Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones

by Micah Dean Hicks

  Henry sat, waiting for his sister to come and take him home. He kept dropping into sleep and then starting awake when he fell sideways across the bench. Every time he opened his eyes, Bethany had the ball. She pounded down the court and dodged between the defending team members, untouchable as wind. He closed his eyes and heard the swish of the ball dropping through the net four, five, six times before he opened them again.

  The scoreboard maxed out for the home team at 999 points. Bethany kept making baskets, and the coach pulled out pen and paper to keep up with her. Her teammates got bored and stopped chasing her up and down the court. They sat down under the opposing team’s basket while Bethany went one on five.

  The parents shook their heads and whispered to one another, glaring hate at the unbeatable girl. It didn’t matter if the Ortiz family had lived in town for two generations. People still considered Bethany an outsider, wanted her to go away to wherever it was they thought she belonged. They hadn’t come tonight to watch their children be outshined by someone like her.

  Henry was about to text his sister, wondering what was keeping her, when he saw Jane standing near the doors to the gym. There was a guy with her, dressed in a bulky white jumpsuit. Jane said something, and the guy smiled shyly, keeping his eyes down.

  Even from this far away, he could feel a chill coming from the boy. The floor under his boots was frosted white. Few ghosts were strong enough to warp reality that way. Jane wrapped her arms around herself while she talked to him. Henry knew that her ghost loved secrets and scandal. It had drawn her to bad men before, endlessly scrutinizing their every terrible motive. For Jane’s ghost, to be in pain was better than to be bored.

  He texted her. He’s going to be just like the last one. You’re going to get hurt.

  Jane looked at her phone and put it back in her pocket.

  Henry texted her again. If you can’t handle Mom’s ghost, how are you going to deal with his?

  The visiting team kept rotating out players, keeping them fresh, trying everything to get the ball and score even one basket. They lunged for Bethany, trying to foul her. Winded and pouring sweat, they eventually sat down with Bethany’s team. Some of the players went for their backpacks and started doing homework.

  Bethany picked up the ball and hurled it into the middle of them. It cracked the baseboard in front of the stands, rebounding hard and scattering the sitting players. “Get up,” she yelled. “At least try.”

  The referee called a technical foul on her, but the opposing team couldn’t be bothered to take their free throw. Bethany threw the ball again, letting it disappear among the ghosts crowding the home side. The spirits made a breathy roar, moving what little air they could, and shouted the names of sons and daughters long gone. Bethany stormed out of the gym.

  Henry followed her out. He made a point of pushing between his sister and the boy, opening space between them. The cold sank into his chest, making him go numb and stop breathing. The shock was like falling into a lake.

  He found Bethany in the parking lot.

  “You were great,” he said. “They’re just jealous.”

  Bethany started her car, the window down. “It doesn’t matter how good I am if I’m stuck here.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll keep working on it, I promise. We’ll figure out a way for you to leave.”

  “You already found a way. I just don’t want it. I’m done with all of this. I’d have to leave the planet for anything to be different.”

  She drove off in her old car, taillights winking erratically. The parking lot was dark and almost empty, the utility lights having burned out years ago. Stars arced across the sky above him, the glow of distant planets falling toward their suns.

  Jane pulled up beside Henry in her car, shivering. “Trigger’s just a friend. We used to be in class together. Why are you so worried about him? Have you heard something?”

  Henry got in and shut the door. “You already know what I’m thinking. Why ask?” His seat, the springs worn out like she’d been moving furniture, sank deeply.

  She turned out of the school and the car drifted heavy and slow toward home. “You’re thinking about stars and planets and math. What am I supposed to do with that?”

  He was too tired to explain. Bethany said she wanted to leave the planet. He couldn’t help but think about what that would take. The closest Earth-like planet was still very far away, and the human body couldn’t handle a journey like that, not without major changes. In his head, he sifted through what little astronomical data he was familiar with, other stars and their necklaces of worlds with alphabetical names. A human would probably never be able to make the trip. You’d have to become something else.

