The Ghost Sequences

by A. C. Wise

  I had all this nervous energy, and I had to let it out somehow. I used to do that with drink. My brain would spin and spin, there was no other way to shut it down. After the accident, I quit, cold turkey. I’ve been sober for three years, eight months, and thirteen days. A recovering alcoholic, mind you; there’s no such thing as cured.

  *

  I saw Neelie inside the station yesterday. Every other time, she’s been out on the ice. Ricky was drawing, and she was looking over his shoulder. It reminded me of the way she used to watch me cook, not asking questions but intently studying everything I did and recording behind her eyes, chewing on the ends of her hair the whole while. I didn’t hit Ricky. I wanted to.

  (I’ve waited so long for her to come inside, and when she did, I ran away. Her eyes recorded everything; what if she doesn’t forgive me for the last moments of her life? My little girl turned and stretched out her hand, and I ran away.)

  *

  Could I have stopped the car? I wasn’t drunk, only buzzed.

  It was late, foggy; Neelie shouldn’t have been out of bed. The babysitter should have been watching her….

  No. I can’t shift the blame. Neelie liked to run out to meet my car. It didn’t matter whether I’d been gone an hour or a whole day. I knew that. I should have been paying more attention.

  (I was.)

  (Neelie…I could never get over her eyes. Deep down, in the truest and darkest part of myself, love wasn’t enough. I couldn’t get over her eyes. I was one of the lucky ones. All her limbs were in the right place, but her eyes…she was out of phase with my reality. Can poison in the ground do that? Sometimes, she looked just like a normal little girl, like the other children on our block after we moved. And sometimes, her eyes were flat black. Polished stone. Static-shot. She would look at me like she was tuning in something very far away or sending everything I was doing elsewhere. Did she know? Was she always judging me for what happened in the last moments of her life, or was it that I thought she was judging me that caused my decision?)

  The car. There was a heartbeat’s worth of space. Two. I took a breath, let it all the way out with her frail body pinned in the headlights. The fog made tendrils, swirling around her. She looked right at me with those eyes. Recording. She didn’t look human. I wasn’t drunk. I was scared, scared of my little girl.

  I took a breath and let it all the way out, and my foot didn’t move from the gas to the brake. Neelie bled out a few feet from our door. I didn’t cry. I just cradled my baby’s head in my lap and stroked her hair.

  The voices gibber and whisper and weep. Last time they came, I looked at the light behind them for as long as I could. The spaces behind them, between their silhouetted bodies and the jagged edges marking my world. Things slid and dragged—amorphous shapes. Too many eyes, too many limbs. Some of them used to be human, I’m sure.

  I lied to Austin and Sheila and all the rest. I came here because if the voices can come through, other things can as well. A ghost. A little girl already out of time. I’m not here to save the world, just to take responsibility for what I did, will do, have always done.

  *

  The smell made me look through Ricky’s door. He spends 20 out of 24 hours in his ’lab’, birds pinned down, so he can draw the mechanics of their wings. Like we don’t know how birds work by now. (Except the birds aren’t birds.) It’s okay; drawing keeps Ricky out of the way. It keeps him from going off screaming onto the ice like Austin did.

  Did I mention Austin disappeared? We found the arm Cordon printed for him and nothing else. He went out into the snow and vanished. Or maybe he’s still here in another when, reunited with his original arm.

  I thought maybe Neelie would be looking over his shoulder again. She wasn’t, and Ricky wasn’t at his drafting table either. He was crying, wiping at his face and smearing blood all over. Did I say about the blood already?

  Ricky was covered in it. His hands, his clothes, all the places he’d tried to wipe the tears away. Only some of it was red. The rest…there isn’t a word for the color. Green, but purple. Iridescent: beetle shell, crow feather. The color itself made the stench, clogging up my mouth and nose.

  “I needed to see inside,” Ricky said. “The birds aren’t birds. I told you so.”

