HONORABLE MENTION, Fall 2020
The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award
Illustration by Andy Paciorek
BY DAVID LEWIS
I thought we’d have to break into the funeral home, but Ayden had a key. I didn’t realize they’d give you one if they were showing your daughter’s corpse. In the lobby I asked if France had laws about resurrections; he told me to stop talking like a Yank. The hint of disdain in his voice was uncannily like Grandma’s. When we reached the sign “Nolwenn Seznec 1995-2019,” his daughter’s room, a nervous burn rose from my chest to my throat. I told Ayden I wasn’t very good at this kind of ritual and that these experiences changed people, living and dead. Maybe we should reconsider.
He put his hands on my cheeks and his forehead against mine and I stopped talking. A couple of long hairs on his beard reached out and tickled my skin. If I’d moved forward a centimeter, our lips would have touched. I imagined his mouth, fresh and warm. When he said “Please,” his breath smelled like a field after the rain. I shut up and followed him into Nolwenn’s viewing room.
I expected the coffin to be sealed shut but was surprised that it opened without any fuss. When we lifted his daughter out, Ayden held his head high and stared forward, tears shimmering in his peppery beard. I couldn’t look at him, so I stared at Nolwenn. The makeup artist had done such an excellent job masking her death that I couldn’t tell which side of the skull the truck had hit; she looked perfectly intact. It was just an illusion though. Her shattered bones scraped against each other as we carried her out of the funeral home to Ayden’s car. My stomach churned during the entire drive to Montreuil.
Grandma could never abide my squeamishness. After my first cat died, I cried as she made me skin it. She tutted: “It was lucky your mother died at childbirth. She’d burn herself alive if she knew her little queer was such a pansy.” She never thought I was ready for resurrections. I’ve only tried once and that was when she died; she left instructions with a note: “You’ll probably let a dead worm’s ghost into my cadaver. But try anyway. Dark Lord knows, you need the practice.” She was right. I botched it. I turned her into an animated corpse with a taste for human flesh. It was an improvement in her personality, but not in my skill.
After I moved to Paris, I learned more—but not much and I began to wonder if I had enough focus for witchery. One time at a party, I bungled a seduction charm on a dancer who then spent the night humping the host’s greyhound. Ayden never let me live that one down. He probably knew I was hoping to try the spell on him at some point. Maybe that’s why he’d kiss me when we were really drunk—to give me a taste without magic. But it was never more. I’d finish those nights jerking off into a toilet.
When we got to his house, we lay Nolwenn in the bath. Grandma always said to do resurrections in a tub for easier clean up. “I can’t promise this will work,” I said. “I’ve never done it correctly.”
Ayden shook his head. “Can I help?” he said, holding his hands out to me. His palms were checkered with nicks and scars, the hands of a sculptor. He looked like he was going to start weeping again. Fortunately I hadn’t told him there was a chance I might accidentally cremate his daughter. I asked him to make her favorite dish and put it outside the closed door. Grandma would have laughed at that: Real power doesn’t come from pretty symbols. It’s honest and brutal. It’s a slap in the face. But he had to go. I couldn’t concentrate with him and his sadness in the room; it was distracting and attractive.
He knelt next to the bathtub and mumbled some Breton into Nolwenn’s ear; then he walked back to me, a spark shining in his dark eyes. He put his arms around me and hugged me so tight that my joints cracked. His desperation surged through me and when he let go, I felt it sparking off my skin, swirling through my limbs and up into my head. I was almost giddy with the strength of his loss.
When I told him to go, he left like a timid hound.
For the next tedious hour I tried to call Nolwenn back, sending thoughts of fresh air, clean blood and solid bones to her crumpled form. It wasn’t until the doughy scent of fresh crêpes crept under the door that I saw movement. Her cheek twitched. Had the food helped? I sent thoughts of plump muscles flexing and stretching but she didn’t move again. I reached out and touched her face. Flakes of makeup cracked off. I could hear Grandma cackle, “Queer or not, you’ll never match the women in our family.”