  His ghost awoke in him, filling his chest and spreading through his body like fire. “Shit. No. Not again.” If he’d been more awake. If he had focused, had refused to let his mind wander . . . But it was too late now.

  Jane looked over at him, eyebrow raised. “Henry, this is serious,” she said. “I really like this guy. Trigger isn’t anything like Mom.”

  Henry looked out the windshield at a field of stars. His ghost swallowed him up.

  Normally, Jane would be working on a Saturday, but the owner of the grocery store was cutting hours. Jane lay across her bed, staring up at the rows of secondhand speakers, mixers, record tables, and CD players stacked along her back wall like a headboard. Nylon netting stretched across the equipment so that nothing would vibrate loose and fall on her head.

  Jane’s ghost reached out for her family and ferried their thoughts back to her. Her mother slept late after a night wandering the dim pool halls and bars dotting the highway south of town. Henry kneeled on the roof above, hammering and drilling together some contraption that only his ghost could understand. Last night, Jane had been in the middle of talking to him when she saw the pale blue shine stretch over his pupils, the ghost rising inside him and looking out through his eyes like windows. He’d abruptly stopped talking, grabbed an old pen from her console, and made furious calculations in a spiral-bound notebook.

  Henry told her that he loved it, that the ghost made him feel brilliant and powerful. But Jane could see deeper, into the pores of his mind, the wispy truths he couldn’t quite bring into focus. Henry worried that he wasn’t really in control, that the inventions had nothing to do with him. And deeper than that, he worried that one day his ghost would make him do something he would regret.

  She looked back over her texts from Trigger, wincing at the nickname. She had told him about her ghost, but he didn’t seem bothered by it. Most people in town had one. She asked to go to his house that morning, but he said his dad didn’t like company. No one but the two of them had stepped foot inside their house in years.

  Is it company his dad doesn’t like? her ghost asked. Or is it you?

  Trigger had asked to come to her place instead, but Jane didn’t trust her mother around anyone she cared about. A quick hug, a handshake, the lightest touch could burn and scar if her mother’s ghost was feeling especially lonely, and it usually was. In the end, Trigger texted that he should catch up on sleep anyway, and their conversation ended.

  Is that true? Is he really sleeping? Maybe he has other friends. Maybe he has a girlfriend.

  Jane took a deep breath and put on some music. Her ghost needed something to chew on. If no one else was around, it would pick at Jane’s insecurities, magnifying them and throwing them back at her. It had taken Jane a long time to understand, longer to ignore it. “Listen,” she said to the restless spirit darting around like a bird inside her chest. “You like this song.”

  The singer’s voice trickled down from the speakers looming over her. The woman sang with her mouth close to the microphone, and Jane could hear the wet pop of her lips parting, her tongue scraping the back of her teeth, the hot wind pushing out of her throat to sear the words into the melody. Jane’s ghost could dredge up what the singer had been thinking just from a recording of her voice, the woman’s secret thoughts scatter
ed in the hollows between her words. The spirit raced over the notes, curled into the lyrics, flashing between Jane and the storm of sound falling down on her. The ghost cracked the songs open, reached through the clean narrative to pull out its messy tangles. The boyfriend in the song had been a girlfriend until the record company made the singer change it. The drug addict friend was the singer herself, too afraid of what her parents might think to sing the truth. Confronting a rival in a dance club—just a fantasy, something that had never happened.

  Jane lay on her back in the sun coming in through her window, the music pressing down on her body and filling her ears, the ghost sending off firecrackers of synchronized feeling inside her head. She stayed like that for almost an hour.

  Your mother is awake. She brought someone home late last night.

  Jane turned the music up, softly singing along.

  He’s still here.