  He held a scalpel, probably nicked from Sheila. He’d made a real mess of the bird pinned to the table, a storm petrel, I think, but not like someone inexperienced at dissection. More like he got scared and tried to stab what he saw out of existence.

  It buzzes. The picture of the bird in my mind buzzes, like flies going all at once. It drips, melting wax too close to the sun. Icarus is falling and drowning and drowned, and the world is ended, always ending, has been ended since the beginning of time.

  Okay, I just read back, and I’m letting that sentence stand. Some things are just true. It isn’t my fault if anyone reading this doesn’t understand.

  I don’t know much about the biology of birds, but I know what they’re not supposed to look like inside. Nothing living should look like that inside.

  Picture a city with angles folding inward and protruding outward at the same time. A city made of bone and flesh, intestines and organs, sinew and blood. Picture something like a starfish. Picture all of that and throw the picture away. Remember the worst migraine you ever had. The inside of the bird on Ricky’s drawing table was like that but moreso.

  I pulled Ricky out of there and hid him in my room. I had to get him away before Risi saw what he’d done because then she would kill him for sure.

  *

  Ricky cut his throat. Probably with the same blade he used on the bird. He bled out in one of the showers, slumped against the wall. Or maybe Risi killed him, a murder-suicide. No one has seen her for two days.

  I found Ricky’s notes after we burned his body. We dragged him to the ghost part of the station and set him on fire. Nervous energy. We needed something to do. He was probably too young to have a will. Kid like that thinks he’s going to live forever. Hopefully he wanted to be cremated.

  After we burned him, I went through his stuff. Clothing. Razor blades. Deodorant. Cologne. A dildo, tucked down in the bottom of his bag under the socks and underwear. He’d never unpacked. He’d left everything in a duffle bag, like he’d be going home any day. A family portrait: mother, father, daughter, golden retriever, cute as hell. No one in the picture looked anything like him. His drawing supplies.

  I found his notes wedged between the mattress and the bed frame. Crumpled, like he wanted to destroy them but couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. There was a notebook filled with gibberish; each entry was neatly labeled with the date and location. The sketches were perfect. Gorgeously rendered in accurate scientific detail. Until they started to bend. Until you could tell from the outside that what I saw when Ricky cut open the bird was lurking just beneath the feathers and skin.

  *

  I keep a picture of Neelie in my room. Yesterday, Neelie was gone. The picture was still there, showing our yard and the swing I built for her hanging from the old maple tree. The arrested motion of the swing made it look like she’d jumped out of the frame. She used to pump her legs as hard as she could and jump when the swing was at its highest point. It put my heart in my throat when she did that. There were days when I expected (wanted) her to fly, keep going up forever.

  I turned the picture over, like I might see her on the other side, giggling. Hide-and-Seek post-mortem.

  It’s proof. Time is broken. It’s always been broken. A vast, cyclopean city rose everywhere and everywhen. Neelie isn’t in the picture, but she’s out there waiting for me. I’m coming, baby girl.

  *

  I woke up outside. Sleepwalking, I guess, though no one really sleeps anymore. I’d thought to put a coat on but not button it up. Boots, but I was still wearing a nightgown.

  (Neelie was wearing a nightgown when she died. Maybe, I wasn’t sleepwalking. Maybe, I went looking for her.)

  Neelie was patting my cheeks when I wok
e up. She was crying. “Don’t go to sleep, Mommy.” My dead daughter saved my life. After I could have hit the brakes but didn’t.

  “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry,” I said and threw my arms around her. Not a ghost. Solid and real.

  She looked at me. Her eyes just the way I remember them: flat, black, seeing everything. I almost took it back. I almost pushed her away and ran across the ice, begging it to take me, like it took Austin. Can I live with my dead little girl looking at me like that, knowing? Yes. I have to live with it—the choice not to hit the brakes, and the choice to find Neelie again. There are no third chances.

