never found him, despite a long, lavishly operatic search in a blizzard.

My mother collapsed at the table across from my grandfather, her dead cigarette still between her fingers.

“Papa,” she uttered.

Federico did not look up at the sound of his daughter’s voice. He placed his tools on the table, stared down at Fred, and petted him. The dog gazed deeply into my grandfather’s eyes, as he had, when he lived with us, so devotedly into my mother’s eyes. As he had gazed into my eyes. He had been in love with my mother, and now he refused to look at her.

There was kindness in my grandfather—evident in the way he did not look up and petted Fred—perhaps too sheepish, as the dead are often when they appear. But the kindness was buried, deep as a dead child, reserved for a dog. My grandfather had borne too much in steerage across the Atlantic from Napoli: hunger, nothing but his satchel of tools, no language in either tongue. Mute. Burning. Then decades of rusted, lock-jawed silence: suit of smoke, pillar of fire, a stony hill in Mount Carmel under a crucifix with his name chiseled into it: Federico Antonio Schiaretta. The dog loved my grandfather, as he had once loved my mother. The way Fred looked at Federico. The way this dog, lost forever, punished my mother.

My grandfather took up his knife and pared a sliver of sole from the shiny boot, drove in the nails, single strikes, set down hammer and knife, and picked up the De Nobili. Its flame puckered and bled. He inhaled, then filled the room with smoke.

“Did I start the fire? Is it my fault?”

My grandfather looked up at my mother, as if about to answer, to reveal what had really happened— because the dead are no longer required to lie. Was my mother, Rita Schiaretta Sweeney, somehow complicit in burning her father at the stake? Had it been merely an accident? The dead, however, when in congress with the living, by writ and lore, are denied rejoinder—the code of silence my grandfather dared not violate. The dead may converse only with birds. So perhaps my grandfather had divulged to a bird on Omega Street—an Italian bird for certain—the true story, chapter and verse, the spliced rickety 18 millimeter of that day in 1942 when his shoemaker shop burned down and killed him. It was in my grandfather’s power to do this: confide the true story to a bird.

My grandfather’s face had not smiled in memory. Surely the dead smile, but my grandfather had forgotten how to arrange his face appropriately. Yet he remembered a smile in a child’s drawing. It could have been Rita’s, his Carita’s—my mother’s name means story—an exquisite orange smile, a colossal slice of cantaloupe. There at the table, that night in our kitchen on Saint Marie Street, my mother peered so imploringly at him. He tried to smile, but his jaw had been chained and padlocked for years and years. Instead, he trembled; smoke rose from him. A sign? Perhaps it meant: No, you are not responsible for the fire, for my death. Was it reassurance in his unblinking perfectly round dark mahogany eyes? Was it something else? Perhaps an indictment: Voi. Carita.

Like reading a Ouija Board, my mother determined that the befuddled grimace on my grandfather’s brilliantly tragic face, along with the melodramatic smoke shrouding the kitchen, exonerated her. My grandfather was old. He was dead. He too craved exoneration. Even the dead, wandering earth, seek absolution from the living. It was time to forgive. Or was it the hour of vendetta? A bird in East Liberty swooped through the sky with the true story.

My grandfather then stood, removed his apron, took up his fedora of embers, placed it on his head, and ground his De Nobili into the ashtray. He drained the glass of Old Granddad, gathered his tools and the lamp, placed them in his canvas satchel with the apron, and stepped into his black overcoat.

My mother stood. Silver tears streamed each cheek and fell upon the table, but she didn’t make a sound. My grandfather handed the repaired boots to her, and with Fred behind him, walked out the back door into the alley.

I had remained on the landing in the dark after following my mother downstairs. The dining room was between us, but I had a clear view into the kitchen. All that’s written here is accurate. My grandfather did indeed appear in our kitchen and recobble my mother’s boots—which have not deteriorated in all these years, despite the untenable treks my mother takes in them—and Fred, our forever lost dog, inexplicably had accompanied him. My mother questioned her father about the fire. All this is true.

However, I am not sure what that declension in my grandfather’s face meant, that miniscule, nearly imperceptible, tic. Perhaps it was merely hesitation. Perhaps, he had short-circuited. Hence the smoke. My mother’s back had been to me. I’m certain she did not know I was there. My grandfather, elegiacally illuminated by the cobbler’s lamp, and I faced each other—his countenance, as he worked, stoically fixed, like a marble bust. It betrayed nothing, but stone. The moments he raised his face from the needle, he raked me with his not unkind eyes. I wanted to go to him. I had been with him before. I wanted to kneel in front of Fred and pet him.

Fred never acknowledged me. I haven’t wanted to say it, but he must have been dead too. He could neither bark nor whimper, nor accept the love of the living. He was my grandfather’s dog now; there’s comfort there. The two Freds. I was used to my grandfather’s death, twelve years before my birth. I am born into the fable of the fire. I knew him only as the mute ghost of an old, well-dressed Italian man with a face of locked stone. But little Fred, the dog? He’d been innocent and had died somewhere along the way—in that year for us, seven for him, since he had been our good boy and slept with my parents—in whatever fashion young dogs of the street lose their precious lives. He had been our good boy.

That’s when I cried, quietly, so my mother wouldn’t hear me—when it hit me that Fred was dead. From the kitchen, my grandfather watched me cry. I watched him watch me—the back of my mother’s head, that big black claw clip sliced across her wiry, tangled yellow hair, in the foreground. He was powerless to come to me. My grandfather stood, the repaired boots in his hands. Then my mother stood and he handed her the boots across the table—whatever the bargain. It did not strike me as absolution. He and Fred then walked out of the kitchen. The smell, the smoke, remained. The De Nobili smoldered. Fred did not look back.

Maybe this is the account I confessed to my mother as she and I sat at the kitchen table after my grandfather had departed. We had been visited by my mother’s dead father, not for the first time, and it was impossible to deny it. I made tea and toast. My mother poured Old Granddad in her tea. She spread marmalade on her buttered toast and dipped it into the tea.

I fetched my grandfather’s De Nobili from the ashtray. I had never smoked before, but I put it to my lips and pulled. It yet had fire.

“Don’t smoke those, Fritzy. They’re too strong, too bitter. Those bitter old Italian people.”

It was too strong, too bitter, a mouthful of slag—my incinerated cobbler grandfather: that frantic shock of white hair, white shirt, necktie, the white Carrera marble of his stubbled locked jaw, the spectacles as he mended. It tasted of my prehistory; it boded of my future. I stabbed it out. Son of a bitch.

My mother lit a Chesterfield and pushed the pack across the table. Without the cobbler’s lamp, the kitchen was dark, yet light enough to see the beautiful packet: Chesterfield in magnificent ornate font, quilled in the scriptorium. It was the most beautiful thing in the kitchen. It fetched the moon looking down on the alley.

“Don’t tell your father,” she said.

My father had never seen my grandfather, dead or alive, but he knew all about the fire—East Liberty lore—and, I’d heard it said, he knew what had really happened.

“Son of a bitch couldn’t spare a word, not a goddam syllable, when he was on earth. Now he’s dead and forbidden to speak. Jesus Christ.” She laughed a tetched Bette Davis laugh. “Do you think the dog’s dead?” she asked.

