Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones

by Micah Dean Hicks

  The robot towered over the stove, making breakfast. Henry had made it out of what he could find—a busted hot water heater tank for its torso, a tin pail shielding a pair of outdated camcorders and auto lights for its head, the key levers of an old typewriter for its delicate fingers. Inside its body, a dense ball of junked computers and VCRs were soldered to car batteries and the power supply from a vacuum cleaner. The frayed end of an electrical cord swung behind it like a tail.

  The robot dressed itself in his father’s old clothes—something Henry was certain he hadn’t programmed it to do. Its work boots and jeans were stiff with mud. Bright stars of rust and bleeding tracks of white battery corrosion dotted its limbs and chassis. It moved erratically, slamming down plates and dropping silverware, movements jerky from spirits that had taken up residence in its servomotors. His ghost had driven Henry to build it after his father left, when Henry worried that someone needed to take care of his mother.

  The spirit haunting his mother was a lonely, hot-burning ghost desperate to be loved. Her skin was scorching to the touch, the ghost translating its desire into heat. People were drawn to her, felt thrilled to be so wanted. Those who stayed by her side ended up burned to ash. After suffering burns all over his body and the mental trauma of being drawn like a moth to what was killing him, their father vanished. His body was still there, but everything inside him had been snatched away. Henry and Jane still saw him occasionally, but he wasn’t the same.

  His mother was dressed in her blue Pig City jumpsuit. She’d gotten a coveted Pig City job before Henry had been born, but she’d never been promoted or gotten a raise. There weren’t many black workers at the plant, and no one management considered a problem would work there for long. She did her work invisibly, without objection or complaint, like another ghost.

  But his mom liked her work. She was in the pig houses, keeping the animals healthy. She could touch the pigs without searing their skin. When she fed them from her hands, she didn’t have to ask whether or not they really loved her. More than the men who floated in and out of her life and bed, the pigs were a comfort. A shame, Henry had always thought, that it was her job to bring them to the slaughterhouse.

  His mom was on the phone with her brother who lived out of state, but the two of them didn’t have much to say to each other. Their extended family had gotten out of Swine Hill and left their ghosts behind. It hadn’t been easy, and they didn’t want to hear anything about the place, didn’t want to remember the hungry touch of spirits. They had new problems now. And Henry’s mom didn’t want to hear about her brother’s new wife or how well his kids were doing. Sometimes the two of them would spend an hour on the phone and barely say anything, listening to the background noise of each other’s houses. The plastic of the phone receiver deformed in his mother’s burning hand, hot from all the things she held in.

  Henry sat down, and the robot dropped a plate in front of him. It was a huge steak, falling over the edge of the dish and oozing blood.

  “Is this breakfast or dinner?” Henry asked.

  “One of Jane’s customers gave it to her. She cares more about them than she does about me.”

  Henry put aside the weirdness of Jane’s customers giving her steak. “What day is it?”

  She ignored him and kept talking to his uncle. “My own daughter doesn’t hug me anymore.”

  Henry sighed. They couldn’t hug her. They’d get burned.

  His uncle must have said as much.

  “But they don’t even want to hug me,” his mother said. “That’s what matters.”

  It was like sitting in front of a furnace grate. Henry leaned back in his chair in spite of himself.

  His mother glared at him and stood, picking up her keys, her cell phone still against her ear.

  “Are you going to work?” he asked. “Does that mean I have school today?”

  “Have your sister take you.”

  It was easy for him not to take his mother personally. Her ghost made her this way. And unlike Jane, he didn’t have a window into their mother’s mind, couldn’t see just how deep ran her river of selfishness and need.

  Henry finished breakfast and gave his dirty plate to the robot. His backpack lay against the foot of the stairs, but it didn’t hold any clues to what he had been doing for the last two months. He felt impatient, wanting to see what he had made. It might be dangerous, and then he’d have to take it apart. Still, it had to be amazing if he’d spent months working on it.

