Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones

by Micah Dean Hicks

  It was raining softly, the world gray and dim. Jane drove through the neighborhood, seeing rows of old houses that had been pulled up straight and square with new siding and shingles. Pig people sat on the porches wearing hats and drinking coffee, snuffling their snouts at the smell of rain.

  When she reached the road to Pig City, it was backed up with vehicles. She held her foot on the brake, waiting for the car in front of her to inch forward. There were always a lot of people coming and going from the plant, but she’d never seen traffic stopped on the road before.

  “What’s going on?” Jane asked her ghost. “Was there an accident or something?”

  The spirit was silent, sulking in the back of her mind. Jane sighed and closed her eyes, wishing she had slept. She went back through the faces from the dance, the kids who mobbed the DJ booth, the ones standing along the walls. Henry had texted her something about kids trying to jump him on the bus a few days before. How many people in that room had known what was going to happen?

  She thought of Trigger—her fury with him for telling his father where the music box was buried, but also the feel of his arms around her—and she almost started to cry. A few feet at a time, her car made the climb up the narrow, winding road. Rain beat across the windshield. She shuffled through song after song on her CD player, but nothing felt right.

  At the top of the road, a group of pig security guards in rain ponchos stood in front of the gates to the plant. The gates were chained shut. The pigs waved cars to turn around and head back down the road.

  Jane rolled down her window, rain drenching her arm and shoulder. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  The pig woman gave her a strained smile from under her hood. “The plant is temporarily closed for maintenance. Please turn around.”

  Her ghost swam to the front of her mind. She’s lying.

  “What kind of maintenance?” Jane asked. “Will it be open tomorrow?”

  “No, not tomorrow. But soon. The plant manager will make an announcement.”

  Something happened. Hogboss is angry. He closed the plant as punishment.

  The ghost sent her a barrage of images. Hogboss crying at his kitchen table. A photograph of Dennis. A group of police standing in the light of their sirens, the bleeding man among them with a mad grin on his face.

  “Could I speak to Hogboss?”

  The pig woman stepped away from her car and waved for her to turn around. The car behind her honked.

  Drive slowly back down, her ghost said. Some of them know why. They’re thinking about it.

  Jane passed car after car waiting to go to work. She stared at the faces of the drivers. They looked down at their steering wheels or talked on their phones. Their faces were worried, tired, guilty.

  They’ve heard rumors. They knew someone who was there. Their kids saw something. They have suspicions. The ghost pulled fragments of what happened out of their minds, building a story in Jane’s head. She came down from the ridge and drove aimlessly through town, letting her ghost reach into the houses around her.

  A group of kids saw Dennis waiting in the parking lot after the dance was over. His blue suit looked white under the glare of the sodium lights. He said he was going to get a ride home with a friend.

  There was a bright-eyed girl, holding her arms close and keeping her distance from other people. A fragile, tissue-paper girl. She was afraid of the loud boys in the big truck who followed her in the parking lot, who offered her a ride home wedged between them with the gearshift between her legs.

  “He needs a ride,” the girl had said, pointing at Dennis. “Take him.”

  Why had Dennis gotten into the truck? Maybe he knew the paper girl was afraid. Maybe he did it so that they would go away and leave her alone.

  In the truck, the boys took Dennis joyriding on the back roads and dirt tracks around Swine Hill, crashing through potholes and pushing down grass-strangled alleys. They had a bottle of vodka and made him drink, watching him wince with their laughing eyes.

  “Take me home,” he had said.

  “Soon. Real soon,” they had replied.

  They took Dennis to an old barn in the woods where other kids had gathered to drink and lie around a bonfire. They clinked beers and drunkenly pawed one another in the dark. A girl tried to make out with Dennis, but kept bumping into his snout. She fell backwards, laughing.

  “What does it even look like?” she snorted. “How big is a pig dick?”

  Dennis slurred that he wanted to go home. He rolled around on the dead grass, his shirt unbuttoned, trying to get up.