This was the kind of question my mother typically posed to my father—a test really—because there could only be one answer, and it had to dovetail seamlessly into whatever story to save herself she had already cooked up. You had to say what she desired, period, and it was so easy to trip the wire and behead yourself. The feat of appeasing Rita required, most dramatically, the ability to read her mind. She resented anyone who could not read her mind. My father could not read minds, nor could I, but he was the canniest person I’d ever known when it came to sizing up people, and he never lied, not even to my mother. His thunderous snores, but a few feet above my head, on the other side of the ceiling, comforted me.

My father would have fashioned a way of telling my mother Fred was indeed dead that absolved her. Wise and tender, and she would have listened—reached across the table for his hand. They’d smoke cigarettes and drink VO because out of my father’s mouth had come the very words, in the exact order, pitch and heft, to the syllable, that my mother craved. Her beautiful brown eyes. His beautiful blue. So very happy in the kitchen.

But things could backfire. My father might say precisely what she most loathed hearing, and she shoves the table over. Literally. My mother’s most imaginative performances occurred in the kitchen—at the kitchen table, where I sat smoking with her. Fred was a goner. How could I tell her this?

In the thrall of Rita Sweeney, neither first nor last time, I pinched a Chesterfield from the packet. My mother pried open the hood of the Zippo, fired it up, and lit my first cigarette.

“Fred’s not dead, Mom.” I exhaled my inaugural sentence of smoke.

“I don’t think so either.”

I had to catch a city bus for school in the morning. It was 4:00, the hour when most depart the earth, the hour most babies are born. The transmigration of souls.

I smoked a cigarette with my mother, then I said, “I have to go to school pretty soon.”

“I’m glad it’s you and not me,” she said.

We walked back upstairs to her bedroom. My father, seemingly untroubled by the past, roared peacefully, happily.

“Fritzy,” my mother said. She stood a foot from me. Stunned. In the sway of her father, planning the campaign to find lost Fred, the dog. Glorious in the nightlight, an emissary from elsewhere, her hair a froth of ragged light. “I want you to forget about tonight. Don’t ever think about it again. Promise me. Promise your mother.”

“I promise, Mom,” I said.

She kissed me. “I’m sorry about school tomorrow.”

She opened the door to the bedroom. My father was a jacked-up Malibu in a Negley Run drag race.

“Jesus Christ, Travis,” said my mother, loud enough. “You could wake the dead.”

My father came to, took us in with shock, then back under, revving it up.

“Good night,” I said.

“Wait until I’m in bed, Fritzy.”

She put on her sleep mask, then got into bed with my father.

In succeeding years, my mother would tell the story that a robin approached her one bright spring Sunday, not long after my grandfather’s visit. She’d risen early afternoon, following a long night at the King, then a couple hours with my dad at a speakeasy in East Liberty, the Perry Social Club. She had walked into the backyard in a robe, to smoke a Chesterfield, and this very Italian robin recounted the true story with which her father—whose sole confidantes were birds—had entrusted it. The bird’s story exonerated her. A tale no more outlandish than having her immolated cobbler father return from the dead to fix her go-go boots—which I happen to know is the unflinching truth. I swear to God.

I crossed the hall to my bed. Home room at Saint Sebastian’s in three and a half hours.

______________________________________________________________

Joseph Bathanti is the former North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-14) and recipient of the North Carolina Award in Literature, the state’s highest civilian honor. He is the author of 20 books. His latest volume of poetry, Light at the Seam, from LSU Press, won the 2022 Roanoke Chowan Prize, awarded annually by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association for best book of poetry in a given year, as well as the 2023 Brockman-Campbell Award, given annually by the North Carolina Poetry Society, for the best book of poetry published by a North Carolina poet in the previous year. The Act of Contrition & Other Stories, winner of the Eastover Prize for Fiction, from Eastover Press, was published in July of 2023. His novella, The Stranger, is forthcoming in 2024 from Regal House Press. Bathanti is McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. He served as the 2016 Charles George VA Medical Center Writer-in-Residence in Asheville, NC, and is the co-founder of the Medical Center’s Creative Writing Program. Bahtanti’s flash fiction piece, “Jesus,” won the Summer 2022 Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition. Author photo: David Silver.

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CHOCOLATE MILK AND CIGARETTES

by Editor on October 30, 2023

Illustration by Andy Paciorek
HONORABLE MENTION, Fall 2023
The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award

BY SPENCER BOYD

I pulled some Camels from my pocket and tossed them across the concrete table. Sam sat mouth open, staring at the ravens overhead. The pack hitting the table broke her trance.

Me: Are you going to tell me what happened to Tommy?

She reached for the cigarettes and put one between her lips. I leaned across the slab with my mini lighter.

Sam: Can I get some chocolate milk?

Me: Chocolate milk.

I stared. Her blonde hair had been hacked unevenly above the shoulders and the state’s standard gray sweats were too big for her vegetarian-thin body.

Sam: You won’t believe me.

Me: Try me.

Sam: My chocolate milk.

I twisted in search of the clinician, ultimately flagging down a guard. I reached back across for my cigarettes and lit one up as we waited on the milk. A few minutes later, the milk arrived and I pressed the red dot on my recorder. She set down the tobacco and tore into the paper milk cartridge, gulping down every last drop and then emitting a belch too loud for her tiny frame.

Sam: All right, Anderson Cooper, I’ll tell you about Tommy.

Me: It’s Stephan, but okay.

Sam: He was abducted.

Me: By whom?

She took a big drag and looked me dead in the eye.

Sam: Aliens.

Me: That story.

Sam: No story, that’s the truth, hetero-douche.

I bit my tongue before slipping the cigarette back in my mouth.

Me: Okay, Sam. Tell me how he came to be abducted.

Sam: It started last summer on our paper route through Seadesert.

Me: The new urbanism project outside Palm Springs.

She grabbed another cigarette.

Sam: Bingo. Our families moved there along with every other bored suburbanite looking for something culty.

She paused to catch her breath through her tobacco.

Sam: Tommy and I were like brother and sister. He, the blonde-haired blue-eyed surfer. Me, the angsty little lesbian. Anyways, we had this paper route we did together. Made the days pass quick, ya know? Like, who bikes by themself? Kill me now.

I looked over at the old aqua Schwinn I had ridden to the state hospital as it rested against the fence. I bit my tongue again and nodded.

Sam: So, we’d cruise. And all was normal until the Johnsons.

Me: Yeah, we all know he—

She flicked her burning bud at me.

I jerked up and stomped on the embers.

Me: What the—

Sam: Are you telling this story or am I?

I sat down and waved my hand as a gesture for her to continue.

Sam: They were weird, but it was mainly him.

Me: Richard?

She nodded.

Sam: I don’t mean like my dad saying bussin’ weird, I mean like weird. The first time was when we caught him drinking from the birdbath.

Me: Birdbath?

Sam: Yeah, dude. Birdbath. Shirt off, khakis on. No hands. Mouth to water like a dog. Tommy and I paused in front of their house and just watched. He finally looked up through his glasses. With a smirk on his face, he waved. We waved back. He said he liked to share what nature shares. Real hippie shit, ya know?

I nodded as I reflected on the hippies in my life, including the boyfriend my mom brought to my college graduation last spring.

Sam: So, we’re in the street, leaning on our bikes, still not sure what to do and the wife comes out. And she’s stunning. Like, no childbirths, late twenties, healthy hair, and perky tits, stunning.

I blushed.