  His head felt tight with pain from lack of sleep. Everything seemed a little softer, farther away, less real. He yelled up the stairs for Jane to take him to school.

  Her car wouldn’t start. Henry had offered to fix it for her before, but his inventions had a habit of turning out to be dangerous: a dishwasher that turned dirty plates into pottery shards and powder, rewired sockets that cooked electronics, a cell phone that picked up only strange, inhuman frequencies. He knew Jane was afraid that his ghost would snatch him away again if he came across an interesting problem, but there was no other option. She laid her head against the steering wheel and gestured for him to see what he could do.

  He spent twenty minutes looking for his father’s jumper cables in the mess of the garage, but the car wouldn’t start until he opened the battery case and filled it with water. Finally, the engine moaned to life. It was only a temporary fix. Jane needed to buy a new battery, but money was always tight.

  They rumbled over the pitted road and past the neighborhood’s sagging porches, which were like hands slowly closing to fists around their doors. The whole town was like this, with few people left on any street. Everything weather-damaged and gray, the lawns overgrown and cratered with junk. When a washing machine’s electric hum seduced a lonely ghost and then the motor seized up and refused to turn, people could do little but throw the possessed hulk out on the lawn. Henry wondered what it must be like for a ghost, finding in the spin of a motor or the minuscule architecture of a circuit board some shadow of what its life had been.

  “I haven’t seen Dad in a while,” Jane said. “I leave food out in places where we’ve seen him. I think he’s finding it, but who knows.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine,” Henry said. He thought of his father’s ropey scars and twisted face. The way he could appear suddenly at a car window or staring out from an abandoned building. How he spent his nights walking among the most brutal and angry ghosts. The only reason he wasn’t haunted was that he had somehow become more ghost than man.

  “You don’t have to be afraid of him,” Jane said. “He wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

  Henry tightened a fist on his bag and looked out the window, ashamed. His sister could always see the worst parts of him. He tried to refocus, to think of something else before her ghost pushed deeper and found something uglier.

  “Two months. I’ve never been out that long before. Did Mom tell you what I was working on?”

  Jane was quiet for a moment, focusing on the road like she hadn’t heard him. “I met someone at work last night. His name was Walter Hogboss.”

  Henry felt his ghost stir slightly, a small flare of recognition. “Was he from the plant? Did they need help with something?”

  Jane pulled into the student parking lot behind the school, the gray brick and glass building rising before them.

  “He wasn’t human.”

  “It was a ghost? You talked to it?”

  “Not a ghost. It was a walking, talking pig. It was stitched together, like a butcher built it out of spare parts. I think he’s here because of you.”

  Henry stared at his hands. Crusted blood collected dark along his nails. “You don’t think that I made it.”

  “Where else would it have come from?”

  “Why would I make a talking pig? Bacon doesn’t taste any better if it can talk. What would be the point?”

  “He said he’s going to call you.” Jane squeezed his shoulder. “I think you did something really bad this time. Worse than the robot.”
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br />   “Mom needs the robot. A lot of the things I make are good. They help. If I made this pig, there must have been a reason.” He fought to close off his mind, to think of anything else to keep her ghost from laying him bare.

  “That’s what you want to believe,” Jane said. “That’s what you’re telling yourself.”

  “I have to go.” Henry snapped off his seatbelt and shouldered open the door.

  * * *

  Henry passed through the sagging chain-link fence that divided the high school from the haunted arms of downtown Swine Hill. The school was filled with its own strange species of ghost. Most weren’t dangerous. Unlike the downtown ghosts who’d lost everything they’d lived for, the dead students still had the school. And in the eighty-odd years the school had stood on this spot, nothing had been torn down. The school buildings crumbled across a stand of hills, their sad ghosts still moving through the hallways and waiting for their lives to begin.