  “First, you have to show us,” one of the boys said. “We won’t take you home until you do.”

  They stripped his clothes off, throwing his suit jacket, pants, shirt, and underwear into the bonfire one by one. The garments caught fast and flared up, turning to ash and floating embers. Dennis stood in the firelight’s glow, trying to cover himself and looking painfully like a human boy.

  “Why’d you burn his clothes?” the girl asked. There was a note of sympathy in her voice now, a gnawing worry. Only now had she realized something bad was going to happen to the shy pig boy, that things were too far along for her to stop it. She blinked, buzzed and bleary-eyed, telling them to stop.

  “We’re going to take him back to the farm,” they said.

  Someone slipped a coarse rope around Dennis’s neck. They kicked his knees out from under him, making him get down on all fours. The boys led him to the truck, and there, they threw him over the tailgate and tied him wrists to ankles. They drove away from the party, the girl watching their taillights fade and wondering what to do but not doing anything at all.

  The boys talked about him as they drove. How much they hated seeing pigs in their town. The pig boy wasn’t one of them. He didn’t deserve to walk around their school on two legs. They would make him remember what he was.

  What had Dennis been thinking, bent double and tied in the dark? Did he remember a few hours before when he moved so light and fast up on his feet, his suit coat trailing him like wings, that it was like he flew? Was the ghost of the dancing girl with him in the back of the truck, or had she already passed on?

  The boys drove around town for a while, not knowing what to do with the pig boy, but knowing they weren’t done with him yet. People saw them stopped at a traffic light, or getting gas, or coming too fast around a bend in the road. They spied Dennis tied and naked in the back of the truck. They ignored it. Pretended he was only an animal when they knew otherwise. Got their coffee and went to work, busy with their own problems. What did it matter to them what happened to one of the pigs?

  Drunk and not paying attention, the boys took a wrong turn and drove into the dark heart of downtown with its army of sad ghosts. The vicious shades came out of the boarded-up doors and surrounded them. The ghosts saw a violence and hate in the boys that reflected their own, and they flowed into the cab of the truck and filled them up like venom.

  The haunted boys went into the shattered buildings for knives and saws. Weeping with living eyes over everything they had lost, the ghosts dragged Dennis onto the tailgate, and they killed him in the dark. They carved up his body, butchering him like the pig carcasses they had handled while alive. And then, bloody-handed and shivering with pain, they wandered back into the buildings they’d come from. The police found the abandoned truck and Dennis’s remains a few hours later. The boys stared out at them from the ruins, their eyes gone blue with the dead. The cops left them there.

  Jane turned away, not wanting to let her ghost lead her into downtown to the spot where it had happened. She had already seen the bloody asphalt in her mind, and she didn’t need to see it again.

  Henry would blame himself for this, too.

  Shouldn’t he? You can’t blame everything on the dead.

  Jane went home, pulling into the driveway just as her mother was coming out the door in her Pig City uniform.

  “Henry is still sleeping,” her mother said. She was shaky, swea
t running down her face. “Can you stay with him today? Someone should be here.”

  Her mom worried that Swine Hill had broken Henry, that he would retreat into himself and vanish just like their father.

  “Have you heard from Hogboss?” Jane asked.

  Her mother shook her head. “I’m supposed to see him at work later.”

  “Something bad happened to Dennis. The plant’s closed. You should just stay home.”

  Her mother hesitated in the driveway, caught between love for her son and love for Hogboss. But both of her children had flinched from her. Both of them resented her for the ghost that burned in her breast. She couldn’t talk to them the way she could with the pig man. Walter had only ever been kind, had never blamed her for anything. He made her feel like she wasn’t her ghost, and no one had made her feel that way in a long time.

  Stunned by her mother’s depth of feeling for Hogboss, Jane watched her get into her car and drive away.

  For three days, Henry’s phone lit up with messages from Hogboss. I thought you were going to keep him safe. I thought he had friends. Was I wrong to let him leave the plant? When will it stop hurting to think of him?