Poor Ayden was probably making new batter, stacking the pancakes into a giant tower and thinking that each one brought him closer to his daughter. They did smell nice. Maybe bringing them in wouldn’t hurt.
I looked back at Nolwenn. Her funeral suit had shrunk. No, she was growing. The makeup cracked and fell off her face in jagged shards.
“Stop,” I said in my most commanding voice. Nolwenn’s head rolled back, lips curled into a stiff rictus as her jacket began to rip. What would Grandma do? I reached over and slapped her hard. “Wipe that smile off your face and stop.”
It worked. Her head bobbed left and right from the slap and her body stopped expanding. She remained oversized, but maybe Ayden wouldn’t notice. My chest quivered with adrenaline. Then the side of her face let out an airy whistle, like helium escaping a balloon. Pink embalming liquid oozed out of a crack in her cheek and down her face. I grabbed a roll of toilet paper to clean it and, as if I’d lanced an aggravated boil, her forehead collapsed, splattering fluid onto my face. Droplets of it crept into my nostrils and burned with a pickled stench. I retched.
A knock on the door. “Are you okay?” Ayden’s worried voice boomed through.
It felt like a fiery worm was crawling through my nose and into my throat. I could hardly speak. “I’m fine.” Grandma’s ashes were probably swirling with laughter down in the gutter where I’d dumped them.
“Can’t I help?” Ayden’s worried voice vibrated through the wall.
“You don’t want to come in right now,” I said. Each word felt like a nail scratching at my throat.
He tapped at the door. “Can’t I do anything useful?”
I’ve been asking myself that question for years.
“Did you say something?” he said.
I took control of my voice. It had to be commanding. “Yes. Go back to the kitchen.”
One last knock and I heard him walk away, his footsteps fading into the hall. I turned back to the tub. Could I do anything right? The bathroom smelled like a dissection laboratory and embalming fluid had splattered the walls and floor. Nolwenn’s corpse slid into the basin, her broken legs bending into odd angles to make room for her enlarged torso. What was left of her face was drenched in the fluid still leaking from the dent in her head.
“I don’t suppose you’ll clean yourself up,” I croaked.
Then her eye opened and a ball of cotton and mucus fell out.
I screamed. It was neither my witchiest nor my most masculine moment. In seconds, Ayden was pounding at the door. “Shane, that doesn’t sound okay.”
When I’d turned Grandma into a zombie, her corpse rose as if it were held by strings. This was different. Nolwenn’s trembling hands grasped the side of the tub and she tried to lift herself up. The collapsed half of her head was throbbing outward, oozing pink. Her one open eye held a shriveled grey stone in its socket and it fixed itself on me before she slipped back into the tub, her shattered limbs folding back on themselves. A gurgle came from her throat. She tried to open her mouth, but the undertakers had sewn it shut. I rifled through the medicine cabinet for a pair of scissors. The chemicals in the air were still burning my throat, but I didn’t care. Had I succeeded? If Grandma could see this, she’d die again from shock.
“Shane?” Ayden was hitting the door so hard, it sounded like he was throwing bricks at it.
“Just give me a minute.” I snipped the strings tying Nolwenn’s jaw shut. She coughed and vomited a long stream of pink and grey. The fumes scratched at my eyes and they filled with tears. “Everything’s fine, Ayden. Go back to—”
Nolwenn’s scream was so loud it made me dizzy. The door cracked with the sound of Ayden’s body slamming against it. Before I could open it, he burst in. His daughter screamed again.
“What have you done?” he said, his face contorting as he looked from her to me. There was an angry light in his eyes and I thought he might try to punch me.
“I’m not finished. If you can’t keep calm then go,” I said, my newfound assurance suddenly slipping away. “Panicking isn’t going to help.”
His lips quivered as he turned from me to his daughter. He looked like he was going to be sick.