  The ghost flooded Jane with sensation, inside her head and inescapable. No amount of music would block it out. In the bedroom downstairs, her mother felt tense, stretched like fence wire. The man lying next to her was a sea of pain. His body felt disconnected, liquid, vast with hurt. Burns in the shape of handprints, kisses, soft bites spread over his body. His breath was weak. Nearly dead, his mind was snared in a web of need. He only wanted to please her.

  “Fuck off,” Jane said. “I don’t care.”

  Her mother’s whole self was want. She wanted to feel loved. She wanted to be held and calm. She wanted not to hate herself so much. She had so much heat and need inside her, and pouring it onto someone else was her only relief. She loomed over the feverish man gasping in the dark. She rolled on top of him and kissed him hard. Took his tongue in her mouth. Pressed her palms hard to his cheekbones. Gripped his legs with her own. Fire rushed out of her and into him. He curled like paper kissing flame. Beneath her, he died.

  Don’t care? But you’re crying, Jane. You care so much.

  Her mother lay in bed next to the dead man for a while. Her ravenous ghost retreated within, and she ran her hands over her body, finding her skin cool. Soon she would be burning with fever again, but for now she could breathe.

  Jane’s mother was tired. The man had been kind. Like most of them, he really thought he could help her. The woman felt a knot of self-loathing in her throat and sat up in bed, reaching for a glass of water. She worried that Jane lying upstairs or Henry stomping around on the roof might have heard something. She was not a good mother. At most, she paid the bills. And with the pig man taking control of the plant, who could say how long she would continue being able to do that?

  Jane surfaced from the rush of feeling, concentrating on her sagging mattress, the blast of music, the sunlight heating the skin of her legs. It didn’t do any good to be angry with her ghost. There was no getting away from it, no storming out of the house and spending the night somewhere else, no blocking its calls, no locking the door. The ghost was wherever Jane was, and she could have no secrets from it.

  She tried to remember when she stopped loving her mother. She had sympathy for her at first, when her mom came home burning to the touch. It was storming that night, and a woman had run in front of her car, shouting for help. Her mother never should have left the car, but the woman looked so sad, so completely alone. Jane’s mother stepped into the downpour, looking for a wreck. She asked the woman what was wrong. The ghost took her hand and said, “Stay with me. Never let me go.”

  In the weeks after, her mother changed. She needed so much from Jane and Henry. Insisted that Jane sit on the couch and watch television with her for hours, or wanted to endlessly braid and unbraid her hair, needed to be told that she was loved every few moments. Her skin grew hotter and hotter, her hands leaving burns on anyone they touched. Jane and Henry started to keep their distance. They reminded themselves that it wasn’t her fault, that she was haunted like so many others.

  Her father took the brunt of it. Jane didn’t have her ghost back then, couldn’t feel her father’s pain, but she could see it written on his skin. He blistered and burned, his body becoming overgrown with scars.

  After Jane found her own ghost, her mind alive to the thoughts of everyone around her, she tried to help. Jane borrowed albums from friends and teachers, downloaded songs from the Internet, and burned CDs in her room. While her mother wept, begging her daughter to embrace her, Jane played track after track, the saddest and most broken songs she could find. She listened with her ghost, trying to find the moment when her mother’s spirit would be tempted into some greater sadness. But her mother’s ghost wouldn’t budge. It couldn’t let go of something until it was dead.

  Jane picked up her phone, thinking about texting Trigger again. She wondered if Henry was right about him, if his ghost would be too much for her. Maybe she could help Trigger get rid of his ghost, find the one song in the world that would speak to its pain and loneliness better than anything else could. Or would it be like her mother’s haunting, the spirit too deep in him to ever be ripped loose?

  Downstairs, Jane heard her mother leave.

  She’ll be gone for a while, her ghost said. Let’s go see.

