Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones

by Micah Dean Hicks

  Jane grabbed an old sweater from beneath her register and pulled it on, the sleeves falling to swallow her hands. Soon, the cold moved over her again. There was a faint sound, too, a high-pitched ringing. A smell like gunpowder.

  Riley walked to the front, holding an armload of deli sandwiches and sodas. He met Jane’s eyes, recognized her, and looked around to see if there was a different cashier. He remembered sitting in math class with her, his embarrassment when she had to explain a problem to him and he still didn’t understand. He was ashamed that he hadn’t finished school, that she might think less of him. It was such a strange feeling, so unusual for someone to think that Jane was better than them, that she wanted to reach out and touch him, to tell him that everything was okay.

  He put everything down, and sores of ice opened on the rubber conveyor belt where his fingers touched.

  He’s worried you’ll ask about the cold.

  Jane rang him up, rubbing her sleeve hard on the glass scanner to brush away the ice. “I haven’t seen you in forever. Did you move away or something?”

  He gave a weak smile. He thought she was pretty, was afraid to look at her, glanced toward the door instead. “No, I’ve always been here.” His voice broke, like he wasn’t used to talking to people. “Except for work, I just don’t go out much.”

  “You left school at a good time. It was all downhill after Algebra Two.”

  “I’m surprised you’re still here.”

  “Yeah,” Jane said. “For now. What about you? What’s with the suit?”

  “My dad got me a job at Pig City a few years ago. Night shift. We clean the place once everyone goes home. Spray everything down to sterilize it. That’s why I left school.”

  No, no it’s not. He left because something happened.

  Jane started to ask about his family, but her ghost said, No.

  She tried to think of something else to say, not wanting the conversation to end. “Working nights, you probably see more ghosts than people.”

  “It’s nice. I like the quiet.”

  Gratitude that she would talk to him at all, a warm, sweet feeling, bloomed in the boy.

  A truck honked in the parking lot. Riley fumbled with his wallet, then handed her his debit card, sharp and cold.

  Jane held on to it, not swiping the card right away. She wanted to ask, What the hell happened to you? But that would only scare him off. “You going to the game tomorrow?”

  He looked at her like he didn’t understand.

  “High school girls’ basketball game. Bethany Ortiz is playing, so no surprise about who’s going to win. You should come, though. Before work.”

  Her ghost relayed a stream of feelings: surprise, confusion, caution, gratitude. “Okay,” he said. “Maybe.”

  The truck honked again from the parking lot, three angry blasts.

  “I should go before I’m late,” he said.

  “Sorry.” Jane swiped his card and handed it back. She hugged her sides. It was so cold being close to him. Her breath poured out in a ribbon of white. She wondered what his skin felt like.

  Riley angled his body toward the door, sacked groceries in hand, but he didn’t leave. “You were really smart in school. I was sure you would have gone off to college somewhere.”

  Jane started to answer, but her ghost said, Wait. She stared at him, silent, letting a quiet pressure build between them. She wanted to defend herself, to tell him that leaving cost money, that people needed her here, that nothing was wrong with staying. She wanted to turn the question back on him, ask what the town possibly had to offer him.

  “I’m glad, I mean. That you’re still here.”

  Oh. She silently thanked her ghost.

  The door opened, and an older man in the same white hazmat suit and mask walked in. His eyes flickered across Jane and she felt a blast of contempt. He held his arms out to Riley. “We’re late, kid. What’s going on?”

  “It’s my fault,” Jane said. “I run my mouth sometimes.”

  The man had a salt-and-pepper beard, long hair, stony eyes. He looked at Jane and dismissed her in an instant. It was unimaginable to him that his son might want to talk to her.

  The man put an arm on Riley’s shoulder, and his son tensed. “Say bye to your friend, Trigger.”

  Trigger?

  Her ghost filled her ear: Don’t ask about that. If you do, he might not talk to you anymore.

  Jane tore the receipt off, but before she handed it back, she wrote her phone number on the back of it, shielded behind the register where his father couldn’t see. She pressed it into Riley’s hand, getting a shock of cold when her fingers met his, like touching frozen glass.

