Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones

by Micah Dean Hicks

  “She’s upstairs. Been resting a lot lately.”

  “She’s really sick,” Henry said.

  The woman shrugged. “Don’t worry about Bethany. Nothing is going to beat her. Not even illness. That’s what I worry about. People need to lose every once in a while, don’t they?”

  “I lose a lot,” Henry said. “I’m not sure it’s helped me any.”

  “Maybe that’s why you’re her friend. To help her understand.”

  Henry didn’t know if he liked thinking of himself that way. But he thanked Bethany’s mom and headed upstairs. Ghosts sprinted up and down the steps like they were bleachers, their passing a blast of air.

  Bethany sat in front of her window staring at an empty sheet of blue sky. When she heard Henry walk in, she pointed up. “What do you see?” she asked.

  Henry wiped his glasses on his shirt and looked up, searching for a plane or cloud or kite. “Nothing. Just air.”

  “Sometimes—not all the time, but right now—I see a city. Like I’m in the sky looking down on it. It gives me vertigo.”

  Could the alien be affecting her mind? He wished he knew more about mental illness, delusions, people seeing things that weren’t real. Should he tell her there was nothing or should he play along? What did she need?

  “What does the city look like?” he asked.

  “It’s Swine Hill, but it’s a different Swine Hill.” She turned around, looking perfectly lucid and in control, but her hands gripped the sides of her chair as if she was afraid she might fall up into that other place.

  “Are you sleeping okay?”

  “No. I feel like I’m going to sink through my own bed. The world feels so thin and fragile. That’s why I’m slower now. It’s not that I’m weaker. It’s that the world is less solid. I can’t get any traction on it.”

  “We don’t know how the alien is affecting your brain. We should get you back to the clinic, try to get you an MRI.”

  Bethany picked up a signed baseball from a shelf near her bed and threw it hard at the wall of her room.

  Henry flinched, bracing himself for the sound of the ball cratering into the drywall. There was silence. He looked up, searching for broken glass or a crack in the wall, for the ball rolling across the floor. He looked at Bethany’s hands, making sure she didn’t still have it.

  “Where did it go?” he asked.

  “Somewhere else,” Bethany said. “Some other Swine Hill.”

  Henry’s mind raced, alternating with terror and excitement. “Wow. Okay. Let’s try some things.”

  He pulled a microscope out of his backpack, taken from the science lab at school, and examined a skin cell from her arm. There were no longer glowing pinpricks of light inside the nucleus of the cells. Now the entire cell was limned with gold, as if it had absorbed whatever the alien was. As he watched, the cells slipped through the specimen glass and vanished.

  He took more cell samples from her and tried everything he could think of to kill the strange light. He bathed them in acid, electrified them, iced them down as cold as he could get them, heated them up. He only succeeded in destroying the tissue. The alien light wasn’t going anywhere.

  Feeling inspired, he found some old antibiotics rattling around in the cabinet, went downstairs and scraped the mold off an orange, rubbed a smear of dirt from the paws of Bethany’s cat, blew his runny nose directly onto a slide. He exposed her cells to every foreign thing he could think of, fungi and bacteria and viruses. If the alien was alive, he might be able to trigger an autoimmune response, let it overwhelm itself responding to the foreignness of their world. But after he’d worked for over an hour, dirtying all the slides he had brought and scraping Bethany’s forearm red, nothing seemed promising.

  Bethany stood at the window, staring out at the roofs of junked houses and the twisting smokestack of the plant looming over it all. “If I relax, I’ll fall through the world. What will happen to me? Will I die?”

  What was the problem he had been trying to solve, the riddle that had brought out his ghost? She had wanted to get as far away from Swine Hill as possible. Not just another planet. There were places much farther away than the other side of space.

  “I don’t think you would die,” Henry said. “But I’m not sure you could come back. I think you’re phasing into an alternate reality. Like a parallel dimension.”

