by Paula Guran
When no answer came, she went downstairs. The farmhouse had been recently cleaned. A metal pail filled with gray water sat in the corner near a mop and a discarded rag. The layer of dust usually visible on the floors and walls and wood stove had been washed away. Layers of grime that Sully had previously believed permanent had been scrubbed clean. The scent of lavender had done away with the previous odor of musk and sweat. Sully rubbed her eyes, made a shade out of her hand to block out the midday sun.
“Good afternoon, you,” said Ziza as she poked her head through the open window. Sully turned around to see the girl she’d birthed wearing a smile, one of Sully’s head scarves, and the Master’s church shirt, trousers, and suspenders. “Glad to see you’re finally up. I was getting lonely with only livestock as company.” There was that smile again, so wide and open it hardly fit on her face.
“You’ve made yourself quite at home,” Sully said.
“It got tiresome trying to be the polite house guest. There was too much needed doing,” she said. Sully saw that the panes of glass in the door, which had always been a murky brown, had been washed clean. They were clear and bright, sparkling just about. Ziza had turned this ramshackle cottage into something palatable, something the Missus had always hoped Sully would do. “You should come out here if you’re feeling up to it,” she said.
Sully peered around the main room of the farmhouse, all evidence of her murderous deed erased. Ziza had cleared away the pot of tea she’d brewed with analgesic leaves. The bloody clothes Sully had been wearing on the night in question were cleaned, dried, and ironed. They lay folded on a chair.
She wished she missed them. She wished at the very least she felt sadness or guilt. But all she felt was the same old rage. It burned her up, leaving her numb, nerves charred. She’d done the thing she’d always dreamt of doing, and now what? Perhaps now it was her time to die.
“You coming or not?” called Ziza.
Sully joined Ziza outside, where the sun was too bright. Her legs still weak, she leaned against the rotted wooden frame of the house, chewing her lip, arms crossed over her chest.
Across from her, not far from the chicken coop, Ziza drank in the sky. Her head tilted back at such a sharp angle that the base of her skull was perpendicular to the line of her neck. She touched her skin. Patted it. Poked it. Pinched it. Her whole body gestured joyousness. “Hallelujah, hallelujah,” she said.
Sully rolled her eyes at this stranger who’d made a house of her uterus. “What are you so happy about?”
“Haven’t you seen the sky today? Isn’t that reason enough to be happy?”
Sully slid her hands into the pockets of her apron and focused her eyes hard on Ziza. “No.”
“How can you be sure unless you have a look at it? Go on. Do it.”
Sully didn’t like to do what people said, so she looked out at the expanse of poorly managed land before her instead. The Missus’s family hadn’t been the most skilled of farmers, their approach to tending the earth one of brute force. They beat the ground with their hoes and rakes and called it tilling. The dirt was hungry. It needed feeding, cajoling, coaxing, singing to. Building up not breaking down. What had the Master and Missus known about growing something? All they knew was how to bleed something for all it was worth. What must it be like to live life when every interaction included the question, How much value can I extract from this?
“I can’t make you look, but it sure is beautiful,” said Ziza, eyes now affixed to Sully. She was small and birdlike, her mannerisms sharp and jittery. Her body was too small for her spirit.
“I don’t believe in beauty,” replied Sully, saying it because it sounded controversial, not because she particularly meant it. She counted the rows of cotton plants, which looked as scraggily and ugly as anything she ever saw. Ugliness was something she could count on.
“If you don’t believe in beauty, then I suppose you must’ve never seen your own reflection before,” said Ziza.
Now Sully didn’t have a response for that. “What did you say?” she asked.
Ziza returned her gaze to the sky. Her face was angled away, so Sully couldn’t see it properly, but she thought the girl was smiling.
“You’re nothing like how I imagined a ghost would be,” said Sully.
“Maybe because I’m not a ghost. If I was, could I do all this?” She grabbed a stick off the ground and flung it at Sully.
Sully batted it away then picked up another and tossed it right back. She reached down and grabbed handfuls of dirt and pebbles and threw them at Ziza, too.