  Henry didn’t write back. He lay in bed, the bandages tight around his face, the scar of his nose burning with pain no matter how many pain relievers he took. Finally, Hogboss texted him the time and place for the funeral.

  Bethany texted him too. She might have found a way to beat the alien light, but it meant she had to move slowly, to stay very still. A sprint down the court or a leap to catch a ball might send her flying through the fabric of the world. But as long as she sat and concentrated on breathing, she could keep her balance. Henry had told her the same things months before when she was trying to overcome her ghosts. Give up. Quit trying to win. To survive the alien, she would have to stop being who she was.

  Maybe it’s for the best, she wrote. I’ll finally be able to leave Swine Hill.

  Henry felt like he might as well have killed her, too.

  Jane came to sit on the edge of the mattress and talk to him. She was sorry that her ghost hadn’t seen this coming. She was leaving Swine Hill as soon as she could, insisted that he come with her. Dennis’s funeral was in the morning. Jane would take him. Her words fell over him like rain as he drifted in and out of sleep. Everything was so wrong that just thinking about anything exhausted him.

  In the middle of the night, he heard someone crying. He touched his eyes to see if it had been himself. Henry rolled over, expecting to see Jane or his mother, and came face-to-face with the ghost of the dancing girl.

  The pale burn of his computer background illuminated her face, her dark hair, the hollows of her eyes. Instead of reflecting light, her body was shot through with it, like a piece of glass. He saw the matted bedsheets and blankets beneath her. The girl was far less solid than she had been before. It, not she, he reminded himself. A ghost was a thing, never a person.

  “Why are you here?” It was the first he’d spoken in days.

  She moved closer, her anger radiating into him. “It was my house before it was yours.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” He reached for her, surprised that her shoulder felt solid under his hand. Her skin was cold and crawled with electricity. He pulled his hand away. “I thought your spirit would have moved on. You got what you wanted, didn’t you? You finally had your dance.”

  He didn’t say it with accusation. He didn’t feel up to judging anyone just now. He was only confused. The ghost girl shouldn’t be here.

  “Dennis changed me. The world was so new for him, and he loved all of it. If a moth flew into the drama room, he would stare at it for an hour. He asked me the strangest questions: ‘Why did it fly here? Can we help it? Do you know its name?’ The more time I spent with him, the more I wanted to show him things. I didn’t get to live for long, but I had so much more than he ever did.”

  “He’s dead now. After the dance.”

  More anger from her, a physical wave that needled his skin. “I know. I was inside Dennis while they killed him. He kept asking me why they were hurting him. How do you answer a question like that?”

  “Because they’re stupid and cruel. They’re fighting for everything to stay the same, even if that means nothing will ever get better. They deserve Pig City. I hope it grinds them up.”

  “Pig City is gone now. Hogboss closed down the plant.”

  Henry got up and staggered to the window, his head heavy. There was no plume of white smoke illuminated by the lights of the plant. The ridge was indistinguishable from the forest around it, lightless and black. No headlights of cars moved through the streets. The town held its breath.

  “What did your father think he was doing when he helped me make the pigs?” Henry asked. “Is this what he wanted?”

  “He wanted to build a machine that would run on pain,” the ghost girl said. “He thought he could power the world with it. Dennis was more than that, though. It’s good that your ghost left, Henry. He could have made you do much worse.”

  He accidentally tried to breathe through his nose, and his face caught fire. He held the edge of his desk, lightheaded. It was hard to imagine how he could have screwed things up for everyone much worse than he already had. Wasn’t the town itself an engine of pain, its people cylinders under pressure, moved by anger and hurt? He had hoped that the pig people were somehow a solution for everything wrong with the world, some missing variable that he didn’t understand yet. But they weren’t. They were just people, caught in the same machine as everyone else. It would shatter them, too.