  Bethany looked around her room at the snarl of jump ropes tangled on the floor, the hill of busted running shoes falling out of her closet, the stacks of college applications she had filled out but hadn’t mailed. All around her whispered her hundreds of ghosts, rustling through the room like a breeze.

  “Maybe this is a good thing,” she said. “Maybe I’ll end up somewhere better than this.”

  Her arms and shoulders looked real as stone or iron, solid and here. It was hard to believe that she was slow, cautious, afraid that she would fall off the world like it was a tightrope. She went to her bedroom window and struggled to open it. Her hands kept slipping off the wood, like she was having trouble getting her hands on it. Finally she got it, letting in the sun and the breeze and the green smell of the cut lawn below.

  “Maybe I should just take the jump. If it’s inevitable, why waste time fighting it?”

  “We don’t know that it’s inevitable. And you don’t know anything about that other world. What if it breaks your atoms apart like confetti and you just disintegrate?”

  She stared at him blankly, and, not for the first time, Henry wished that he could read minds like his sister.

  “I can’t catch a ball,” she said. “I can barely walk, much less run. There wasn’t much for me here before the alien came, and there’s less for me now. Whatever reality I’m falling toward, at least I might be able to get my hands on it.”

  “What if you just need a little practice and time? Your parents think you’ll beat this on your own. Maybe you will.”

  “I’ve always had to hold back. People try to stop me from doing what I want, tell me that I can’t do it, and then ignore me when I do it anyway. Even if I learn to control this and stay, why would I want to?”

  “Promise me you won’t go jumping into that other universe until we learn more. This is dangerous. It could hurt you.” Like all of his inventions, Henry thought.

  Bethany sighed. “Fine. You should probably head to school soon. You need to keep an eye on Dennis so nothing happens to him.”

  He had forgotten about prom already. With everything happening, it was the last thing on his mind. Henry wasn’t really dressed for it, just wearing jeans and an oversized T-shirt.

  “I was going to invite you,” Henry said.

  Bethany raised an eyebrow.

  “Not like that. You’re graduating soon, and I don’t know what will happen after that. I thought it would be fun to go as friends. But then everything changed.”

  “I probably would have said no,” she said. “But thanks. You’re a good friend, Henry.”

  She stared at the sky through her window, eyes wide with horror or wonder. Too ashamed to know what else to say, Henry texted his sister to come pick him up.

  Trigger was in the passenger seat, looking uncomfortable in his too-tight rental tux. He kept clawing at the collar and raising his arms to keep from sweating. Henry’s sister wore a dress with the tag still on, hanging out of the collar like a flag of surrender. No doubt she’d return it to the store tomorrow. But it fit her well, as pale as snow against her arms and legs. He didn’t often think of his sister as beautiful, or pretty, even—but she was. She smiled at him, and he rolled his eyes, knowing she’d been listening in.

  “Can you drive already?” Henry asked. “I’m dying back here.”

  They’d wedged him in with all of the speakers, mixers, and amplifiers. His cheek pressed against the window, equipment resting against his shoulder. Jane’s air conditioner had just gone out, and Henry was soaked with sweat. For a moment, he had a dark wish that Trigger’s ghost would come back just to cool them off, but he qui
ckly buried it before his sister could catch what he was thinking.

  They were about two hours early so Jane could set up. Only a few cars were in the parking lot. Henry helped his sister and Trigger cart the stereo equipment into the band room. It was a cavernous space with ratty gray carpet and no windows. The art teacher had covered the walls and floor with black tissue paper, stringing up white Christmas lights to try to make the space less depressing.

  Along one wall, there was a giant mirror. Its edges were cloudy and its surface scraped. Henry walked up to it, wondering what strange world Bethany would see behind its glass if she were here. The mirror was haunted, reflecting the room from years before, new and beautifully decorated. People long dead danced in the reflection. This was the version of Swine Hill people preferred to remember, back when the town was still prosperous.