“Stay against the wall,” I said. He nodded and crumpled into a corner.
Nolwenn was whimpering now, a weak mewl that trembled like a giggle. She didn’t look great, even though her forehead was pulsing back into its old shape and turning red with fresh blood. Thick streams leaked out of her ears and eyes, clots and scabs dripping down with them.
“Nolwenn? Can you hear me?” I said. She turned her half-formed eye to me. Even shriveled and dry, a bright green life shone in it. She turned her head to the sound of Ayden retching in the corner, but I forced her to focus on me. It seemed essential that she see who birthed her, who brought her back, the person she owed her new life to. It was her resurrection, but it was my moment.
“Try to relax. This will end soon.” She seemed to sense my uncertainty. Her torso shook with hiccups—or was it laughter? Blood leaked out of the half-healed cracks in her neck. When she calmed down, she lowered her head and laid back into the tub as her body pulsed and reformed, the skin and bones sewing themselves back together.
Ayden wrapped his arms around me from behind and pushed his face into my neck. “Thank you.” His lips moved against my skin as he spoke.
“Thank me when it’s finished,” I said, pulling away. I didn’t want to lose concentration, even though the resurrection was enacting itself at this point. I wished Grandma could see this. She loved seeing me fail. It would have been nice to see her slack-jawed stare as I brought someone back like a Jesus.
In half an hour, Nolwenn’s body had reformed itself. “I need the bathroom,” she rasped through chapped lips. Her first words, and so practical. A lesser person would have asked something banal, like if she was in heaven or hell. Her eyes still looked milky and blind and the acidic stink of formaldehyde wafted out of her mouth, but she held herself like she’d just woken up. Ayden fell down to the edge of the bathtub and kissed her forehead. She recoiled and tried to focus on him.
“Who are you?”
“It’s papa, chérie,” he whispered, choking back a sob. “Let me help you up.”
Nolwenn’s eyes cleared and she looked at me with a knowing squint. Ayden helped her out of her burial suit. He rinsed her off and guided her to the toilet. “Are you okay, chérie?” he said.
She nodded. “Leave me for a minute,” she croaked. Then she turned to me and grinned.
I felt a chill. What if the resurrection had changed her? Could a rebirth like that shatter a weak personality? I wasn’t sure if I should leave the room too, but she waved us both out. Ayden took my arm, his palm rubbery from contact with the chemicals. Nolwenn squinted at us from the toilet until we closed the door. Outside Ayden pulled me into a hug and his body trembled against mine in wavelets of sobs. He repeated a broken thank you over and over. My heart fluttered and I tried to extract myself, but he pulled me closer, his hands spread wide across my back.
When the bathroom door finally opened, Nolwenn appeared wrapped in a towel. Just out of a shower, she radiated health. Her heart-shaped face had filled out and her eyes shone. She smirked when she looked at me.
“It’s good to see that you’ve finally become a witch Shane.” I held my breath. I hadn’t heard that voice in so long.
“Nolwenn? Chérie?” Ayden said.
She bit her lip. “No, I’m afraid not.” My grandmother’s voice rang out clearly from Nolwenn’s mouth. “My grandson’s a long way from being able to perform a proper resurrection on his own, but with my help that may change.” She smiled.
“But Nolwenn?” Ayden asked.
“She’s in there.” She pointed to the shallow puddle of embalming fluid in the tub. A sad bubble rose to the surface and popped.
Ayden fell to his knees and let out a cry so mournful I could hear his vocal cords ripping. My grandmother walked towards me, grinning through Nolwenn’s soft features. She pulled me into her arms and whispered into my ear, “Well done, pansy. You almost made me proud.”
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David Lewis is a reader for Electric Literature. His essays and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Talking Points Memo, Chelsea Station, The Fish Anthology, Liars’ League London, Willesden Herald: New Short Stories 9, Fairlight Books, Paris Lit Up, The Weird Fiction Review and others. He is originally from Oklahoma and now lives in France.