Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones

by Micah Dean Hicks

  You’re sad for that murder machine?

  “I think it loves her,” Jane said. “But she needs more than a machine. I think it knows that. Look how heartbroken it is.”

  It has electricity, not feelings.

  “Sure it does. Not like a person’s feelings. But there’s something there. A machine-kind-of sad.”

  The ghost conjured images of construction cranes abandoned on muddy job sites, cars up on blocks and weeping rust, the shattered bones of a cell phone flattened in a parking lot.

  “Yeah. Just like that.”

  It’s broken. Let’s go do something fun.

  Jane didn’t feel like fun. Too much of her mother’s anguish and the robot’s quiet mourning had gotten inside her head. She needed to do something, to think of things that weren’t so hopeless. She pulled out her phone and was texting Trigger before she even realized what she was doing. My mom won’t be home for a few hours.

  His response was immediate. Be right there.

  She left the robot to keep its strange vigil over the grave and went back through the field. When she came out from between the houses, a police car was parked on the street, blocking her way.

  The car had rusted and been repainted poorly, the paint clotted and streaks of muddy brown breaking through to wander down its sides. The engine had an ugly, rasping idle. A rotten smell, like a carcass steaming on the road, came from the car.

  Her chest tightened. Had the cop seen her? Did the police know about the dead body? This was it, her whole life about to unravel to threads in a moment.

  Don’t talk to him. He’s looking for an excuse to do something.

  Jane had been bothered by cops plenty of times before. She had learned not to linger, never to go out without a destination, always to work or school or home or the store. To always have a story. She was fanatical about stop signs, knew the speed limits even on streets where the signs had been missing for years. Still, she got stopped. It was tense every time. The police had left ghosts all over town.

  Jane tried to go around the car, keeping close to the sides of the damp-smelling house. He turned on his lights, letting them flicker for a second, then chirped his siren once.

  “Girl,” he called. “Come here.”

  His hand is on his gun. His seatbelt is off. He wants you to run, because he will chase you, and he will catch you, and that will be all the reason he needs.

  He knew. He must know. The earth was soft under Jane’s shoes, her sneakers turning in the mud. She struggled not to fall, going down the slope to stand by his open window. The ghost fed her every flashing thought from the man’s head. Little fantasies of violence licking out. The feeling of hands around a throat. The smell of gunpowder and rasp of a whetstone. The tension building in his chest like an oil well ripening to explode.

  Now that she stood by his open window, Jane could see his face. The officer’s eyes were bloodshot and his lips cracked. He was balding, and his hands trembled on the steering wheel. A small trickle of blood curled from his ear, and she wondered for a moment if he was hurt. More blood issued from the corners of his eyes. Clotted around his fingernails. Leaked drop by drop from his nose and stained the beard around his mouth. She didn’t need her ghost to tell her that the man was haunted.

  Jane made herself smile, shoving her anger and fear down her throat. “Yes, sir?”

  “That’s your robot. I saw you with it.” His tone was pleased and justified, like he’d caught her doing something and knew she would deny it.

  He doesn’t know. But be careful. Don’t contradict him.

  She enunciated each syllable, speaking soft and clear, as proper as possible. “Did it do something wrong? If it did, I’ll make it right.”

  The man’s teeth were stained dark. “That’s all I want. To make things right. It’s not right to replace people with things.”

  “The robot just helps my mom around the house. Her ghost is really bad, so it’s hard for her to take care of us.”

  He nodded. “I know something about bad ghosts. I’ve had mine a very long time.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Jane swallowed, waiting, but her ghost was silent. “Was it someone close to you?”

  “A suspect. He ran. My gun went off.” The officer gave a pained laugh, pressing a fist to the side of his head. “I tell it every day that I’m sorry. That it was an accident. Still, it’s angry.”

  Jane hated the man for forcing her to talk to him, for making her sympathize with his pain when he was so ready to hurt her. She kept the rage off her face. “The robot is mostly junk. A lemon. It could never work a real job. My brother’s always having to fix it.”