Sam: What? Lesbians can’t talk crudely about other women? She yells over to Tommy to have some iced tea, like I’m not even there. Tommy shoots me a wink, drops his bike and jogs over to take a glass. He chugs it while Jodi stares up at him, and Rich goes back to flicking his tongue in the birdbath. Meanwhile, my jaw is so close to the pavement it nearly burns me and I whip my neck around to all the cookie-cutter houses and there’s not a soul in sight. Tommy hands her back the glass, she brushes some curls out from in front of his eyes, and then walks back inside. Tommy being the jock that he is, runs back out to his bike looking like he just met god. I asked him what the hell that was and he says nothing the rest of the route.

Me: All right, so the husband’s a weirdo, all of America knew that. Give me something else, kid.

Sam: Kid. Isn’t this what’s going to send you into the upper echelon of your career? I want more chocolate milk.

I rolled my eyes and yelled back at the guard to bring over two more cartons. I figured it couldn’t hurt to see what all the fuss was about. I pulled out two more cigarettes, lighting mine and then lighting her’s with mine before passing it over.

Sam: Now you’re getting it. The next day, we ride past the Johnsons’ and hear neighing, like they just adopted a fucking pony. We slam on our brakes and give each other a look. Tommy whips his bike back around and rides it across their Bermuda grass. I follow and he signals for me to come over to the fence as he peeps into their backyard. I bend down and look through a hole to see Rich naked, loping around in circles. We both cover our mouths to hold in the laughter and then look back at him again. Jodi sneaks up behind us and offers Tommy a brownie.

Me: Weed?

Sam: You’re a natural, detective. Yes, weed. They’re hippies. Tommy gladly accepted. I tried to give him a hard time, but mainly because I was jealous. Like, I’m cool too, ya know?

The guard came over with the two cartons of milk and told us we had ten minutes before she needed to go inside for therapy. Sam flipped him the bird and told him to suck her dick.

Sam: Day three. We cruise our usual route and Tommy’s daydreaming about having sex with Jodi. I pretend to ignore him but also think she legit might sleep with him and am weirded out by the whole situation. A few houses away from theirs, who do we see? Rich. He’s standing in their flower bed taking a massive shit. We watch in disgust and he sees us. He waves his arms up and down with his pants still around his ankles, signaling us to come over. We pedal over, walk onto the lawn, and he tells us he’s fertilizing the soil.

I put down my chocolate milk and shook my head.

Sam: Like who does that? The front door was open and we heard Jodi’s voice. She yelled for Tommy and of course he scurried to her. I backed away from Rich and played with my phone until Tommy returned. I told him I was shocked he didn’t want to stay and take poops with Rich out front. He gave me a half-hearted laugh and I knew something was up. I poked, poked, poked. Finally he folded. She wanted him to come back that night. Rich would be out in nature, whatever that meant, and she wanted Tommy.

Me: Now we’re talking.

Sam: I tried to tell him it was a bad idea, but he was psyched to lose his virginity before college, so I rolled my eyes and went with it. I told him I’d wait outside as backup. That night we rode back. The street was dark aside from the Johnsons’ porchlight. I told him ten minutes tops before I called the cops and I ended up calling them in six. After he went in, I saw their silhouettes go past the windows from one room to the next. I’m no voyeur, so I went out to the street. Rich came toward me on the sidewalk. He had rung a chicken’s neck and was rubbing its blood all over himself. He started plucking the feathers and putting them on his body. When he saw me, he ran over, excited to share. He said he couldn’t eat the chicken unless he knew what it felt like to be the chicken. When I heard banging coming from inside, I ran back to the house, looked through a window, and saw the truth. Jodi was gone. Her skin lay shredded on the bed and another life form was choking Tommy with six tentacles wrapped around his throat. I screamed and the alien broke away and sprinted through the house and out the back door. I opened the front door and charged in, but I was too late; a beam of light from the sky pierced the roof, Tommy was sucked up through the air and into their ship, and you know the rest.

On my way home, I stopped by the Lickety Split for a six pack of Milwaukee’s finest. At the register, the cashier’s radio talked about a boy over in Arizona who had just videographed his parents being abducted by aliens. I thought, That boy’s gonna be famous.

______________________________________________________________

Spencer Boyd is a writer from the mountains of Colorado. “Chocolate Milk and Cigarettes” is his first published short story. He tells us: “I’m a sucker for cheeky horror, so I’m honored to be included! I’m currently working on publishing my first novel, a dark contemporary western with goth undertones, explicit sex scenes, and a cowboy bucking his environment of toxic masculinity.”

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DOOR TO DOOR

by Editor on May 31, 2023

Illustration by Andy Paciorek

HONORABLE MENTION, Spring 2023
The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award

BY RUTH SCHEMMEL

“Hey there, I’m not here to sell you anything. . . .”

The salesman sticks a foot in the door before Abby can close it. Why, she thinks, did I open the door in the first place?

“You like security, am I right? You like to know there’s an alarm system in your house, to protect the little ones. Am I right?”

“I don’t have little ones,” Abby says. “I’m the babysitter?”

“But that’s exactly why you do need an alarm system!”

“That doesn’t make sense,” she says. “Are you listening to yourself? I can’t buy anything for this house.”

“You know what?” says the salesman. “I don’t think you qualify for this sale, anyway. I’ll have to check with my office. But maybe? I’ll have to see.”

“Great,” she says. “Fine. I don’t care. Because I’m not buying anything from you.”

“Just say yes,” he says. “To anything.” His eyes implore her, pouches beneath them the color of bruise. He reminds her of her father before the end, his small electronics store failing, bankruptcy imminent, still putting on the false smile, trying to believe. Tears flood her eyes. But it isn’t her father, of course, not quite. His face is rubbery, slack, somehow inexact. She smells his desperation: fresh underarm sweat in unwashed clothes. He looms in the doorway, his shoes—scuffed wing-tipped oxfords, brown and white, once-beautiful shoes of a bygone era—hanging half over the threshold. He can’t come in, she notices. Maybe he can’t.

“No,” she says.

“Do you like blue skies? Do you like rainbows?”

“No.”

“Do you like apricots? Is today Thursday?”

“No.”

“It is, though. You know it is!”

“No.”

“Do you want me to go? Do you want me to leave you?”

“Yes!”

“Thank you!” His words are a gasp, a chuff of air. That’s all he is now: air. For a shimmery moment she can see through him, see through his saggy cheeks to the clumps of white snow falling behind, lit by streetlamps, plopping onto the asphalt and disappearing. And then, as a swell of wet cold air washes over her, he’s gone. Across the street a neighbor man slams the door of a pickup. Soft light pools from his open garage. He’s hoisting a box of tools from the cab when he looks up, catches her eye. He’s the sort of specimen she’s learned to be wary of. A husband and father. A family man.

The sort of specimen who’s taken everything she’s ever had.

Correction: the sort of specimen who was the rocky outcropping to her storm-tossed sea vessel. The sort of specimen she once smashed herself against, ruining everything for everyone forever.

Not that her particular specimen, her particular rocky outcropping, would look at her now.

She closes the door.

Phil Philbrick, ten, standing in the living room behind Abby in his dinosaur pajamas, scowls at her with suspicion.

“What are you doing?” he says.

“Just looking at the snow. It’s snowing. Did you see?”

“Who was that man? Why are you crying?”

