Her Ghosts

Copyright, Mary B. Sellers

Fiction || 2,173 words

Death called, and she told me about her love of rabbits. The thing about midnight was the space. Little jingles of light giggled nervously over her two comforters and the coin in the gold bowl was gone. Purposefully, she checked for the bubble in her ear and her hand came away with blue grease. At the toilet, she examined her hands and found the long, blue veins of a grandmother. The last RX they’d prescribed her had made her so happy she’d sat in the slush of dirty sheets on the couch and thought about building towers from match’s ashes. Months later, she’d find dunes the size of her fingernails on the depression glass and ask the room for further guidance for better renter’s insurance.

Have you ever heard a bat in your brain before? At the superstore, she’d bought children’s items like they were daylight, and banana pale baskets were threatening with cartoons of delinquent ruffles, reminding her of the stab wound in her bloomers. The fuzzy psychology of metal room décor felt like hefts of decades worn strung against her back like kitchen sponges. Eggy chronology aside, she was daughter and creature and marked by the beast of complex survival. Plastic mirrors you saw pixelated Mona Lisa mars light through, the brick of resin that looked grateful for its center: favorite purchases, the debit scored sum totals like what you’d expect the bright diagnosis to bridge numerical rainbows through. She wanted to scoop her lower bowel’s soft waste like ice-cream. A fist. The fist. The fish on aisle 8. Maybe it heard the onion of announcing herself.

 She needed a new headband to be buried in. Buying second-hand, usually, to avoid the salary crush, was Jennifer’s main avenue for fakery, simplified, made honest curtains of, by the variable of make-believe. Office Culture was theater and its tragicomedy knuckled things into realism she’d barely known in the books she’d read, blew sinewy i-got-you-now raspberries through desk perils and deleted files and coworkers who were smarter than her, applying their heavy judgments through recommendation, alone. It was enough. The clever insult didn’t hurt so much as ping. Jennifer’s clothing and nice bag and loafers—by a reasonable designer everyone knew, loved, smiled at in brief relief that yes, they’d found the right girl for the job after all—was patchy armor, glitter worn off in areas small enough to press a thumb against. She wanted to kiss the UPS delivery driver because he brought her product. A half-life?

Her unhorsing came in the anti-cavalry attack of terminal illness. The train left without her. Diagnosis day, and the only thing she could square away was rope, braided thickly like a large snake’s hide, falling pleasantly before her when she shut her eyes. Friendly rope, extended to her by invisible friend, above, on some different stone turret that was better than hers. The friend couldn’t speak to her because of her circumstances and because, as visions go, there was a spiritual plexiglass between them. To voice their thoughts would have been going against code. Hierarchy reigned in her head. She was there and they were.. up there… and the sky looked the same from both of their perspectives. That was enough. There was grace in the gesture, and it made her weary to consider how desperate this made her. Someone coming for rescue meant she’d been oblivious to the cement drying around the lip of memory. She opened her eyes again and saw the weak lamplight of her $79.88 Amazon lamp that’d come with a shade you had to make and bend yourself. She considered dying early. Thought against it while stroking her left arm with negligent fingernails.

Buying second-hand had been her evil excuse when her liberal uncle from Nashville asked what she’d done for the environment recently, but the occasion of a summertime death warranted a second look at her loan. There was an option to refinance. It was 3:23 am CST and the world felt pocketable like it had in childhood. Sleepy news reruns and the gentle blue of the expensive sheets, the white sound machine offered her the mental silence she required to devil between the bleak realism of never seeing the catacombs. Despite careful dreaming, she was nearly dead and politely destitute, barely employable, reliant on a lie her recent health problems were cured by generous government deductibles. She’d paid a quarter of the sheets’ full amount, was careful about adjusting her body in bed because of the debt. It lived, momentarily, on the left side of the bed and took space as a partner would. Latent manners, or maybe a shyness for thread count? She gave debt space, and he warmed the laundry. What she’d borrowed from them was safety, jig-sawed, false as the weak as shit flame in her Yankee Candle.

No one wants to fuck a dying girl.

Thirtily, she said this to her one friend in the PNW and expected laughter. Her friend’s soft phone censure was a surprise. While the lecture lasted, she listened for the sounds of husband on the other end and held out her hand in dead space when the friend’s daughter came to the receiver. Pet—or did she want to hold real youth again—little wiretaps bent on beginnings and healthy, functioning genes. Something clicked and she looked up from the digital glue and saw the cat in the doorway.

“Bed, or nothing tomorrow,” she said to him.

He replied by a confusion of stretches. He, like everything else in the apartment, was a piece of artwork. This made her a bad pet owner because he moved. It’d been three years and the windowpanes still hollowed before her, and the sizable yawns the fright caused her held her pinioned, placed before dark air. Closing them meant they’d won.