  The two men went out the door in their bulky suits, looking more like astronauts than Pig City workers, like they were headed up to rake the dead white surface of the moon. Trigger held the receipt deep in his palm, thinking of her hand.

  He and his father don’t like each other.

  “Even I could tell that,” Jane said.

  Riley had left a pile of dead leaves on the floor behind him. Jane reached down and picked one up, the point beaded with blood, its veined body crucified by lines of frost.

  He’s not bleeding, her ghost said. The leaves are just part of his ghost. They’ll fade away soon.

  Jane held the leaf in her hands, watching as it turned glassy and light, until it was gone and the cold with it.

  You gave him your number.

  “He seems like he needs a friend.” Jane often spoke out loud when she talked to her ghost. It was the only way to keep the ghost girl from talking over her, breaking up her train of thought, running her in circles.

  Maybe you’re the one who needs a friend.

  Jane felt a flush of embarrassment, unable to hide anything from the ghost, and it howled around her body in an exulting, invisible wind.

  A few minutes until closing time, the manager turned off half the lights, leaving the store dim. Jane leaned back against her counter, palms behind her, staring at the clock.

  The door sighed open again. With no warning from her ghost, a giant ducked its head and squeezed through the doors. He wore denim coveralls, oversized black boots, and a blue Pig City cap. But he wasn’t a person. His swollen arms, thicker than Jane’s waist, strained the fabric of his sleeves. Thick gray hair shot from under his cuffs and up from his collar. His hands, resting on the small bar of a grocery cart, had four thick fingers, their nails flinty black. He glanced at her with an inhuman face.

  The creature had the head of a pig. Tusks protruded slightly from the sides of his mouth. His eyes were small and sunken, snout wet. Tall triangular ears stood up on either side of his head. His face was a puzzle of scars, like he’d been pieced together rather than born, the seams still showing.

  Jane squeezed the lip of her counter, waiting for the spirit to do what it would do. It was so solid, seemed so real. There would be no getting away from it. She hoped it hadn’t come to haunt her.

  Her ghost rose in her, sensing her terror. What’s wrong, Jane? It’s only a man.

  The hulking pig man pushed his cart toward the meat department.

  “It can’t just be a man,” Jane said softly. “What does he want?”

  Him? Her ghost swirled thoughtfully. Nothing. He’s thinking about work. Thinking about pigs.

  “He is a pig,” Jane whispered, afraid the man would hear.

  Being as close as they were to the haunted downtown, Jane had seen plenty of strange things walk through the door. People so weighed down with ghosts that they could barely speak, bent double over their carts, flinching from sound or light. But a pig—a walking, grocery-shopping, plant-working pig—this was new.

  Jane walked down the aisle toward the meat section, letting her ghost get close enough to listen in on the pig man’s thoughts. “Is he angry? Is he here for a reason?”

  He’s just thinking about meat. Prices. Nothing at all.

  Jane could feel the spirit’s irritation. There was nothing worse to
her ghost than someone calm, in the moment, without a gnawing secret or worry. The pig might as well be a newborn, his flighty thoughts catching on the noise of his cart or the flicker of the lights above. The pig man’s cart creaked closer, and Jane went back to her register.

  Her manager waited, a key in his hand. He dropped it onto her counter and backed away, thinking of the pig, but thinking too of Jane’s ghost, of any ghosts that might already be invisibly closing in.

  “I need to get home,” he said. “You can lock up tonight.”

  He fled the store, leaving Jane alone with whatever the pig man was.

  He thinks it’s a ghost. He’s afraid it came into the store just for him.

  Jane picked up her phone and pressed the intercom button, announcing that the store would close soon. She was pretty sure the pig man was the only one left.

  Here he comes. Thinking about sausage, of all things.