“Stop! Stop!” Ziza cried, all the while laughing wildly.
Worn out from Ziza’s constant frivolity, Sully huffed a breath. “What are you even doing here? Leave me alone. Go away.”
“I promise to stop pestering you if you look at the sky,” said Ziza.
“I don’t think you could stop pestering if you tried,” Sully said and mashed a little dandelion into the ground with her boot.
“Damn, girl, just look.”
Sighing, Sully cast her gaze upward. At first all Sully observed was the cloudless, bright blue that she suspected had entranced Ziza so much. She felt disappointed that after all of Ziza’s haranguing for her to look, there was no revelation, no moment of transcendence. Sully didn’t feel moved at all. The sky was the sky, like it had been yesterday and so many days before. She was about to look away when out the corner of her left eye she saw a fluttering of white. A flock of seagulls approached, so far inland that surely they were confused. “What in creation?” said Sully, mouth and eyes wide. The seagulls dipped low to the ground to give her what looked like a bow.
“Mercy,” Ziza cried out, then laughed in astonishment.
The chorus of squawking hurt Sully’s ears, so she yelled for the birds to hush. At once, the seagulls became silent. She covered her mouth to stifle the gasp.
Ziza, grinning widely, turned away from the circling birds and the cavernous sky to look at Sully. “You did this, did you know that? You are astonishing.”
Assaulted with such strangeness, Sully didn’t know whether to be joyful or frightened, to revel in this new inexplicable power or cower in its presence.
Sully removed the artifacts of her past life from the house and burned them in a bonfire outside, thinking these vestiges of the Missus were the reason for the sick feeling she still had even now that the family was dead. What could not be burned, she smashed. What could not be smashed, she buried in the woods past the property line. The Missus had collected all sorts of knickknacks and bric-a-brac over the years. Needless figurines. Stacks of newspapers ceiling high. Old, busted musical instruments that no one played. Bottles of snake oil bought from this and that traveling salesman, promising to cure ailments no one even had.
“With all the accoutrements gone, this place doesn’t feel like much of a home at all,” said Ziza as she helped set the table for supper. She’d invited herself to stay. “Looks like a tomb in here.”
“You’d know all about tombs, wouldn’t you, Miss Dead Girl?” Sully said, experimenting with a partial smile so Ziza would know she did not intend her comment anything but facetiously, but she hated the way it felt on her cheeks. She resolved never to do it again.
Ziza snorted as she folded a cloth napkin and placed it on the table, laughing with her tongue against her teeth so the sound of it was a soft hiss. “What’s a woman like me know of tombs? I died in a outhouse and was surely buried in an unmarked grave or burned. Tombs are for kings and queens.” She grabbed a piece of cornbread from the basket at the center of the table and brought it to her mouth, her manner far from proper. Crumbs stuck to the corner of her lips and she wiped them away with the fabric of her shirt cuff. In the days since she’d been here, she had yet to take off the ivory-colored button-up that used to belong to the Master. His single bit of fancy attire. Clean and barely worn. Though Master Albert had been a small man, the fabric draped like a carnival tent over Ziza’s miniscule skeleton.
; “I don’t mind that you’re so very uncouth,” said Sully and sat down to join her new guest, her sort-of child, at the table. She’d taken—not quite pleasure, not quite comfort, perhaps reprieve—in the routine she’d fallen into with Ziza, enough that she could try to make pleasant conversation through the numbness.
“Says the girl who slain five womenfolk with no more thought than she’d throw out dirty bath water,” Ziza said.
Sully reached with her fingers beneath her head wrap to scratch her sweaty head and sized up Ziza from across the small wooden round table. She didn’t look like any girl Sully had seen before with her light brown skin and green eyes, sun-colored nappy hair, a cornucopia of freckles.
“Was you always that color?” Sully asked. She’d heard tales about ghosts possessing women, turning them white with death. “Or was it what happened to you in the Thereafter? I knew a boy who had a patch of white in his black hair from all the worries of his life, though I’ve always been an aggrieved sort of person, and that never happened to me. They say I’m dark as a raisin.”