  No students were here yet, but there were already some ghosts. Over the decades, a few people had died in car accidents on their way to prom. Every year, they came in their bloodied finery to dance through the evening. While Jane and Trigger set up the DJ table, the ghosts made silent circles on the floor. Jane put on an oldies playlist, letting them have this first hour to themselves.

  * * *

  Henry propped against the wall, sneaking shy looks at upperclassmen girls laughing with their friends. They were like a completely different species. For all the things his ghost had helped him understand, he’d never been able to flirt.

  Dennis still hadn’t arrived. The room was filling with people. Jane’s music rained down from speakers mounted in the corners, the sound shaggy and huge and thundering, making the hair rise on the back of Henry’s neck.

  Henry stayed close to the mirror, watching how it reflected another time and space. He wondered if Bethany would one day be able to walk through history like that, or if she would have no control, falling back through the past until she arrived at the beginning of time. The faces in the mirror were all white, the black kids first forbidden and then discouraged for years from attending the official prom. Henry wondered where their ghosts danced tonight.

  The door opened and Dennis walked in alone. He held his arms up, pirouetting into the room. He took the hands of anyone near and spun them, pulled them close, twirled away. People laughed, nervous, as he uncoupled them from their dates for a moment and used them like islands to dance across the room. Henry caught sight of his eyes, blue with ghost-light, and understood that he wasn’t alone after all. The ghost girl was in him now, making Dennis dance for her.

  The pig boy, in a powder blue sequined coat and white shoes, spun and leapt his way in front of the mirror, dancing right against the edge of it. From within the glass, a ghost surfaced, pressing her tear-streaked face against it from the other side. Dennis laid a four-fingered hand on the glass, and from the other side, the ghost pressed its palm to his.

  The ghost of the dancing girl slipped in and out of Dennis’s body, her hand rising from his hand, her leg extending from his leg. Once, she leaned out of him and tried to embrace the ghost girl in the mirror, but the glass kept them apart. The three of them danced—the mirror ghost with the pig boy, the dancing girl with Dennis, Dennis with the eyes of the room—but none of them could have what they wanted most.

  The pig boy’s eyes were wet. Henry wondered if he only now realized that the person the ghost girl wanted to dance with had never been him, had always been this shade trapped in the mirror. Or maybe he did know and Dennis had given her this dance because she had been kind to him, letting her have his eyes for an evening so that she could weep?

  The song ended and a new one didn’t start. The room fell to silence, the swishing of hems and shoe soles against the paper floor, the soft murmur of voices. Away from the DJ booth, Jane danced with Trigger. They looked like photographic negatives, Jane with her dark skin and white dress, Trigger with his pale skin and black suit, their arms holding tight to each other. The room turned to watch them, the only ones without baby fat in their cheeks, sharp and sad and mysteriously adult.

  A girl, weaving between dancing couples and crossing her arms tight over her chest, came to stand a few feet from Henry. She walked up on her toes and took long steps, like she was tiptoeing over the surface of the moon. When she leaned back against the wall, Henry could hear her body crinkle and crush inward, settling like paper.

  “I’ve seen you before,” Henry said. “You’re always late to the laughing room. Erica?”

  She nodded, but stayed an arm’s length away. Whenever one of the other couples moved close, she shrank back. Henry stepped in front of her, making a barrier between the girl and the rest of the room. She smiled. He had to go pee but didn’t want to leave her, so he held it.

  “You don’t like people?” he asked.

  “I have to be careful.”

  She folded her arm against itself, then folded it again, her limb flattening and bending like something two-dimensional. She shook it out and smoothed it with a papery rasp, her arm taking on roundness again. Her ghost had made her into an origami girl.

  “If someone bumps into me, I could tear,” she said.

  “What if you get caught in the rain?”

  She shook her head, eyes huge and lunar bright. “I would never go out in the rain.”