Who was that man? The question haunts her all the next day. Your neighbor, she’d told the kid, thinking he’d meant the brawny blue-collar beauty with the toolbox across the street. No, he’d said. I’ve never seen him before. That’s when she realized the kid—Phil Philbrick—saw her salesman. She’d figured they were figments, the twenty or so traveling salesmen who’ve been dropping by during her babysitting gigs, some seedy, some sexy, all desperate, trying to sell her things she doesn’t want for a house she’ll never own. They were just productions, she’d thought, of her own brain, which she herself damaged and chemically abused. This was just another part of the living hell she’s cooked up for herself, her own self-loathing personified and embodied, encased, momentarily, in flesh.

But Phil Philbrick seeing the salesman changes the equation. It means there was actually a salesman there for him to see. For a moment there was.

Could it have been an actual ghost?

Then she thinks: of course! Of course she’s screwed up her life enough to drag an embarrassing string of loser ghosts around. Of course she, Abby Glickman, is the one living mortal who’s managed to gash the ghostly veil, upheld, she can only assume, for millennia. Till now! The whiff of her failure must be pungent enough to waft through the afterlife. Why her ghosts aren’t alcoholic drug addicts who’ve slept with the wrong people, failed fired schoolteachers who’ve addled their brains and ruined their teeth, lost their families, alienated friends—ghosts, in short, more like herself—is anyone’s guess. Let it be salesmen. Huzzah!

It’s in this spirit—the spirit of huzzah—that she flings the door open the next night, in the home of Laura Kosishche, deep in a Benadryl-assisted sleep.

“Two words,” says the salesman, a younger, hotter version of the dude from the day before. He lifts up two hands as if placing the words on a marquee. “Solar panels.”

“One word,” says Abby Glickman. “No way.”

“Well, that’s two words,” the salesman says with a sexy chuckle.

“You can count. What else can you do?”

She hears the innuendo in her voice. She starts to smile and, catching herself, closes her lips. She’s flirting, she realizes. With a ghost.

Well, this is a new low, her bossy inner voice begins. We’re this starved for the male gaze that we’ll take it from a wraith? A possibly malevolent, possibly soul-stealing scrap of a being, obviously unhappy or why would he be here?, unable to maintain a fleshly presence for more than a few moments? Pret-ty hard-up, Abby Glickman.

Oh, but this boy’s blue eyes! Otherwordly they are. Transporting. I’ll take care of you, his eyes promise. I’ll keep you safe. You’re all that I desire. He takes off his hat. “May I,” he says, sliding next to her in the doorway, “come in?”

She starts to feel—in his blue gaze—lovely.

You can do whatever you want, you handsome stranger, she could say.

And why not? a voice she hasn’t heard before in her head reasons. It’s not like he’s real. Doesn’t it feel nice to be desired? Best act fast, before he winks away!

She finds herself smiling, an open-lipped smile. Then, remembering her unrepaired teeth, she closes her lips.

Tenderness comes into his gaze. Pain on her behalf, for her lost looks, lost youth, lost chances? He touches her face, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “Can I hold you? Just for a moment?”

He draws her into his arms. His lips find her lips.

She feels a wrenching tug from the bottom of her abdomen, like the pulling up of a stitch. Her body shudders with pleasure.

Not pleasure, exactly, she thinks. He’s . . . drinking me!

She shoves him back against the door frame. “Get out!”

Surprise flashes on his face. Anger.

For a second she feels her lips wrenched back crudely, as if by an invisible dental assistant, exposing her gums and ruined teeth. Her hands fly to her cheeks. She can’t control it, can’t stop the ghastly grin.

“You have such a beautiful smile,” he says.

“uck ooo,” she says liplessly. She grabs him with both hands, shoves him off the stoop. “Oo ucking agh-hole!”

“You—” His face twists with bitterness. Before he can finish he’s disappeared.

She pats the life back into her numbed cheeks.

Lessons learned.

“So you were a teacher?” Phil Philbrick asks her. A week has passed. A week without work. She’d feared this was it—her clients had picked up on her desperation. Maybe the ghosts had blown it for her. Neighbors might have seen things, made calls. But then Phil Philbrick’s mother had texted—and just in time, with February rent so nearly due.

“A lifetime ago.”

“Why’d you quit?”

An image flashes in her mind: herself, lying under her desk in her free period, weeping. That was toward the end, as it was all falling apart. Her marriage, her job. I couldn’t do it anymore, she could say to the boy. I couldn’t pretend to have anything to give.

I prefer this, she’s always said before, when asked. I love babysitting. Visiting kids at their homes. . . . But Phil Philbrick has seen her ghost. Phil Philbrick knows she’s being haunted and hasn’t told his mother. She owes Phil Philbrick some version of the truth.

Or maybe it’s the glass of wine she’s poured herself that makes it easier to be honest. Wine because why not? She’s a babysitter, not a brain surgeon. A person’s got to still her nerves somehow.

“I lost the job. I made mistakes.”

“What kind of mistakes?”

She shakes her head.

“Is that why you’re being haunted?”

He’d sat himself down in a heap on the carpet, his bare feet knobby and raw. He’s a long, homely boy, too smart and sensitive by far. Too sweet. Too old to be wearing dinosaur pajamas, as he is again this night. He’ll suffer terribly through adolescence, she thinks.

Maybe he’ll become like her.

Maybe he’ll suffer from anxiety, alienate people, obsess about them, use them like drugs. Use sex. Maybe he’ll start a family and wreck it, he’ll succumb to destruction in any of its tempting forms. Maybe a needle or a pill. And he’ll fall. He’ll fall so far and so hard that his old ordinary life will seem like a heaven he’s lost, an Eden.

God, how he’ll wish himself back.

“I don’t think I’m haunted anymore,” she says.

She believes it. The secret is not to want. Anything. That’s the lesson she’s been absorbing, the lesson that’s finally sunk in. As long as she wants nothing, cares for and about nothing, nothing in the world can touch her. That’s all the salesmen can do: make her think she wants something. I defy you, she wills the ghosts silently in her heart, to find anything that can tempt me.

Just then there’s a knock on the door.

“Go to bed, Philip.”

“I want to watch.”

“Bed.” She waits until he’s safely in his room to open the door.

“What a beautiful evening! What luck to find you home,” says the salesperson, in a striking, smoke-ravaged voice. It’s a woman this time, a good ten years older than Abby. Maybe twenty. There’s a jarring disconnect between her eyes and the rest of her face. Her eyes are those of an accident victim, possibly a murder: wide open, shocked and staring. It’s like they’ve seen—are seeing—horror. Yet her features are calm, her face neatly made up. A smile splits her face, ear to ear. Her hair falls in a dyed black shag to her chin.

It throws her. Abby is prepared for the broken old men with sad eyes. She’s prepared for hungry sharks and their flattery. She’ll never believe their lies again! But a woman is something else again. Who in her life has ever hurt her like women?

“May I come in?” the woman says. “It’s cold out here. Brrr.” She doesn’t wait: she just enters.

Well, that was a mistake, Abby thinks. How did I let that happen?

Tell her to leave, her inner voice urges.

“I won’t be buying anything,” she hears herself say. “I don’t live here, you know.”

Leave. Leave. Tell her to leave.

“Would you like some tea for the road?”

“Tea?” The woman looks pointedly at Abby’s wine glass. “If by ‘tea’ you mean ‘wine,’ then hell, yes.”