After a few bites of beans, Ziza had a gulp of lemonade. “I was just born like this,” she said. She dipped her cornbread into a bowl of spicy red beans, thick pieces of meat from the ham hock mixed in among the onion. She ate every meal so ravenously, and it occurred to Sully there might not have been food in the Thereafter.
“Isn’t there food in the place you came from?” she asked.
Ziza hummed as she played with her spoon, tapping it against her bowl. “It’s hard to say,” she said. The only times Ziza wasn’t actively cheerful was when Sully brought up anything that took place before she’d come to the farm.
“So you don’t like to talk about it or what?” asked Sully, aware she sounded coarse but unsure how to fix it.
Ziza squeezed her eyes shut. “It’s just, what happens when you die isn’t a thing you can talk about. It’s not a place that exists where I can just describe the color of the sky and the whoosh of the water and the subtle hue of violet in the flowers in bloom. It’s more like being drownt and you seeing everything through icy water.”
Sully blew on another spoonful of beans, but she didn’t bring it to her mouth. “Does it hurt your lungs like drowning does?” she asked. She leaned across the table toward Ziza, hungry to know the ways of death.
“It’s more like the moment of letting go, when the fight is out of you. When you about to pass out so the pain of being denied air is gone.”
Sully exhaled slowly, her lips trembling as she whistled out air. “I don’t see why you’d ever want to leave a place that feels like that,” said Sully. “Like peace.”
Ziza stirred what remained of her food, the hand holding the spoon shaking. “Don’t say that,” she said.
Even when the voice bearing the edict was as gentle as Ziza’s, Sully didn’t abide commands. “If you’re free to blather on and on about what a glorious day it is and hallelujah this and that and such nonsense, I can talk about what I want to talk about.”
Ziza sucked in her lips and let her head droop a smidge, eyes averted from Sully. “You’re right,” said Ziza. “I spoke out of turn. I’m a guest in your home.”
Sully didn’t expect the girl to capitulate so easily, and she was sorry her hostility had whipped the fight out of her. “It’s not my home,” said Sully after a moment.
“Isn’t it?”
“It’s not like I got papers saying it’s mine,” Sully said, and everybody knew papers were everything.
“Did you not kill the folks who had the papers? Therefore could you not change the papers? Is an owner anything but he who kills for the papers?” asked Ziza. The temporary contriteness that had overtaken Ziza went as quickly as it had come.
“But what would I do with this place?” said Sully, standing, finding Ziza’s inquisitive stare suddenly oppressive. She leaned back against the wood burning stove, where her cup of coffee sat keeping warm. She drank what remained, but still did not feel settled. She filled Master Albert’s pipe with tobacco and began to smoke it.
“You could live out your days here,” said Ziza.
“Why would I want to live out my days here?”
“Why wouldn’t you? Do you wish to travel instead?”
Sully inhaled smoke then blew it away from Ziza. It felt good to do this in the house. The Missus had always forbade Albert from doing so. “Travel? For what purpose? I thought travel was for seeing things, and I’ve already seen all I want to ever see, I think.”
“For the pleasure of it. Or you could stay here. Whatever you do, I’ll do it, too. You bornt me, girl. Look at this,” she said, untucking her shirt from her trousers and lifting it up to reveal her belly button, where there was a large, black stump. The remainder of the umbilical cord that had connected them. “We can go or we can stay. Which do you want to do?”
“I don’t want anything in particular,” said Sully.
“Then I’ll want for the both of us. I’ve decided. This is your home and my home, now. Our home. And it will be others’ home, too.”
“The others?” asked Sully.
“They’ll surely be riding your murder wave here,” said Ziza. “You kilt five, did you not? And I am only one. When we disrupt nature, she likes to reestablish the balance.”