  “Your brother.”

  The man’s anger shifted from her, finding a new target. Jane didn’t know whether to be relieved or afraid. He wiped the blood pooling under his eyes, smearing it in two wide bands across his face.

  “So he’s the one responsible?”

  “He’s haunted pretty bad too,” Jane said. “My whole family ended up that way. What we get for living around here. Sometimes his ghost takes over and makes him build things, like the robot. He can’t help it.”

  “It’s not his fault.” The bleeding man sounded sincere. “It’s not my fault when I have to hurt people. But somebody has to pay when things go wrong, and you can’t wring blood out of a ghost, can you?”

  There was no one else on the street. The sky was big and clear and achingly blue. It was hard to believe this man was in front of her, his hand resting on his gun. Her ghost waited, had nothing to say.

  “You’re right,” Jane said. “You can’t get blood from a ghost.”

  The officer buckled his seatbelt and put his cruiser in drive. “I’m glad you see it my way. Keep an eye on your brother. And that robot. Make sure they don’t do anything stupid.”

  He drove away, Jane watching his car and unable to move. Her phone vibrated against her leg. Trigger was probably already at her door. She was on the precipice of collapsing or running away. Something inside her was close to breaking.

  Just imagine, her ghost said. What if he’d found your brother walking down the street alone? Henry would have said all the wrong things.

  Jane sank down against Trigger on the couch. His skin was like a sheet of ice, and sadness poured off him like fog. It helped her stop thinking about her mother, the robot burying the corpse, the bleeding man who might have killed her.

  “I don’t understand why you went downtown,” Trigger said. “Or why you’d walk. You should know better.”

  He meant because of the ghosts. It hadn’t occurred to him that there might be other reasons to be afraid. She would have been annoyed at his tone, the implication that she had done something wrong when it was the world that had wronged her, but her ghost opened his mind to her, full of desperate fear that she might have been hurt.

  Above, her brother pounded a piece of metal, the sound echoing through the house. She wanted to climb to the roof and shake Henry, tell him that he’d almost gotten her killed. But there was no reaching him when his ghost had taken over.

  “What’s your brother doing up there?” Trigger asked. But he was thinking again about how Jane was still in Swine Hill, wondering what kept her here.

  Her ghost pushed heavy against her chest, circling in silent irritation. It didn’t like the thought of Jane leaving. If she ever left Swine Hill, taking the ghost far from the streets it knew, the memories that anchored it to the world, it would most likely vanish, going wherever it was the dead went. At least, that’s what it had told her.

  “Why are you still here?” Jane asked him.

  He looked at her in surprise, realizing she’d been listening to his thoughts. He wondered if he even needed to speak or if she would just pull what she wanted out of him.

  “No,” Jane said, “I like to hear you say it. And the things people think and the things they say aren’t always the same.”

  “My mom left a long time ago,” Trigger said. “My dad is never going to lea
ve that house, though. If I go, he’ll be all alone.”

  There was another reason, a thought he was trying to hold back. Before he could think of something else, Jane caught it. His dead brother, the ghost that wrapped Trigger in winter. He felt guilty for his brother dying. He couldn’t leave the ghost behind.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  She folded herself into him, his big arm draped over her back. “My mom doesn’t think she’ll find anything better than Pig City, so she’s staying put. She’s never really done anything else. Henry needs someone to look out for him. And my dad.”

  Jane couldn’t finish the thought. She was the only one who even tried to look out for him. Her dad could die or disappear. Something awful could happen to him and she would never know.

  Trigger leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “People think leaving will fix everything, but it doesn’t. Everywhere has problems. And it takes a lot of money to start over in a new place.”

  He wasn’t wrong. Still, people did it. Even if they had to leave parts of themselves behind. Jane felt him wondering what she would do once Henry graduated and inevitably left. She wondered herself.