  Jane didn’t want to see the dead man. Her mother had done this before. She brought home men she found in the ruins of rural towns dotting the interstate south of Swine Hill, and they died in her arms. It was a miracle that the police hadn’t come for them years ago. Jane could hardly breathe when she thought about it, and wished she could abandon her mother and go somewhere else, if only leaving weren’t so hard.

  But the men who were drawn to their mother, someone so obviously haunted, rarely had anyone to miss them. Alone for too long, they knew they needed saving and thought this burning woman did too. They dared to hope that they could be what she needed, and like moths courting a candle, their hope killed them.

  Henry said that he built the robot to take care of their mother, but Jane knew its real purpose was to clean up after her, to shampoo the carpets, wash the bedding, and hide the bodies in one of the infinite empty places surrounding the town.

  Something pulled her downstairs to see. Was she curious, or was it only her ghost? Was there a difference? Jane got dressed and went to look.

  The carpet in their house was stained and sandy with dirt. The drywall was nail-studded and cracked. Trim was missing, leaving gaps between the walls and ceilings. Some of the windows were cracked, held together with packing tape. The house was falling apart. It needed a lot of money and time, something that no one in her family had to give.

  The robot was already in her mother’s room, its heavy step making the floorboards groan. She switched on the light in time to see it sliding a trash bag over the dead man’s feet. The man was small and shriveled, a mummified husk. The robot wrapped the corpse in bags, taped him up, and hoisted him onto its shoulder.

  “Why do you let her do this?” Jane asked.

  The headlamps over the robot’s eyes flickered. Was it annoyed? Her ghost couldn’t read its mechanical mind.

  “If you really wanted to help her, you wouldn’t let her bring anyone inside this house.”

  She followed it downstairs to the garage, the robot weaving from side to side on its stiff legs. The garage was mostly filled with her father’s old tools, his clothes, bins of family photos that their mother couldn’t bear to look at. The robot wrested a shovel out of the mess, raised the door, and headed down the street.

  “It’s the middle of the day. What if someone sees you?”

  The robot didn’t seem concerned. And why should it be? Even when Jane was born, the street was half empty, and by the time she was a kid, there was no one left for her to play with. Now they were the only ones left in their neighborhood. Close as they were to downtown, people had been moving away for years. Jane couldn’t remember someone ever moving in, the bright For Sale signs eventually sun-yellowed, knocked over by wind, drowned in the grass.

  The robot crossed the street and turned between two derelict houses, pushing through the gate and into the
backyard. Jane followed it across an overgrown field, grass coming up to her knees. Sunlight glinted in the bright scratches on the robot’s bucket-shaped head. The bagged body lay across its shoulder, unmoving with the jerky strides, as stiff as kindling.

  They came to the back of a three-story house, what must have been a mansion once, now down on its knees among fallen columns and tilted balconies. Jane knew that if she walked around to the front, she’d be able to see the old bank, the boarded-up front of a restaurant, dust-eaten clothing boutiques with their shattered windows. One street over, vicious ghosts prowled even in the daylight, wanting to know why their world had fallen apart. She was almost in the heart of downtown.

  The only thing left in the city center was the police station, its offices and holding cells crowded with suspects and protesters long dead. Few officers remained. Those left screamed at the chains of spirits twining through the building like starling murmurations. They fought the ghosts inside their own skins, the bloody history they couldn’t escape, the past more real to them than the present. Jane knew to stay away from that place.

  In the windows of the house, spectral shapes moved. There was a popping, like distant gunfire or glass shattering. A quiet sob moved through the grass. Jane stepped away from it.

  The lot behind the house was filled with dirt mounds, each rising a few feet. Most were old and grass-covered, but three were new. The robot started digging a pit. It didn’t take much time, the machine being frighteningly strong. It made a hole and threw the body in, then covered it up and scraped earth from the soil nearby to mound on top of it. When it was done, the robot sank to its knees on the grave, cradling the shovel to its chest. The wind played with the shirt it had unevenly buttoned, the collar trembling. Her father’s shirt.