The woman has a shambling lopsided walk, as if her body had been broken apart and hastily reassembled. She’s sitting on the sofa when Abby returns with another wine glass. The staring horror of her eyes contrasts with her too-wide smile. “Thank you. Now that’s a generous pour. To Bacchus!” She holds up her glass.

They drink.

Only then does Abby’s gaze settle on the flat, rectangular leather case propped on the woman’s knees. The woman opens the latch.

“I told you I’m not buying anything.”

“Yes, yes.” The woman waves a gnarled hand, the fingers twisted with age, her nails painted a lovely deep red. “Well, there’s no harm in looking, is there?”

Abby finds she can’t argue with this. There is harm in looking, of course. Ask any addict. But this woman muddles her thinking, slows her tongue. Or maybe that’s the wine. The wine, of course. She’d gone months without it, till now. But it doesn’t matter: there’s nothing in the world she wants.

“Are you real?” Abby blurts at last. The woman seems fully embodied for a ghost. But then they all have been, all of her ghostly salesmen. For a minute, anyway. This woman’s presence seems more solid than the others. She’s also in no hurry. She doesn’t seem to be in danger of winking away, as the others have done.

“Am I real?” She lets out a throaty laugh. “Oh, my dear. What a charming question. You’re a treasure.”

Abby blushes. She feels that she is a treasure. Right now she feels she is. “So what are we looking at here?” she asks, suddenly bashful, eager to direct attention away from herself.

“What are we looking at here? We are looking,” the woman says, “at your heart’s desire.”

What they’re looking at is knives. Kitchen knives. Five of them, a gleaming set, nestled in crushed blue velvet.

“This isn’t my heart’s desire,” Abby says. But she wonders.

“Oh, really?” says the woman, her voice a soft rasp. “Then tell me: what is?”

Peace, Abby thinks. Numbness. An end to pain. She looks up at the woman’s horrified eyes and placid smile, and understands. “You’re a suicide,” she says.

“Now, that’s not polite.”

“I can’t afford these.”

“I think you can.”

“I don’t have money.”

“No,” says the woman. “You don’t.” She smiles her disturbing smile.

“You’re saying I don’t need money.”

“I’m saying you don’t need money,” the woman says, “for this. But there’s a cost.”

Abby stares into the woman’s shocked eyes. Only this—only the woman’s look of frozen horror—stops her from saying the thing she wants to say.

The thing she wants to say is yes.

She feels it again: the tugging from the bottom of her abdomen. The slipping of herself out of herself.

Oh, she thinks. To be free. To be finished.

“You don’t have to keep going,” the woman says, her voice now crooning. “You’ve done what you could. You had a good run. You did! It’s okay to take your foot off the gas.”

“My foot off the . . .”

A sound on the stairs breaks her concentration. Phil Philbrick in his dinosaur pajamas. Phil Philbrick, with the terrible future she’s imagined for him. His lonely adolescence, his descent into addiction.

His possible descent. She shouldn’t get ahead of herself.

If she completes this sale here—if her fingers close around the handle of a knife—will he find her dead body?

No, she’s about to tell the woman, but the woman is busy cutting her own throat. She’s gone before the blood hits the carpet.

I’m not the ghost, she thinks later, after she’s put Phil to bed. She wanders into the kitchen, runs her hands over gleaming appliances. Things she’ll never own. On the refrigerator there’s a photo of Phil’s parents, Bill and Donna. She kisses the image of Phil’s dad. Then, why not? She kisses the image of Donna. She pours herself another glass of wine. She has plenty of love left. She has plenty of love left for the world.

___________________________________________________________

Ruth Schemmel’s work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Fiction, New Orleans Review, and North Dakota Quarterly. She has received a Jack Straw Writers Program fellowship. A former Peace Corps volunteer and current community college instructor, she has taught English learners in Ukraine, the Bronx, and the greater Seattle area, where she lives with her family. Author photo: Look Photography, Monica Schippers

Back To The Story Page

THE GHOST BETWEEN US

by Editor on May 31, 2023

Illustration by Andy Paciorek

HONORABLE MENTION, Spring 2023
The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award

BY AMBER BURKE

At your rehearsal dinner tonight, you stood next to your bride and the two of you made a speech. You thanked the people who taught you how to love. Your bride thanked her parents, and you thanked me. I stuck around for an hour, then I had to leave. I’m not coming to your wedding. I can’t be your best man, little brother. Your gratitude is misplaced, and I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you the whole story. It has our dad in it, and our mom. And a dog. And a ghost.

We didn’t have any of them for long.

* * *

It was spring. We were eating pancakes at the shiny white table in the kitchen of our Pittsburgh house, a kitchen I remember being golden-yellow, pancake-colored. I was seven and you were five. You sat by me because you liked to sit by me. Dad was home on his lunchbreak from the school where he worked, teaching Social Studies and Phys. Ed. He was a short, tan-faced man, with sandy hair parted deep to one side and gelled flat. The impression he has left on my memory is one of tightness: clumps of taut muscles and snug pants belted high.

“Pancakes are not lunch,” our dad said to our mom. He ate them anyway, with disdain. He believed in protein.

When Dad finished, before anyone else, he cleared his plate, adding it to a tilting stack already filling the sink. He shook his head at the dishes.

“You’re a fat slob,” he said to Mom.

“I’ll do them. It’s just my knees,” Mom said.

It was true that she was fat. You don’t remember this, but she was as big as three of our friends’ moms put together. The objects in the house moved into disorder around her, as if disturbed by the moving gravity of her large presence. I looked at her and thought, Why do you have to be a fat slob? If you wouldn’t be a fat slob, Dad wouldn’t yell. I’m sorry I thought this but I thought this.

Dad cleared our plates off the table roughly. Mom moved to get up, but Dad said, “No, no, don’t worry about it. Just sit on your ass, while I take care of everything around here.”

He cleared my plate, even though my fork was still in my hand. He started to pivot toward the counter, then stopped himself and looked at me as though I had just materialized. “Louis. Why aren’t you at school?”

“No one took me,” I said, which he must have taken as criticism—since dropping me off at school was his job—or as me being a smartass, I don’t know. But his tight mouth tightened and he threw a metal spatula at me, and I ducked, and the spatula hit you in the head. You began to cry just as Dad screamed; he’d put his hand down on the stovetop burner, which was on and hot.

Mom went to help you. Dad said, “You can’t do a damn thing.” Dad was mad that she left the burner on, or that she went to help you and not him, or both: he grabbed a hank of her long brown hair from the top of her head and dragged her up the stairs to their room. She grabbed his hands with her hands and scuttled like a crab, trying to find the steps with her bare feet. The loose dress she was wearing rode up.

“Mom!” you shouted, so worried about her that you forgot your own wound.

I didn’t do anything. I just sat there, alert, in the vibration of Dad’s anger. I was squeezing my fork, which was sticky with syrup; my other hand was a tight fist holding nothing. Through the ceiling, I heard Dad say, “Go ahead, cry.” Nothing made Dad mad like crying. But I couldn’t hear if Mom was crying; I could only hear you, next to me—you were almost screaming, Mommommom—and footsteps through the floor, a heavy body hitting bed springs. Thumps, I heard thumps, and Dad’s footsteps down the front staircase, the slam of the front door, the spurtle of the engine.