  No two structures were alike, all in various stages of decay. Shingles shed from rooftops and piled under the eaves. Bricks tumbled from the sides of stairwells, masonry cracked, and painted boards flaked their layers to show decades of neglect. Old pieces of pipe jutted out of the ground randomly, gas lines that went nowhere and had hopefully been disconnected. There were picnic tables between the buildings for lunch hour, but half of them were broken in some way, little more than wooden hulks for students to perch on. The school buildings sat at odd angles from each other, had protruding stairwells and doors chained shut. Whole floors were closed down due to water damage and low enrollment. With all the secret corners and resident ghosts, it was hard for the teachers to keep track of their students. They’d mostly given up trying.

  Henry went into a gray annex off the main classroom building for first period. It was supposed to be a Gifted and Talented class, but Henry wasn’t there because he was smart. The principal liked to keep any student with an especially strong ghost out of the way.

  They called it the laughing room. Years ago, an entire classroom of eighth-graders had started laughing, afflicted by some chorus of gleeful spirits. The students laughed until they cried, pounding their fists and clawing at their desks. The teacher yelled, threatened to write them up, but they couldn’t stop. With a roar, the entire class simply disintegrated into laughter, their mocking voices rising to foam around the ceiling.

  When Henry opened the door, ghostly voices came shrieking out. It was an ugly sound, as if the ghosts were laughing at you. It was important not to listen to what they were saying, or else you could be swept away too. He pulled out a bulky CD player and headphones. Before he sat, he picked up a binder of work from the teacher, who was playing solitaire on her computer.

  The CD player whirred to life, the disc making a quiet scrape, and Henry was flooded with music. Jane had put together the mix for him. The songs were soaring anthems about saints, inventors, and mythic heroes. The vocalists wailed about destiny, and the words felt true, oracular. It was embarrassing that his sister knew him so well. Henry did want to remake the world, to build some new age. And why else would his inventive, powerful ghost have been drawn to him, if not because he was meant to do something big?

  His Gifted and Talented binder was full of Byzantine problems the faculty had created to test the limits of what Henry and his ghost could do. He may have been the brightest student to ever come through the doors of the school, but half the problems were unsolvable, ridiculous, impossible. Sometimes Henry looked at them and saw only a closed door. But his ghost bent what was possible, wouldn’t accept that something couldn’t be done. The problems in the binder were written to wake it up.

  He needed to keep control of himself, to find out what he had done before the ghost carried him away again. He didn’t want to be a passenger in his own body. Henry took a deep breath and opened the binder.

  The first problems in the binder were merely mathematical or dealt with chemistry. None of them was strange enough to interest his ghost. Henry breezed through them, balancing out equals signs and dispensing with unknown variables like he was tying his shoes. While he worked, the door softly opened and closed. A girl, always late and careful not to look at or touch anyone, hurried to the back of the room. Her footsteps were soft, like crushing paper. Henry wondered what kind of ghost she must have to be so afraid.

  The next problem dealt with a complex waste disposal mechanism at the plant. There was a diagram of an intake chute, a furnace, gas lines. A list of work orders detailing problems with the chute getting clogged or the intake belt jamming. Everything was drawn out to scale, neatly annotated with measurements and angles. Henry tensed, waiting for his ghost to rise in him. It loved anything that dealt with the meatpacking plant.

  Thankfully, it didn’t come. Henry looked over the schematics, found the point of failure, and sketched out a better design. In the back of the binder, Henry found a plastic bag full of trash: a flattened soda can, some bottle caps, random screws and bits of wire. The instructions told him to make a battery. He stared at it blankly for a second, took a breath, and then . . . he found himself staring at a soda can wrapped in black electrical tape. It was heavy when he picked it up, sloshing with some improvised electrolyte. His hands were scraped and his thumbnail cracked. The gutted remains of a stereo speaker and a VCR rested on the floor beside him. Looking at the clock, he saw that he’d been out for thirty minutes.