  The pig man was easily twice the size of the biggest man Jane had ever seen. His shopping cart groaned with weight. In it, he’d stacked hams, tubes of hamburger meat, big cylinders of tenderloin, and plastic bins of pork chops. There was nothing in his cart but meat, most of it pork. He dumped it clumsily on the conveyor belt, and Jane started checking him out. The cheerful Pig City logo, a cartoon pig giving a thumbs-up, passed again and again under her hands.

  Jane tried not to look at his snout or ears. He pressed against her counter, smelling strongly of metal and blood. She felt surrounded by him, his towering height, his shadow, his bellows breath.

  She rang up six hundred dollars worth of meat, then bagged groceries while he fumbled a wallet out of his pocket and carefully tweezed it open with brutish fingers. He handed her a Pig City company charge card. The name on it read “Walter Hogboss.” She rang him up and handed the card back to him.

  “Thank you,” he said, his voice a snarl, a collection of grunts and wheezing squeals pinned with meat hooks and stretched into words. With that, the pig man pushed his cart to the door and went out into the night.

  Jane locked the doors after him, thankful that he was gone. “He may not have been a ghost, but he wasn’t a man, either.”

  He seemed like a man to me.

  She wondered if the pig man had come out of the haunted downtown somehow. There had been odd visitants before. Last year, right at dusk, a crowd of ghosts had flooded into the store and rushed the bakery, their semi-translucent bodies bleeding in and out of one another. They stayed there all night, the manager putting up CAUTION: WET FLOOR signs so the living would know to keep their distance. Afterward, Jane learned that it had been some holiday that no one in town celebrated anymore. The ghosts were looking for a special kind of bread that the store had carried eighty years ago. The living might forget everything, but the dead still sang their old songs.

  As close as they were to downtown, lots of strange things slipped into the store, most of them small and invisible. Sometimes Jane went down the aisles touching everything, feeling for the special electricity of the dead. Any boxed dinners or pasta sauces or flour sacks that were possessed were thrown out with the expired goods. The stray dogs that ate from their dumpsters snapped at things no one could see.

  Jane locked up and walked across the parking lot, keeping an eye out for ghosts. She heard the creaking groan of a shopping cart somewhere in the dark. She fumbled her keys out of her pocket, ready to quickly unlock her car or to defend herself.

  The pig man pushed his cart out from behind a Pig City work truck, blocking her path.

  His basket-like hands rested on the thin rail of the cart handle. His gray fur looked white in the wash of the parking lot lights. He let go of the cart and took a step toward her. Jane felt her mind stop, her body freeze. Even her ghost retreated deep within, both wondering if they would be dragged into a black place, snuffed out between his big hands.

  “Excuse me,” the pig man said. “Something is wrong with my truck.”

  Her ghost leaned against her chest, listening. He’s worried his meat will spoil.

  Jane took a breath. “Okay. I can take a look at it for you.” She wished Henry were here. Machines were his thing, not hers.

  Jane walked toward the pig man’s truck. He pushed his cart behind her, fretting about the meat. She didn’t have to pop the hood to know what was wrong. The whole truck trembled with ghosts. They filled its engine, pinging about inside the cylinders. They floated through the gas lines and the tank. They curled in the tires, and entwined their bodies with the electrical. She couldn’t see them, but her ghost told her they were there, told her what they were feeling. A pig working at our plant. A pig wearing our uniform. A stranger taking what’s ours. Send the pig back where it came from. Don’t let it take what little we have left.

  “Did you drive through downtown?”

  The pig man pointed across the dark smear of the city center. “I live on the other side.”

  “You have to go around. Otherwise, the ghosts mob you. You’re lucky it’s not worse than this.” She was surprised the pig man hadn’t ended up haunted himself. The ghosts must not have seen anything in him that reminded them of themselves.

  He grunted. “Can it be fixed?”

  “Let it sit here for the night. By morning, most of the ghosts should have moved on. Maybe your truck will start then.” She doubted it, but there wasn’t much else to do.

  The pig man thanked her and stood there with his cart. He sniffed the air. Her ghost read his thoughts, how he weighed pushing his cart straight through downtown against taking a longer way and risking the meat going bad.