“The gods like a defiant streak,” said Ziza. She’d taken it upon herself to teach Sully the ways of the world. Her lessons came over many weeks, given as she and Sully roasted corn and hot sausage over the fire together, or scrubbed mud-stained clothes in the stream, or swept, or planted crops of peas, or gathered wood or stone to build dwellings for their impending arrivals.
She learned about tinctures, roots, and bones. Some of it Sully already knew, like how to bring sickness to heel with the right cocktail of plants. The subject of resurrection was what interested Sully most, and she played close mind as Ziza babbled about necromancy, zombifolk, mojo, herbs, conjurers.
Ziza described a bridge made of dreamscape, said Sully had accessed a way to pull people across it. “Why me?” asked Sully.
Shrugging, Ziza continued her work devising a crop rotation schedule for their land. She insisted that most of the acreage needed to lay fallow for at least a year, perhaps two, up to three, time over which they’d feed it with the manure of chickens, cows, pigs, and goats. “I guess the etherworld saw something in you and rooted up in you,” she said.
Sully had always been touched by a flash of darkness. On the plantation where she was born, slave women gossiped about her true nature. Her mother, who’d been sold away when Sully was five, called her moskti after the blood-eating fairy in stories of their old home back across the water. They possessed human bodies and kept them alive by feasting on the blood of anyone nearby. As soon as she had teeth, Sully drew blood whenever she fed from her mother’s breasts. Four months old.
“When it comes to the divine, it’s best not to worry too much over the particulars, or you’ll lose the forest for the trees, you understand?” asked Ziza.
“No.”
But everything Ziza said and predicted came true. Sully did give birth again, this time to a boy of ten named Miles. Two months after that came a forty-one-year-old woman named Liza Jane and a few days later her twin sister Bethie. Next came a man named Nathaniel with gray hair and skin dark like a fever dream who didn’t talk much but to recite lines of poetry. Including Ziza, five revenants in all came to stay, one for each of the lives Sully took.
Sully kept her distance from all but Ziza. She watched from afar as they made a home out of the farm over the weeks and months. They sang songs without her, swam in the stream without her, tilled without her, picked blackberries without her, and laughed without her. They were a family, as exuberant in their togetherness as they were in their resurrections.
Ziza was their shepherd—not just for the revenants, but for Sully, too, coaxing her like a lonesome, lost lamb back into the fold. “Sully,” Ziza said one day. “I’ve been missing you.”
Sully wasn
’t the sort of person people missed, so when Ziza said that, she didn’t know what to do with herself but fiddle with a piece of flour-water paste caked to her palms. She peeled off the flakey remnants onto the wooden porch, where she sat rocking in the Missus’s old chair.
“Don’t you find yourself missing me, too?” asked Ziza, kneeling in front of Sully. She laid her hands on Sully’s knees and squeezed, and Sully stood up from the rocking chair so fast it almost toppled.
“You’re the one who doesn’t want to talk anymore now that you’ve got your new friends,” said Sully. She cast a glance out onto the fields, where the newer revenants, Miles, Liza Jane, Bethie, and Nathaniel, were picking wild flowers—weeds.
“It’d be easier to keep up with you if you didn’t sequester yourself away like you do,” she said, then shook her head and walked off. When she was almost out of earshot, she turned around and called, “I’d love you forever if you’d just try. Not that I don’t already love you forever.”
It was foolishness. Ziza was a silly girl, prone to bouts of childish whimsy, yet Sully found herself enticed by the promise. She didn’t care about getting closer to the others, but Ziza? She could bask forever in her attentions.
Miles, the little one, was a rascal and then some, always playing tricks on Sully. He’d replaced her jar of talcum powder with ashes once and another time laid a dead mouse inside her boots. But he was also a master of languages. He’d grown up in a boarding house up north where he’d learned German, Czech, Spanish, Russian, and Italian from the boarders. She liked listening to him rattle on in foreign tongues.
Miles taught her to read and how to do math, and called her “Sis.” She didn’t like him, but she didn’t unlike him, either, and she found her hostility toward him and the others melting to indifference and then to a reluctant fondness as the weeks passed by.