  The final problem in the binder was from his English teacher. On a clean sheet of paper, she’d written, In three hundred words, describe how it feels to not remember what you did, but to know it’s your fault. The ghost was silent inside him, utterly uninterested in matters of feeling or ethics. Henry palmed the battery he’d made.

  He’d decided a long time ago that it wasn’t worth being afraid of his ghost. It was a part of him. His inventions almost never hurt anyone. Even when they did, he was trying to do something good. In a place like Swine Hill, where so much was wrong, that’s what counted, wasn’t it?

  * * *

  Second period was Mr. Nichti’s math class, but the material was so basic that Henry had already worked ahead and finished out the semester. He went to the counselor’s office instead. It had been a supply closet at one time, just enough room for a desk, two chairs, a bookshelf vomiting files, and small, pale Mr. Bradford.

  The counselor repainted his office and the walls of his home every month, his clothes spotted with white. He drove to the next town to purchase food or appliances so that there would be no ghosts in his home. He drank bottled water so that nothing could come through the tap. He never went outside. He wasn’t from Swine Hill and didn’t plan to be here long, spending his careful life avoiding ghosts. But as excited as Bradford seemed by the things Henry’s ghost could do, Henry wondered if the man wasn’t a little jealous that he didn’t have a ghost of his own.

  Henry gave him the Gifted binder and battery, taking a seat.

  “Good to see you,” the man said. “Is your internship with Pig City done?”

  “I was doing an internship?”

  “Apparently HR had a problem they needed help with. Something to do with worker satisfaction.”

  That wasn’t the kind of problem that usually excited his ghost. It was too social, the variables too numerous, the contours of the problem too hard to express mathematically.

  “Have you thought any more about me graduating early?” Henry asked. “We were going to talk about robotics programs maybe.”

  Henry had a vague idea that somewhere out there were colleges where he could build machines, wear a lab coat, work on tech that would help people. And he’d heard about people getting scholarships and grants, that you could get far even if you didn’t have any money. Nobody in his family had ever done it, though. He’d always thought Jane would.

  The counselor gave him a serious look, full of pity and sympathy, like he was bracing himself to deliver hard news. “I don’t really think that’s doable, Henry. You don’t have any AP classes or extracurriculars.
”

  “There aren’t any of those here.”

  “And your grades are fine, but not great.”

  This was true. He missed a lot of school because of his ghost. His teachers didn’t really seem to care, but they weren’t giving him A’s, either.

  The counselor gestured to a shattered remote control car on the bookshelf behind him. “I just don’t think Caltech and MIT are going to be impressed by the video of you repairing a roach.”

  Henry winced. He was usually thrilled by what he made, but the roach was different. A few months ago, the Gifted binder had a bag with the dead insect, glistening brown, and a box full of tiny tools and electronic parts. The problem was simply stated: Repair the roach. His ghost had surged up in him, and when Henry awoke, he found himself in the school’s science lab after dark, days later. He’d connected the roach via electrodes to a remote control car. But stranger, he had done something to the roach itself, coating its bruised exoskeleton with glue, its dead body swollen with chemicals and issuing tiny wires feeding electricity into it at the smallest voltages. When he turned it on, the roach car sprinted off through the halls of the school. It took them days to find it, dead again after submerging itself in the flooded basement. When Mr. Nichti had brought him the wreckage, congratulating him on something so amazing, Henry had only felt sick.

  “Aren’t you afraid that if you leave Swine Hill, your ghost will fade?” the counselor asked. “You don’t want to throw yourself into an environment you’re not ready for.”

  He was willing to take the risk. No way was he going to stay in Swine Hill for the rest of his life. People didn’t understand. The ghost didn’t make him smart. It had been drawn to him because he was already brilliant. It was the same with Bethany. People thought she won because she was a human haunted house, all those ghosts pushing her to victory. But the reason she was full of ghosts was because they craved victory and they could only get it from her.