  He wanted to tell her about his ghost, how it used to take control of him but now he’d do anything to get it back. Her problems seemed worse, though, to be in fear of an accidental touch or a splash of water.

  “How did you get such a strange ghost?” he asked.

  She started talking, but her voice was so soft and whispery that Henry could barely make out what she was saying. He leaned a little closer, and she shrank back.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s really loud in here.”

  She looked around to make sure that no one else was near and motioned for him to stand back against the wall. “Hold still,” she said.

  Erica lay against his shoulder, the whole weight of her barely any pressure on his skin. She spoke into his ear with her papery tongue and lips. Henry stood very still and listened.

  Her family didn’t have much money, so she didn’t have the kinds of toys that other kids did. When she was a girl, her mother bought her a book of cutout paper dolls from a garage sale. Erica snipped out the women and their dozens of outfits, stacking them on the floor beside her bed and moving them around with her hands, telling their stories.

  Even flat, they seemed prettier and wealthier and more interesting than she was. The paper women had more clothes than she did, nicer houses, cars and pets and vacations. She wanted to be like them.

  There must have been some lingering ghost in the book and paper cutouts, some strange spirit that remembered only the magic of lightness and folding. It sank into her and made her paper-light. She’d almost died several times: a rainstorm that she spent months recovering from, a bad tear when her brother stumbled into her, a tiny hole in her neck from a friend who’d thrown a rock at her. She’d spent the last ten years in the laughing room, seated far away from everyone else.

  “That’s awful,” he said. “Have you tried leaving? Maybe if you lived somewhere else for a while?”

  “I don’t think it would help. I’d have to stop being afraid of everything. It’s easy to want to be a different kind of person, but it’s a lot harder to actually change.”

  Henry nodded. He could understand that.

  “It’s not so bad,” she said. “I move slow. I’m careful. But your ghost . . .” She shook her head, moon eyes wide. “I watched from the back of the room how your ghost took control of you, saw the things it made you build.”

  “It was just trying to help. It liked solving problems. I miss it.”

  She gestured to Dennis, spinning in front of the mirror, arms in the air. “Why did you make the pig people?”

  “You think I made him?”

  She grasped his arm with both hands, her touch feather-light but insistent. “Don’t lie to me. Everyone knows you made the pigs. They make
me nervous.”

  He tensed, hyperaware of her hands on his skin, suddenly unable to tell her anything but the truth. “I was only trying to help. I know people are worried about jobs at the plant, but that’s not the pigs’ fault. You shouldn’t be afraid of them. They’re just like anybody else.”

  “What about the one who runs the plant? He has tusks. He’s bigger than anyone I’ve ever seen. If he breathed too hard, he could rip me in half.”

  “He’s the most gentle person I’ve ever met. I promise.”

  She studied Henry for a moment. “And what about you? Are you a gentle person?”

  He thought about it, unsure how to respond at first, but knowing this was a kind of test. “I want to be.”

  She looked into his face for a moment, considering him. “Do you want to dance?” she asked.

  Henry froze, not sure how to tell her that he didn’t know how, and not wanting to move too suddenly.

  “You’ll have to stay perfectly still,” she said.

  He nodded, relieved, and pressed himself flat against the wall.

  The paper girl fell against him and moved from side to side with the music. She slid her hands over his chest, down his sides. It was the closest he’d ever been to a girl. He listened to the strange rustle of her, concentrating on her light weight against him. He took deep breaths, and she rode the rise and fall of his chest like they were really dancing together, keeping her silvery eyes locked on his.

  “It’s good that you don’t have your ghost anymore,” she said. “If you did, I would be too afraid to kiss you.”

  “You want to kiss me?”

  “Close your mouth.” She cupped his face in her hands. “Don’t even breathe.”

  Her face met his lightly, then crushed forward against his lips. He wanted to wrap his arms around her slight back and pull her against him, but he held still.

  Ms. White, the history teacher, reached between them. Erica shied back.

  “Too close,” the woman said.