Then there was a pause when we were alone in the kitchen. You quieted down—not all the way, but halfway. I got up, cutting through the stillness in the room. I clanged my fork into the sink and washed my hands. My fingers tingled under the water, and the ruts my nails had dug into my palms smarted. I wet a paper towel so I could wipe off your head, which was bleeding, because I knew how to do that. That’s what that scar is from, the one that Mrs. Simmons told you was from falling on the playground. It didn’t heal like it should have. It got bigger when you got bigger.

After a while, I heard bedsprings, and steps, and water running. When Mom came down, she moved slowly and spoke slowly. She said to me, “You did the right thing.” I didn’t know if she meant ducking—even though I ducked and you got hurt—or, if she meant not following them up the stairs, not trying to make Dad stop. Either way, I knew I didn’t do the right thing.

Mom didn’t come down for breakfast the next day, and Dad didn’t say a word. He cooked us hotdogs, his movements impatient. I looked at him for a sign that I should worry, or a sign that he was sorry, but his face did not move easily into expression. Even his hair was immobile. Between bites, Dad aimed the end of his fork at your bandaged forehead. He said, “That’s the only way people learn anything.”

I ate my hotdog that was burned on the outside and cold on the inside and wondered what you were supposed to have learned, or what I was.

* * *

You don’t remember any of this. I’ve asked you. Sometimes I think you’re lying and sometimes I think you’re lucky. Our mother died not long after that. I know she had a heart condition. But I was a child then, and to me, it seemed that being dragged up the stairs by her hair was what killed her.

I will tell you how I felt when Mom died: relieved. I was glad I didn’t have to worry about her anymore. I only had to worry about me. And you. I worried about you.

I was big for my age, loud and tough. But you were skinny and shy, easy to feel sorry for: you could have played an orphan in a movie. And you missed Mom. You looked for pictures of her in the albums under the coffee table. But Dad hadn’t taken any pictures of her in the recent years of her expansion. In the pictures you saw, from before she’d amassed her bulk—a bulk I hadn’t yet understood was self-protective—she was unrecognizable to you.

“That’s her,” I pointed. “That one.” I could tell you because once she’d told me.

Our mother’s face before we knew it: smiling and thin. Even beautiful. You took that picture and kept it under your pillow. Later, I learned that, in your memory, this face took the place of the face you had known.

* * *

Outside, our house was like millions of houses: boxy, with a pointed roof and gray siding, an aluminum awning over the front door, a scrap of yard. But inside, our house, never neat, began to fall apart. Doors splintered off hinges, drawers fell off gliders, rugs turned up at corners, paint peeled. Dad took to repairing things with duct tape: the pipes below the kitchen sink, the bathroom mirror, the couch. Our shoes. He was satisfied with these fixes and viewed them as permanent.

So, when the ceiling in our room began to crack, and plaster crumbled down onto the blue carpeting between your twin bed and mine, Dad brought up the duct tape and a chair from the dining room.

“Watch this,” he told me. “Watch and learn.”

I don’t know if you were there or not. I can’t remember. I was only looking at him. He climbed onto the chair and reached up to the ceiling with an arm’s length of tape. He stuck a large silver X over the worst of the cracks. I was amazed that he could touch the ceiling; he seemed impossibly tall.

He climbed down and looked up, standing with his hands on his narrow hips.

“Better,” he said.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this. No. I know why: it was a moment when I believed that fixing things was easy, that my father was a giant, that everything was going to be okay.

* * *

I was sure we would be better off without Mom there to make Dad angry. When Dad did one nice thing the summer after she died, and got us a dog named Pittsburgh, I thought I was right.

We wore clothes that didn’t fit. We always needed haircuts. We were never clean. We ate a lot of canned nuts and processed meats and cheese slices because that was what Dad bought. I believe now that we were close to scurvy. But we had each other, and then we had a dog: Pitts was a pit bull from the pound. Mom hated dogs, and she would have hated Pitts, with his browless red eyes and ears that rose into points. He didn’t look like a good dog, but he was.

We spent our days outside with Pitts that summer, patrolling the long, concretized blocks of our neighborhood. We tried to take care of him. We didn’t train him; we didn’t know how. But we fed him. When we threw bottles in the street for the sounds they made, crashing into splinters, we held him back by his collar. And when school started in the fall—I entered third grade; you first—and Pitts peed all over the house during the day, we cleaned up after him before Dad got back from coaching. We even took Pitts to our room when we went to bed so he would be out of Dad’s way. But we couldn’t stop Pitts from barking at night. Dad would come down, fling open our door, stand in his underwear and say, “What the hell do you think you see?” Then Pitts would, or wouldn’t, shut up. (It wasn’t until much later that I wondered if Pitts had sensed the approach of a ghost, someone trundling down a long, invisible tunnel toward us. Maybe you and I would have felt a disturbance in the atmosphere, too, if it hadn’t been for Dad’s earthly disturbances.)

One night, I heard Dad roar, “Goddammit, I can’t sleep in this house!” He came into our room. “Pitts!”

Your eyes were open: big and scared. I could feel you willing me to protect our dog.

“Don’t, Dad!” I said. I was up now, standing in the doorframe as Dad chased Pitts toward the basement.

“He’s gotta learn.”

I heard Dad slam a door in the basement, then stomp back up. I ducked into bed, under the covers, removing myself from the wheeling periphery of his attention as he passed our door on his way upstairs. Removing myself too from all the urging in your eyes.

Dad, in his room above ours, would not have heard Pitts after that, whimpering in the basement, but we did. I told you to put your fingers in your ears, so you wouldn’t hear the sounds Pitts was making. You did and I did, but you kept looking at me in expectation. It’s unbearable, being an older brother.

I gave in. It was very late when I crept down to the basement. I didn’t see the dog, but then I heard a wheezing whine and scratching coming from the closet. I let Pitts out: he licked me all over. He smelled like piss. I gave him water and a treat in the kitchen, and I wiped him off with a towel. I did that, but he wanted to sleep in your bed, on top of your stomach. I watched the two of you. You looked happy in your sleep.

We woke up in the morning when Dad threw our door open. Dad grabbed Pitts by the collar and dragged him out of our room. Pitts was a good dog: he didn’t bite Dad. He just whined. I followed, at a distance, as Dad punted him downstairs and threw him back in the basement closet. I went as far as three steps down. I could see Dad taking a hammer and a handful of metal from his tool drawer. I could see all his muscles twitching—he was still wearing only his briefs—as he walked back to the closet and nailed metal from door to doorjamb, sealing the door shut.

“Stay!” he said to the dog, who seemed to be tossing his whole body against the door. “Stay out!” he said to me.

* * *

Our walk to school in the morning was somber. Dad had decided a few months ago that I was big enough to walk the two of us there and back. Dad taught at St. Vincent’s, a high school on the other side of town, but we went to the public elementary school near us. Each class took its recess at different times, so you and I didn’t see each other until school let out. That day, I was glad I didn’t have to see you because of the way you looked at me.

When we got home, Pitts was still in the closet, and I told you to leave him there, trying to sound tough like Dad. But when he came home that evening, I couldn’t eat the dinner he handed us in a fast-food bag.

“Eat your hamburger,” Dad said.

I asked, “Dad, can we let Pitts out?”

You looked at me in gratitude because it turned out I was on your side.

“Gotta teach that dog a lesson,” Dad said, chewing. He settled his gray eyes on me, and I didn’t say another thing. His face was closed off, as uninviting as a bolt.

* * *

I tried to forget our dog was in the closet. But I was continually aware of him. Wherever I went, he came with me, as though he were inside me, throwing himself against my ribs.