  Funny (not ha ha), but it wasn’t cold. The ice groaned. An old sound. A deep sound. “Don’t be afraid, baby girl,” I said. The birds circled between us and the sun, throwing harsh shadows on the snow. Piping while the ice groaned. Almost a song.

  The voices were there, too. Begging, screaming. Why did you stop, they asked. Why didn’t you do more to fix the future that has always been broken? I didn’t answer; they already know. Acceptance is a stage of grief, too.

  “Look, Mommy,” Neelie said. She pointed to the thing in the ice that James had talked about.

  Did I say what happened to James? I don’t know. I don’t know if I said, and I don’t know what happened. We’re the only ones left here, me and my little girl. And the voices. And the thing in the ice. Not things, despite the multitude and the vastness of it. One thing, stretching all the way out under ice that’s clear and blue and shining. It turned while the birds sang. Waking up.

  Haruspex. I always liked that word. I read to Neelie about ancient Rome. She liked stories about soldiers. I didn’t tell her about the bloody prophets who dug their nails in the entrails of birds to spell out victory and doom.

  Ricky was right about the birds, even though he wasn’t scrying the future when he cut one open. Somewhere, a city is rising, has risen, will always and forever be coming up from the waves. The future, as a concept, is obsolete.

  I stood with my daughter, and we watched a vast thing turn in the ice. We listened to the birds whose bodies are cities and angles and impossible, multi-limbed things. This is the new shape of the world. This is the shape it’s always been. We listened to the birds-who-aren’t-birds weep in their weird, piping way. This is where it begins, where it began.

  Ricky was right about the birds. They’re an omen but not in the way of a warning. Voices crying in the wilderness, heralding what has already come.

  The Men From Narrow Houses

  The men from narrow houses come up the stairs when Gabby is sleeping. They sit on her bed, place their long fingers on her coverlet, and say, Tell us, love, tell us everything. We’ve been gone for so long. Except sometimes it sounds like You’ve been gone for so long.

  The men from narrow houses have voices like Halloween. Dead of night voices, blown in on a cold wind. They talk almost until dawn, leaning this way and that, their tall hats never slipping from their heads even when they stir like restless trees in a breeze. They pluck at Gabby’s coverlet and say, How interesting, and Tell us more.

  When the sun comes up, the men from narrow houses are gone, but they always leave her with the same nonsense rhyme: Count your fingers, count your toes. Count your buttons, count your bows. Before they vanish, they lean forward and put their lips next to Gabby’s ear. Sometimes the men are only one man and she’s certain she’s seem him somewhere before. He’s an uncle, the kind who does magic tricks. His face is in an old family portrait hanging on a wall she can never quite find. Tell me, love, he says. Where were you before you were here? Except when he says it, it sounds like before you were her.

  *

  Fred loves Gabby. He’s told her so a thousand times. He is perfect for her, and they are perfect together, and everything will be perfect and happily ever after for all time. Gabby isn’t so sure.

  Fred is sweet, but Fred is dull. He is safe, and sometimes Gabby wishes she was the kind of person who could love him the way he loves her. Other times she looks at Fred and doesn’t know him at all. Fred is always talking about building memories. He brings Gabby trinkets to commemorate every little thing—their first kiss, the sailing trip they took where she taught him how to fish. She has crystal figurines in the shape of lips and fish for these two things.

  On their first date, Fred took Gabby to a carnival. She won him a stuffed pig, and he bought her sweet, sugared pears. They rode the Ferris wheel, and he held her hand. A delicate crystal pig, a pear, and a wheel sit lined up along her bookshelf. The latest crystal is actually a diamond, sitting in a ring on her left hand. Not a memory, but the promise of a memory waiting to be born.

  Sometimes Gabby thinks there is something to be said for memories made solid, ones she can pick up and hold in her hand when she feels like she’s lost or suffocating inside her own skin. And it isn’t just her. Sometimes Fred looks at her like he’s trying to remember a name on the tip of his tongue, a recollection forever sliding away from him.