  “Come upstairs.” Jane pulled Trigger up from the couch. “I have a song I want you to listen to.”

  * * *

  Her old desktop computer booted up slowly, the fan purring and monitor flickering with ghosts. Jane opened a music app, where her songs were sorted by artist and album, but also by emotion: mournful songs, angry songs, gleeful songs. She made a playlist of every sad song she had, everything from glossy radio hits to stripped-down indie bedroom recordings.

  “Tell me if your ghost moves when I play any of these,” she said.

  Trigger sat on her bed, his eyes tracing the curve of her neck and back. Her ghost told her how he lingered over her, how he imagined slipping his hands around her stomach and pulling her to him. For the first time in a while, she felt in control, all the pieces falling where she wanted.

  Except that he knew Jane was trying to lure his ghost away, and he wasn’t sure he wanted that. It was exciting for him to imagine being free, but the thought made him feel guilty. Icy fog spread from his cold skin to coalesce along the floor of her bedroom.

  Jane kept cycling through songs. It didn’t matter if he wanted to keep his ghost. Some were benevolent, even useful, like hers. Others ruined people’s lives. He was too deep in his own haunting to see how happy he would be without it. She would show him.

  A thick, winding bunch of cables carried sound from the desk by her window over the dirty floor to the wall of speakers. Music came like wind. There were songs hard-bitten and rural, full of barbed wire and bite, hoarse women singing through cigarette smoke about lovers who hurt them. There were nasal-voiced boys playing electronic dirges, the absurd weight of the universe settling across their teenage shoulders. There were machine-gun-mouthed MCs strafing the wide, unfair world with their words. There were strings and soaring vocals, things old and weathered and as melancholy as a grave. There were voices that raged like storms over the trickling guitar and thunder of the drums, anger made myth.

  Trigger lay across the bed, listening. He didn’t say anything, but Jane’s ghost told her what she wanted to know. Sad alone wouldn’t do it. His ghost craved crashing anger, full orchestra requiems, a labyrinth of pain. She found a track with few words, an obscure math metal band that squealed with dissonance, its melody sharp to the touch, time signature folding into complex patterns. It was a maze of furious sound, a deep, dark forest to get lost in. Trigger’s ghost sat up and paid attention.

  Trigger reached down and unplugged the cables, his hands leaving them white with frost. “I think I need a break.”

  Jane started burning a CD of the tracks that had worked best. She went to the bed and leaned over him, her ghost telling her how badly he wanted to touch her. He noticed how much darker she was than him, wondered if it was okay to notice, hoped that she hadn’t read his thoughts. He felt naked before her, ceding all power, eyes wide and waiting. Jane let the moment of stillness settle around them like a pool, and then she bent and kissed him.

  His breath was sharp. His arms folded around her, and Jane’s skin burned with cold to be so close to him. She remembered what Henry had said, that Trigger was like their mother, that he needed more than she could give. Defiant, Jane pressed deep against his mouth.

  After a few minutes, the CD tray slid out of the computer, offering the disc. Jane pulled away, her lips chapped from cold. “Promise me you’ll listen to it.”

  He closed his eyes. “I’m all my brother has left. What would happen to him if he didn’t have me to carry him?”

  Who would you be? Would you recognize yourself without me?

  Jane sat next to him on the bed again, their fingers twining. “He’s already dead. You don’t have to feel guilty for being alive.”

  He feels guilty because he’s the one who killed his brother.

  The ghost had to be lying, just trying to get a reaction out of her. Still, Jane pulled her hand away from his.

  It was an accident. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t his fault. How do you think he got that nickname? Trigger fingers. Trigger happy. Get rid of his ghost if you want. He’s never going to get past what he did.

  “Shut up,” Jane said. “You’re not helping.”

  Trigger raised an eyebrow.

  “My ghost,” Jane said. “She’s a bitch sometimes.”

  “Have you ever tried to get rid of yours?”