Dates hadn’t happened for several months and the one man she had been seeing by Instagram meet-cute—who came, after band practice, on Tuesday nights, sweetly sporting space music and a generous ear for her chatter—ended things over a girlfriend problem. Two chardonnays and one risky download later, she’d set herself up online as a risqué pen pal, and the audience, mostly, were those from abroad. This suited her. She lived in the Southern United States and, except for one instance in college, had never been around Europeans. They’d liked her 19-year-old brusqueness and ear for poetry, they’d called her accent cute, and she’d promptly gotten her ass grabbed at one Scottish late-night. Her H&M clothing stunk of dancing in the mornings before class and the crows outside her dorm window at 11 pm borrowed the preternatural northern lights in their wings. Their dark dust was over everything that summer, and the swan that attacked her that afternoon held a message in its throat. Run. She’d kept running for these last fifteen years. Breathing, now, against the soft lighting of online bidding—headbands—felt necessary. The online sorority sisters haggled by Yankee Candlelight and she lightly touched her brow, anointing the beginnings of a quarter-annual Botox procedure she’d taken up recently in lieu of credit card payments. She envisioned the tower and thick savior’s string again, then two arms grabbing it, then the cat knocked something over. From guilt, she blinked sweetly at him.

The Devil app imploded things considerably. It was late lunch, after a spreadsheet that had held her throat in its fist. Threats of numbers. On cell 37, the cursor had jumped. Sitting on the bench outside in cold sunshine made her think inexplicably of the last date she’d been on. Scratching at her underwear in the bathroom between the ice waters and appetizers, the man sitting at the table had watched her leave with an expression of flinty surprise. The dates had ceased when she’d started contracting symptoms in early August. No drive, no lunch dates, the old yellow blanket cloaked six months of celibacy under its rough weave of starburst pattern. She viewed romance coldly, checked her horoscope, instead.

The app was punchy with a cartoon of the devil as logo, and the placebo effect of downloading promiscuity felt like lazy agency. There was something funny about going to the dark side in lieu of living healthy, too long, and the grief was hulking, and she swiped through registration with itchy eyes, a glass of alcohol nearby. Later, when she’d matched with someone French, she fled, reviewing the guidelines for modern droll in her head. Was she too depressed to be interesting at this point? What’s good about today? The pristine condition of her pen collection? Later still, when the Frenchman had asked her for a video date, she’d gone squirrelly and pestered him about privacy.

“What about screenshots? How can I know you won’t take them?”

“I swear I won’t yell at you,” Timéo replied, “Not to do that to you, in a heartbeat.”

That Saturday, she took out the expensive, striped bralette she’d never worn and realized how much weight she’d mislaid, and chose a pair of joggers for bottoms, no socks, and the lipstick she’d purchased from an Instagram ad. It went on smooth and coral and she liked herself for these private sins.

Standing in the mirror and examining the puckered skin felt like sweaty nonsense and she laughed and wished the vodka would steep her cleanly in two. Maybe then she could cry wholly, without the hiccup of knowing no one was around. Things were exacerbated and the high she’d felt from a stranger’s longing loosened its grip and things went pink. Being lonely felt like an ice storm, and the mirror had only made her lonelier. That stranger wasn’t thinking about her anymore and the flesh she’d shared onscreen was a bargaining chip for a shot at perceiving herself differently from bird’s eye. She turned on the documentary about the psychic from New York and played with the edge of her drinking glass. She’d been the worm so long that the emotional purgatory she’d paced in depressed stilettos was no longer a safe cave to claim sanctuary in. Just a cheaply drawn jail whose bylaws stated permanent residence. It was a lifelong guilty blush knowing she’d wasted so many years closing herself to the opportunity new connection rolled die against.

She asked a favor of the Frenchman. There were quiet . . . ’s before the reply. The wait felt like an eagle in her chest.

The reply was brief: Yes. The dearest place in the world is right next… La Belle Ronde.

She typed: I can’t thank you enough for granting the dying wish of a southern, expired belle.

He typed: One thing. And this however is so large you’ll die early.

She typed: Yes?

He typed: Do not look at the skulls in the face

She typed: I want a chance to visit and you’ve given it to me. I’ll be in bed when you’re there, toasting you with champagne. The trouble you’re going to—can I send payment?

He typed: Stay alive, queen of the crop top. We’ll view Wednesday for the weather.

She typed: See you then mon amour.

She looked at her requested history against the screen’s edge and felt the pressure of the stranger’s vicinity and everything was weighted. Wednesday carried rain on both their continents, but when he’d chatted her before calling, he’d held an umbrella over his handsome face and taken a selfie. Sent, and the blood in the heart, my god, she’d thought, this was real enough. In the Catacombs, he held the phone at a tilt and the efforts he took to avoid any wobbling screentime cleared space for something guttural to twitch. He wasn’t a stranger any longer but her portal to six million deaths and she played with the debt of her own sharp sadness by twisting the pillowcase between her fingers. The stranger’s voice surprised her for its flute quality—something in French, a greeting against the shoulder of another witness—and the phone bumped once. Just a dark ceiling for a second and a muffling. Dark brown, and crowds ahead of him. Minutes and more shuffling until The Ossuary was crooked, but in view. She wanted Timéo to run his hand over the bone. He stood one row behind before the camera was suddenly elevated for a moment, then, as if he wept, bowled down to the ground. Up again, The Ossuary, then stationary enough for her to pinch the screen.

“Nothing in the world except the remains of God-fearing so thickly ornate could do for them. The heads, and they’re emptied of everything,” she said, forgetting her partner on the other end of the line.

“What?”

She kissed her hand where the semi-circle of loose skin held together and licked the esoteric center of her champagne flute. The steady sipping felt like the deepest kiss, and the cat came to paw at one blue toenail. The apartment was quiet, but the French tourists kept her company. The cross disappeared and her cup was empty.