  Gabby steps onto Fred’s balcony while Fred is in the shower. At the horizon, the sky is orange, stained with city lights. Above, it purples, and in-between are tattered clouds. The orange reminds her of flames. Gabby holds up her hands and counts her fingers against the smeary light. She isn’t sure the hand belongs to her at all. A question lingers like the afterimage of a dream.

  Where were you before you were her?

  *

  The men from narrow houses have smiles like melon rinds, white slices of apple, the sliver of the moon before it disappears. Their clothes smell like earth, and their eyes shine like old coins—copper, silver, and gold. As the wedding draws closer, Gabby begins to see them during the day. They pluck at her with long fingers, like a hard wind worrying at her clothes. They slide around her in subway cars on her way to work; they ride behind her on the elevator on her way to the fifth floor; they lean over her shoulder as she studies spreadsheets on her computer; they dangle their legs over her cubicle wall. They are like reflections on water, always whispering, Tell us, love, tell us everything you’ve seen. You’ve been gone for so long.

  The distraction makes Gabby type the wrong numbers into her spreadsheets and turn in reports that cause her boss to look at her with concern.

  Her boss gives her well-meaning advice about eating right and going to bed at a reasonable hour. There’s nothing about men whose clothing smells like earth, men with fruit-and-sickle-moon smiles. Nothing about eyes like coins vanishing up a magician’s sleeve. Gabby avoids looking at the men standing just behind her boss’s shoulder, leaning forward like they’re starving, like they’re expecting her to perform some trick, something worthy of their applause.

  Tell us, love, their smiles say. Tell us every little thing.

  *

  Gabby dreams of a house underground. She moves through the house at the same time she sees it from the outside, a cross-section diagram. The house is wide at the top, and narrow at the bottom, the attic branching like roots, while the basement sprouts leaves to push up through the ground.

  Tunnels connect the rooms, low enough that sometimes Gabby has to crawl. She slinks like an animal on her belly until she gets to the next room where she can stand again. She tastes dirt at the back of her mouth, and sometimes blood—hot and straight from the heart, and marrow cracked free from delicate bones. Sometimes she moves faster on all fours than she does on two legs.

  The rooms are filled with familiar objects that don’t quite belong to her. She picks them up and puts them down again and moves on. Not all of the rooms are furnished. Some bear circles beaten into the earth, as if an animal paced there before settling down. Others hold piles of feathers and bones—nests, or the remains of a satisfying meal. There is a formal dining room with a crystal-dripping chandelier, and a parlor with high-backed silk-upholstered chairs.

  In the parlor, there’s a picture of her uncle above the fireplace, the uncle who is a magician, the uncle she can’t quite remember all the time. He himself sits underneath the port
rait, in front of the cold hearth, which holds ash that looks suspiciously like more bones.

  “Sit down, love,” her uncle says.

  He wears a tall hat like the men from narrow houses, but his clothing doesn’t smell like earth. Not yet. There’s a sheen to his lapels, like satin, and Gabby knows she was right about the magic tricks all along. His long-fingered hands shuffle cards, vanish coins the color of eyes. They pull scarves from his sleeves, but never doves, and his cuffs are spotted rust-red.

  “Let me tell you a story,” he says.

  Gabby leans forward, but bites her tongue before she can say, “Tell me everything. I’ve been gone for so long.”

  “Before I was buried, I knew the best magic trick a magician can know. Do you remember?”

  Gabby shakes her head. It all sounds achingly familiar, like the taste of blood on her tongue. Her uncle holds up one hand, then the other, twitching his cuffs to show sleeves as empty as the sky.

  “I knew how to turn a girl into a fox, and back again. Isn’t that clever?”

  He holds up a card, not a playing card, but a brightly-colored tarot card. It’s The Magician, except the image looks more like the magician’s assistant, a woman in a spangled leotard and fishnets, a top hat and a bright smile. Gabby’s uncle flips the card and the woman becomes a fox, flips it again, faster and faster, like the card trick that closes the cage around the bird, blurring woman and fox into one.