I wandered away from the other kids on the blacktop, toward the playground, which was lined by tires half-submerged in sand. The playground consisted of stacks of tires, two tire swings, and for tunnels, the big, concrete cylinders used to make sewers.

I saw a kid named B.J. hiding in one of the tunnels. He was the kind of kid other kids would pelt with rubber balls. It was easy to make him my prisoner. I found a long stick and I poked it at him if he moved. I commanded him to stay right where he was, even after recess was over and I went inside with everybody else.

About an hour later, in the middle of math, B.J. came back into the classroom. He was crying and I was in trouble.

Mrs. Olson pushed my desk into the corner. I didn’t know the answers to any questions that day. Mrs. Olson shook her head at me and said, “Louis, pay attention. Louis, you don’t do your work. Louis, you’re not even trying.” I wanted to be big enough to pull her swinging hair because she didn’t know anything.

* * *

I-don’t-know-how-many days later, when we came home, the closet was empty and open and smelled like bleach, but also piss and shit, and there was no Pitts. You cried, but I didn’t cry, because there was nothing inside me anymore to let out. I didn’t have to keep thinking I should do something: now there was nothing to do.

At dinner, I was mad at you for crying. You knew how much it irritated Dad. I was even beginning to understand why it irritated him: you looked swollen and dirty, your eyes ratlike; you looked like BJ coming out of the tunnel I put him in, an accusation for a face.

I hated you. I was alone and you were alone.

Dad told you to shut up about that damn dog, and when you didn’t, he spanked you and stomped our toy trucks into debris, to teach us to listen to him, or perhaps to teach us not to be sad. You cried more. You sniffled during the night. It seemed to me that your sadness was the beginning of your sickness. You didn’t stop sniffling, not for a long time, and you developed a cough that got worse when you laid down. It annoyed me when you coughed at night. I told you to shut up. You were becoming a kid it was easy to be mean to.

I skipped class sometimes, that fall. I didn’t go to the movies, or to the mini mall that had an arcade; I took the bus to St. Vincent’s. I would watch Dad through the squares in the wire fence around his school. He stood in yellowing grass at the edge of the field, usually wearing an open windbreaker over a striped shirt tucked into his tightly-belted pants, a stopwatch around his neck. Boys bigger than me ran laps around him. He whistled. He gave high-fives. Once, I saw him laugh. He was turning around, toward me; I almost didn’t recognize him. His face looked like a different face; it split into angles and teeth. He laughed and I felt like crying.

I didn’t, though. I ran.

* * *

Christmas that year was you and me and Dad. It was the only Christmas that was ever just the three of us. No tree, no lights, no wrapping paper, but Dad turned the TV to the Christmas music station and gave us toy cement-mixer trucks to replace the ones he had broken. He poured us milk in beer mugs and made us cheese sandwiches without the bread, which he had forgotten to buy. We ate our slices of cheese between slices of cheese and told him they were good. We told him bread was boring. When you coughed, he slapped you on the back. We could tell he wanted us to be happy. We tried. You tried not to cough, but I could see you holding it in, like you were being kicked from the inside.

In our room that night, I gave you my truck. Not to be nice: I just didn’t want it. I wasn’t nice: I wouldn’t play with you. I had a bed, and you had a bed, and between them was the dining room chair that Dad had stood on once and never put back. There was a bureau that was yours and a closet that was mine. What I am saying is we each had a side, and from my side, I ignored you. I lay in my bed and stared up at Dad’s X of duct tape on the ceiling. One arm of the X was drooping down.

You coughed that night in your sleep. I thought I would never be able to fall asleep, but I did. I don’t know if I woke up because you had stopped coughing, or because my stomach hurt, but I woke up and both things were true.

The room felt different, crackling and silent. You were awake, lying on your side, looking at a woman who was sitting on the chair between us. She glowed from the inside with a light that was like the light of the moon. She was leaning over you, not saying anything, with her back to me. She seemed to be made of fizz. And she was fat.

“Who is she?” you asked me when you saw that my eyes were open. We could see each other through her phosphorescence.

“Who?” I said.

“The fat lady. You don’t see the fat lady?” you said.

“Where?” I asked. I was playing dumb, because I was jealous at how she looked at you and not me.

“On the chair, where she always sits.”

The word “always” did it. I sprang up and I sat on the chair; I plopped right down on top of the woman you didn’t know was our mother, and you said, “Don’t, Louis!”

It felt like I was sitting in cold soda; my hands and legs tingled. But you were getting upset, and this time you said, “Stop it!” and because you were too loud, and Dad was going to wake up for sure, I jumped back into my bed.

Dad opened the door, and we both pretended to be asleep.

I remember how our room looked when he closed the door and I opened my eyes: the woman had disappeared, but there was a mist on everything, a glimmer of dew.

By morning there was nothing. When you tried to talk to me about your visitor, I rolled my eyes. I asked how long she had been coming. Since the dog died, you thought. I asked you why you hadn’t said anything before if someone was really coming into your room all the time. You said because you forgot by the time you woke up.

I asked you why you didn’t forget this time, and you said because I sat on her. You said you would never forget that.

* * *

Our mother came to you every night. I would watch the two of you. You didn’t even know I was awake, I held so still and looked at you from under my eyelashes. I watched you through her luminous body. I watched you bask in her light like a kitten. Your whole body softened, even your cough smoothed out, under the attention of a ghost you took for a stranger.

I believe that you would have known her if she had spoken, but she never spoke: she just leaned in close, as though she were going to sing you a lullaby or tell you a secret. You would have remembered her if she had been able to embrace you in her warm folds and rolls—being hugged by our mother in the flesh was always a little like being eaten—but she was untouchable. You would have known her, too, if she smelled like she used to smell, salty and thick, but she didn’t—she smelled like pavement in the rain.

More than once, after you were asleep, but before our mother came, I turned the chair that faced you to face me. But when I woke up, she was always in it, and the chair was again facing you. She belonged to you. Our mother was your ghost. She never turned to look at me.

I didn’t wonder why. Now that she was dead, I was sure she knew about the times I thought fat slob. I was sure she knew about the hateful thoughts I had all the time, the ones about my teacher, the kids I bullied, and you.

I was mad at you for deserving her. You were a good kid. You had been devoted to her, and now she was devoted to you. She watched over you for hours. Close to morning, she would stand up and walk toward the foot of your bed, then disappear as if ducking behind a dark curtain of air.

I never told you who she was. But that is not my only crime. That is not what I’m writing to tell you.

* * *

It was late in the winter; the snow outside was brown and hard. This was the time when our father began recede from the house. I don’t know where he went. Often, we wouldn’t have dinner until nine or ten at night.

One night, he didn’t come home, and we went to bed without dinner. After you’d fallen asleep, I went to the kitchen to make a peanut butter sandwich. I didn’t make you one. I came back into our room and ate quietly. When our mother’s ghost appeared near the foot of your bed, she startled me: I had never before seen the moment of her appearance, and now I did, the flash of it, quick and bright, like an eye opening. I dropped my sandwich on the floor.

She went to her chair and leaned over you. You must have seen her on your closed eyelids, the cool blue light of her, because you opened your eyes. You stared at her for a while, then fell back asleep. When she tried to walk away, much later, she walked over my peanut butter sandwich. She paused. She seemed to be stuck; she had to bend down and use her hands to free her foot. She bent over with difficulty. When she was gone, I looked at the peanut butter, and it wasn’t like peanut butter anymore. It was coated with a down that glowed, a powder off her: it had grabbed onto and held the cottony skin of a ghost.