  Her ghost swelled with anger, making Jane dizzy.

  “We fight sometimes, but she’s my best friend. She doesn’t hurt me.”

  Jane lay back on the bed, and Trigger lay down beside her. She draped her arm over his chest.

  He had been in her bedroom long enough for it to feel like a different place. The temperature fell into winter cold. The window had iced over. Blood-smeared leaves were scattered over the floor.

  “How did you get your ghost?” she asked.

  Trigger said nothing for a while. Her ghost pulled feelings, images, impressions out of him. There were the shadows of sounds, strange and distant noises that she couldn’t make out. Men walking through snow. The barrel of a shotgun breaking open with a metal snap. Plastic shells clicking into place. A foot catching on fallen branches, feet slipping, an explosion of sound. And then quiet, the smell of gunpowder cutting the air like a sword.

  “Sorry,” Trigger said. “I don’t really talk about it.”

  He tightened his brow and thought hard of his job at the plant, holding everything in like a dam. He’d already learned how to pull back, how to hide things from her ghost. He was better at it than Henry.

  Jane pulled a blanket over herself, making a wall between them. She shouldn’t have tried to pull it out of him. She couldn’t help it, though. People got uncomfortable that her ghost knew what they were thinking. They couldn’t imagine what it was like for her, to have no private thoughts, every idea she’d ever had open to judgment and mockery.

  “What about you?” he asked. “How did you get yours?”

  * * *

  Jane was nine when she became possessed.

  It was summer, and their last close neighbor had just moved away. Her mother had been wrestling with her own ghost for the past year. Henry was five and often left to play alone with his toys. Her father was still himself, trying to be strong enough to endure their mother’s need. He worked as a roadside mechanic, gone at all hours of the day to rescue people stranded on the highway.

  Her mother’s ghost made the house a suffocating place. She didn’t touch Jane often for fear that she would burn her, but she always wanted the girl near. “Tell me you love me,” she would say. “Tell me I’m pretty.” She would make Jane come with her on outings to the town’s dying boutiques, trying on clothes that they couldn’t afford to buy. Jane felt pent up and restless. She wanted school to start again. She wanted a friend.

  In the mornings, she sneaked out of the house and expl
ored the neighborhood’s streets. She walked through backyards and courted stray dogs with bread and lunchmeat. She stood on their quiet road and drew patterns in chalk. One day, a girl sat down beside her, picked up one of Jane’s chalk sticks, and started writing.

  The girl was white, and Jane hadn’t seen her before. Her dress was dirty, and she didn’t have shoes. Her hair hung loose and messy past her shoulders. But she had an open, eager face. She asked Jane where she lived, what grade she was in, if she had a sister or a brother. Jane told her everything.

  Where Jane drew people, figures walking and holding hands, the other girl drew a halo of words around their heads. Now Jane’s smiling couples bickered, argued, said hateful and cutting things. There was a thrill to it, the pleasure of doing something that would make her parents and teachers upset.

  “Come,” the girl said. “I want to show you something.”

  She took Jane by the hand, leading her deep into a tangle of streets where she hadn’t gone before. The grass stood high in the yards, the pavement pocked and stained. They climbed onto a dark porch, the stairs long rotted away, and pushed through the door. “Look,” the girl said.

  Whoever had lived here left the house in a hurry. Stuffed animals, photos, and VCR tapes were scattered over the floor. There were clothes heaped against the walls. The house was hot, the air still, and the heavy buzz of a wasp nest resonated from a corner of the room. A dog had gotten in the house at some point, leaving clumps of shit at the foot of the stairs and down the hallway.

  “This way.” The girl’s hand in hers was insistent, pulling Jane up the stairwell. There was a quick, fearful moment when they stepped into the dark and Jane couldn’t see anything, her feet finding the steps by feel. The curl of stairs was as dark as the inside of an ear, plunging Jane into a world of smells: mildew and rot, water and old wood.