  Jane sighed, already regretting what she was about to say. “I can give you a ride home, if you want.” She hoped this wouldn’t be a mistake, that the pig man hadn’t been planning to get her alone in the close space of a car.

  “That would be very kind of you,” he said.

  She opened her trunk, finding stacked circuit boards and coils of wire, junk Henry had left there. The pig man layered his meat on top of it.

  He pushed the passenger seat back and lowered himself in, one arm holding the roof to steady himself. The car sank low on its shocks, and his bulk pressed against Jane in the driver’s seat.

  He was mostly quiet on their trip across town, letting his arm and shoulder hang out the window. The car swept through foggy ghosts on their way to or from the plant. When they burst through one, the pig man sniffed deeply. “They don’t smell like anything,” he said.

  He’s thinking about pigs, meat, the plant workers, ghosts. It’s a little hard to follow. He’s tired. It’s all mixed up.

  “Do you work at Pig City?” Jane asked.

  “I’m the plant manager,” the pig man said. “But I was only recently promoted.”

  Promoted from pen and straw. Promoted from four legs to two.

  His house was in an abandoned neighborhood close to downtown. Only one block separated him from the worst of the haunting. A light was on inside, a yellow glow through the white curtains of his kitchen. He got out, the car heaving up with him, and unloaded his groceries from the back.

  Jane was about to leave when he knocked heavily on her window. She rolled it down, and the pig man reached a hand inside. She didn’t move, hands tight on the steering wheel.

  “Take this,” he said, “as a thank-you.”

  He dropped two sticky packages of steaks on her lap.

  “And please tell Henry that I’ll be calling him soon,” he said.

  The pig man stood, grocery bags looped like shower hooks over his huge arm, and went inside.

  Jane rolled up her window and backed out of the driveway, then drove fast out of the neighborhood toward home. “How does he know my brother? What does he want with him?”

  I don’t know, the ghost said. He wasn’t thinking about much. But when he mentioned Henry, he remembered pain.

  When Henry’s ghost finally released him, he found himself in bed. The wall clock read 7:01, and the light outside was dim. Was it morning or evening? He had the kind of
brutal, nail-spike-to-the-back-of-the-skull headache that told him he hadn’t slept in a long time. The blankets stuck to his arms and chest. He pulled them away, finding that he was covered in dried blood.

  He showered with the bathroom light off. After scrubbing away the blood, he ran his hands over his arms, legs, chest. He wasn’t hurt. No cuts or scrapes that he could find. He stood with the water crashing against the top of his head. He felt an electric, full-body awareness, realizing that the blood must belong to someone else. What had his ghost made him do?

  Henry’s ghost cared only about the technical: engines, angles, formulae. When Henry came across an interesting problem, it woke up the ghost in him. Sometimes Henry would only be out for minutes, with no memory of where he had been or what he had done. Sometimes, the ghost rode him for much longer. Usually, whatever he made was harmless, beautiful, a miracle of science and invention. But every once in a while, he made something dangerous. It was all the same to the ghost. If it could be done, it was worth doing.

  Henry dressed and moved through stacks of broken electronics mounded on his floor and into the hallway crisscrossed with extension cords and dotted with drifts of laundry. Music played from Jane’s room, so he pushed open her door. Her back wall was stacked with speakers, CD players, and disc towers, headphones and aux cables falling down over it like vines. The rug was scattered with CDs, detailed notes written in Sharpie on their white faces. Jane slept to the noise of her stereo.

  Henry shook the edge of her bed, and Jane sat up.

  “Is that you?” Jane asked. “Or just your ghost?”

  “It’s me.”

  “You were out for two months. Bethany was worried about you.”

  “Months?” What had he been doing before his ghost took him? He couldn’t remember. “Did I make anything? Have you seen it?”

  “You went to the pig plant with Mom every day. You’ll have to ask her what you were doing up there.”

  Downstairs, he heard his mother talking on the phone and the click of silverware against a plate. He stumbled into the kitchen, holding his head and shading his eyes from the light.