* * *

I had an idea. I took glue from school and covered the chair with it after you were asleep. I sat up and waited. But by the time she sat down, it was dry, and nothing happened. In the morning the chair peeled and flaked.

It had become my job to keep you clean. I did this job poorly. But the next evening, I ran a bath and put you in it. While you were soaking, I got duct tape from Dad’s cabinet in the basement. I wrapped tape all the way around the chair already covered in dried glue. I wrapped it around the arms, and the legs, and even the bar between the legs, so the sticky side was up. Around and around: I used the whole roll. I tucked the chair in my closet, then I took another dining room chair—no one ever went into the dining room, so Dad wouldn’t notice it was missing—and bumped it up the stairs. I set it between our beds.
I pretended I was a good brother. I got you out of the bathtub. I wrapped a towel around and around you. I even made dinner: ham on crackers. You were clean and full and happy.

When you fell asleep, I switched chairs. I set the duct-taped chair in the spot our mother preferred, close to you. Every time you coughed, I was sure you had awakened to see what I was doing. But you hadn’t.

Before long, like a sudden moon, our mother’s ghost appeared. She sat down in the chair I had ready for her. You woke, stared your dreamy stare, then fell asleep, calmed by her watchful presence. Sometimes it seemed to me that a hazy light poured out of her into you, but it is possible that my tired eyes blurred the two of you together.

I kept myself awake for hours by digging my fingernails into my palms. I wanted to see what would happen when she tried to get up. I saw: she couldn’t stand. Her skin stretched as she leaned forward, but the tape held her. Her heels stuck to the bar between chair legs. She put her hands on the arms of the chair, to push herself up, but I’d wound those with duct tape too, and now her hands were stuck. I didn’t know that my plan would work, but it did. I tell you this is how you catch a ghost: tape it down.

Now she turned her head as far as she could to look at me. I saw one of her eyes; that eye was startled and disappointed.

I rose and dragged her toward my closet. It wasn’t hard. The chair with her on it didn’t weigh any more than the chair by itself. I took the other—empty—chair out, put it back between us, and squeezed our mother’s ghost into my closet. She didn’t say anything because she never said anything. I closed the door and backed away. But I could see her knees through the door, two low humps. I opened the door and re-angled the chair. I closed the door again. No knees.

You know what I told myself? I told myself, I can’t sleep with this ghost coming in here every night. Sometimes I told myself, I want to keep her for my own. But the truth was I just didn’t want you to have her.

* * *

During the day, when I opened the closet door, I could hardly make out the orb of her; she was made of something like cobwebs, only visible from certain angles. But at night, I could see her clearly. I looked in on her often when you were asleep. Her light flickered and pulsed, like dark clouds were blowing across her surface. After two weeks or so, she was much thinner. She looked beautiful, like the woman you saw in the pictures. You would have recognized her.

She looked past me. She looked at you. And when the door was open, and she looked at you from across the room, you did not cough. So you see, she did not want to desert you.

“Where did the fat lady go?” you asked me, after a month of not seeing her. By then, you were hard up to ask me anything. I was in a bad mood most of the time. I said I didn’t know, how should I know?

* * *

She was looking bad. I had been trying to pull my school clothes off their hangers without looking at her. I had stopped checking on her while you slept.

Then, there came a night when your cough was a rattle that didn’t stop. You sounded like an old man. You sounded bad enough to alarm my hardening heart. I got up. I opened the closet door, and there she was: gaunt, and wilting bluely, looking down.

“Mom,” I said.

With what seemed like great effort, she looked at up me. She looked at me the way she’d looked at Dad, hopeless like that. Then her gaze slid back down, as if her eyeballs were weighted toward the earth. Your cough behind me was thick and desperate. In that moment, I knew that because of me, you were both dying. What I had done scared me. I wanted to undo it. I reached in: I tried to grab her arm, to peel it up, but there was nothing to grab. My hands went through her. I tried to peel off a piece of duct tape; I began to unwind it from the arm of the chair, under her left hand, but as I yanked the tape up, her hand moved with it—her wrist bent at an impossible angle. She winced. I shut the door fast.

After that, I put my fingers in my ears when you coughed in the night. I wouldn’t open my closet. I wore the same clothes for a week, at least. And when Dad opened the closet door to grab me clothes that weren’t filthy, he said, “What is this? What did you do? Why did you waste all my duct tape?”

I remember hitting the floor. I was grateful to be punished. I thought, then, that punishment could make up for a crime, that I was doing some good by lying there on the carpet.

Dad yanked you off to school and left me in our room that morning. I didn’t move for a long time. From my position on the floor, I looked up into the closet, at the chair inside it, and there was no one there, just a few fine, drifting strands like spiderwebs and an icy dust that floated.

* * *

I’m telling you I ruined your ghost, and I am sorry. I was sorry right away and I’ve been sorry ever since. I started being nice to you again. Guilt was why.

We stuck together: it was just you and me after that. There was nothing at home: no mother, no ghost of a mother, no dog, no father to speak of. I pulled hair, anybody’s; I became a kicker. Mrs. Olson tied my ankles to my chair with jump ropes. I did not want to be tied; there was something I had to get out.

You got worse. It was spring, but you sounded like winter, like clanking radiators, like your bones were cold. Dad didn’t notice because he wasn’t there. By the time the school nurse took us to the hospital, the doctors were upset that no one had brought you to the hospital sooner.

When you didn’t die, we were taken to a carpeted room with colorful walls. A woman with a round face gave us crayons and paper and told us to draw pictures of home. The crayons she gave us were waxy, and hard to draw with, but we drew, and we explained what we drew to the woman when she sat down on the floor between us. She didn’t believe everything, but she believed enough things.

By the following fall, we were in foster care. There was Mrs. Simmons first, and then everyone else. It was the beginning of our grand tour of the foster homes of Allegheny County. There were so many mothers to remember, that of course you don’t remember the one that was your real mother, the one who was a ghost.

* * *

I’m not a good brother. I know that, and I don’t expect forgiveness. I don’t want the indebtedness that comes with being forgiven. And I will tell you something else, while I’m being introspective: I don’t want to have to come to your wedding tomorrow and stand there while another woman devotes herself to you.

I feel better now that the truth is out, now that our brotherhood is over, as it is bound to be, now that you are no longer mine to worry about. It seems to me that there is relief in every ending. In the endings you want and the endings you don’t.

Dad didn’t come to court on the day he was supposed to. He never came for us. That was not the ending we wanted, but there was, eventually, relief even in our abandonment, for in it, we discovered other kinds of love.

I often imagine how our dad must have felt after he disappeared from us. I like to think of him settling into a peace we kept him from, in a house held together with tape. I remember him less clearly now; there are times he grows faint as a moon during the day, and I can’t be mad at him, even though I know he taught me nothing.

______________________________________________________________

Amber Burke graduated from Yale and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and now teaches writing and yoga at the University of New Mexico in Taos. Her creative work has been published in magazines including The Sun, Michigan Quarterly Review, Raleigh Review, Superstition Review, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Quarterly West, and Flyway Journal. Yoga International has published over 100 of her articles and the ebook she co-authored, Yoga for Common Conditions. Check out some of her work on her website. This is her first ghost story.

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