  He got back into his bed. Dawn was coming, the sky lightening outside. The dancing girl’s ghost grew wispy and blurred along with the dark.

  “Why are ghosts stronger at night?” Henry asked. “I’ve never understood.”

  “To hold on, we have to remember what things used to be like. It’s hard to do that when so many new people are walking down our streets, sleeping in our rooms, sitting at our desks. If a ghost has a strong enough attachment, it doesn’t matter. But at night, it’s quieter. It’s harder to tell that the world has left us behind.

  “Henry.” Her voice was faint. She moved closer to him. “I’m passing on. I won’t be back after tonight.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “Can I stay here for a little while? Just until morning?”

  He nodded.

  “At the old bridal shop, there’s a ghost. She haunts mirrors. If you find her, tell her that she won’t see me again. Tell her that I love her and that she needs to move on if she can.”

  Henry thought again of Dennis dancing with the mirror at prom. It sent a wave of grief through him. He told the dancing girl that he would deliver her message.

  She rolled over to face the coming light, its rays shooting through her skin and erasing her, minute by minute. Henry sat up on his elbow, watching until she fully disappeared. Somehow, only now, it felt like Dennis was really gone, blown away like smoke with the dancing girl. Henry held everything in until a moth floated over his bed and landed on the wall, flexing its drab wings. Then he curled up and wept until Jane came to wake him for the funeral.

  * * *

  White shirt tucked into his darkest jeans. A stained tie of his father’s. And Trigger’s rented tuxedo jacket.

  He’d left it in the seat of Jane’s car, and she insisted Henry wear it even though it was far too big. A tremor of emotion passed over her face when she put it over his shoulders, but she squeezed her eyes tight and fled the room. Henry turned to the mirror and saw himself: the worn-out clothes, the coat hanging limp over his back, the dark bandages still covering his nose.

  In the garage, he threw open bins and boxes, scattering tools amidst the dust, until he found an old painting mask. It had a plastic shield for the wearer’s eyes and a respirator that covered the entire bottom half of the face. It looked like a gas mask. Henry wiped it off, finding it stained with red paint, and strapped it on.

  When Jane saw him, she
suddenly laughed. “People are only going to stare at you more if you wear that.”

  Henry watched her through the plastic guard, not moving to take it off. He didn’t want anyone to see the bandages, especially not whoever had cut him. It was bad enough that he had to leave the house at all. Finally, Jane picked up her keys.

  The church was on the outer edges of Swine Hill, away from the roiling ghosts of downtown and the now silent factory. A cemetery curled around the sides of the church, the graves well maintained and marching away in gray rows. How strange, Henry thought, that here was a place full of the dead but empty of ghosts. No spirit had an attachment to the empty lot near the church. They were all haunting elsewhere.

  Cars stacked down the roadside, filling fields and massing on the shoulders. It felt like the whole town was here. Not that any of these people had been good friends of Dennis or his family. They wanted spectacle, and they hoped for mercy. In the distance, the sky over the pork-processing plant was clean of smoke.

  Inside, the pews were full of people wearing Pig City uniforms. Their blue coveralls were stained black with pig blood. Henry wondered what they were trying to say. Was it supposed to be a gesture of support? A threat? He wanted to ask Jane, but she was distant, preoccupied with her own thoughts. Occasionally, she would whisper something to herself, arguing with her ghost.

  A group of kids from the high school crowded together in the back. They murmured in one another’s ears, smiling and joking even here, even after everything. When Henry walked in, several of them looked up and met eyes with him.

  Someone made a low noise, almost a cough. Then others echoed it, raising their hands to cover their mouths. They were quiet, careful that only Henry and Jane could hear it as they walked by. A grunt. A pig noise. They were making it at him. Henry’s neck and shoulders locked tense, a hot and metallic feeling floating through his blood. He hated them. He hadn’t known he could hate someone so much.

  Jane put her arm around him and led him toward the front. “Just be glad you can’t hear what they’re thinking,” she said. “There are worse words than pig.”