The Sadness of Spirits

by Aimee Pogson

  Dolls

  Gasoline from the back shed. A spool of twine. It is a ritual burning straight from the grand history of ritual burnings. The girl stakes sturdy branches into the ground, assembles piles of twigs at their base. Each Barbie is easy enough to tie—she doesn’t put up a fight with those artfully pointed arms and legs; her dazzling smile never wavers. It takes a few minutes for the twigs to catch fire. They’re still a little new, a little green, but the girl stacks them into small tents, tucks bits of dried leaves between them. She blows the match carefully, her breath a shiver of molecules she can’t begin to understand, and the flame quivers and glows.

  Jessica. Samantha. Rachelle. The Barbies have names and narratives she has spent years of her life perfecting. Their legs melt first, the outer rubber of skin giving way to a harder plastic beneath. The flames swallow clothes, the bathing suits that serve as the undergarments of each carefully clad doll, and they only grow bigger. Faces melt, and hair melts, and the smell of burning plastic is sickening.

  She has to look away, and that’s when she sees her dad, poised near the garage door, extension ladder in hand. His mouth opens and closes, and then he’s taking big steps to the coiled hose, unreeling it across the yard. Water sprays down on the Barbies, but not soon enough to save them. “You could have set the whole goddamn yard on fire,” he’s yelling. “You could have caught yourself on fire. What the hell were you thinking?” His eyes fall on what’s left of the Barbies. “What the hell?”

  The interrogation begins at roughly quarter after five when her mom gets home from work. They sit her down at the kitchen table and line up the charred remains of Jessica, Samantha, and Rachelle on a newspaper beside her. “This is a very unusual thing to do to your dolls,” her mom begins. “Why exactly did you decide to set them on fire?”

  The girl shrugs. There really isn’t an answer for a question like that.

  “I remember when I was your age,” her mom says, “my friends sometimes destroyed their toys. Maybe it was a kind of rebellion? Maybe they were suggesting they were too old to play with their toys? I don’t know. I never did it myself.”

  Her dad nods toward the Barbies. “Most people would just pop off their heads.”

  “I guess what I’m saying is that this is normal,” her mom says, “but your method. It’s a little sadistic. Why did you have to tie them to stakes?”

  The girl considers this question, answers carefully. “It seemed more respectful than stacking them in a pile.”

  Her parents exchange glances. “But why fire?” her mom asks.

  Heat is essential. That’s what she’s thinking. It does this thing with the air where a small section of the world can become hazy and rippled. It can break materials down into their component parts. It can cause them to become other materials entirely. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting Barbies to become, but heat. Heat was necessary.

  She shrugs. “I don’t know.”

  “Have you been learning about the witch trials in school?”

  “I’ve learned about them, but not right now.”

  “Is everything all right at school? Is there anything you need to tell us?”

  Her parents gaze at her, waiting for an answer. The truth is that everything hasn’t been fine at school, and the problem is with the soda machines. They sit there at the end of the cafeteria glowing with that inward light: Coke, Diet Coke, the illustrated cans specked with condensation that would make anyone thirsty, but the machines are off-limits during lunch because of state laws regarding sugars and beverages. She sits there during lunchtime watching those glowing humming machines, and she thinks about all she knows about the underpinnings of reality. The spinning electrons that may or may not be electrons. The energy that can never be fully measured. The vibrations that rise up through every object, living and non, and shape it with a song. Such a strange miracle to exist. Such a strange miracle to exist and to think. But what do people do with their existence? They build soda machines.

  She can’t quite put it into words, but when she thinks too hard in either direction—the arbitrariness of the subatomic world versus the arbitrariness of soda machines—she feels like all of existence is unfolding beneath her feet, and none of it makes any sense.

  And soda machines are just the beginning. There are TVs and lawnmowers and her Barbies staring down at her from their perch on a closet shelf.

  When her friends ask her what’s wrong, she says, “All of this. I don’t understand it.” And she gestures to all of the cafeteria, the world beyond.

  Her friends are quickly growing tired of her.

  She is growing tired of herself. Her parents send her to her room right after dinner to think about what she’s done, and she lies on her bed, Barbies beside her. She doesn’t think, though, because too much thinking is like spiraling into a dark cave she might never escape from. Instead, she remembers her Barbies—Jessica, Samantha, and Rachelle—and the stories she made up for them. She could always invent elaborate worlds in her head, and so the three dolls were best friends who met every Friday night to go bowling and eat dinner. Samantha was in a terrible car accident, and it was Rachelle who nursed her back to health while Jessica dated Samantha’s boyfriend, Ken. Samantha forgave her, and later Ken because he lost his leg and his pants no longer fit right. They got married, and both Rachelle and Jessica were her maids of honor.

  The girl could almost imagine them into reality. She could almost love them despite their inner plastic.

  She turns off her bedroom light and waits until her parents go to bed. Then she gathers the three dolls up in a blanket and carries them outside. She chooses a remote location near the trees and, with a garden trowel, digs three neat graves, rests the dolls inside, and then covers them in dirt. Meaningful words would be fitting because something has been lost here, but she can’t find the words. There is only her breath moving in and out, in and out, rustling the invisible air.

  The Long Man

  You bury a man in the woods behind your house, and he is a long man. Arms and legs like yardsticks. A head heavy as a pumpkin. There is almost-frozen dirt to lift and scoop, and overhead trees hover like banshees screaming silently into the wind, waving their wicked arms. You tense your back muscles and lift. Tense and lift. A long man needs space. He needs depth. You count quietly to yourself. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Four sets of four followed by four sets of four. Four is the number of stability, following the uncertainty of three and the duality of two.

  Four by four by four. You count between breaths. You heave dirt as night falls and the long man disappears into shadows, disappears into silence, disappears into the recesses of your mind. A long man dies once when he takes his last breath. A long man dies twice when the last living thought whispers his name.

  Your mind will be whispering his name for a long time, in the quiet moments when your hands are submerged in dishwater, in every nightmare you will ever have.

  Everywhere there is the long man. His eyes follow you up and down the stairs to the basement, where you do the laundry, iron his shirts as if he’ll be back soon to claim them. They follow you to the car, where you buckle in, to the front door as you check the lock, back to the car, back to the door. You feel him beside you as you drift off to sleep at night, legs that stretch farther than yours, a head that rises above you, a chest to curl into.

  You pull the curtains at night because the long man is out there, tamped down beneath dirt and now beneath a light layer of snow. You sit on the floor with legs crossed, close your eyes, drawing your energies, those darting substances that exude and intrude, and turn Tarot cards over in your hands. Please, you think, and the question drifts away. Vaguely, there is the long man. The long man sitting beside you. The long man opposed to Tarot cards, the negativity they might summon.

  Cards are just cards, cardboard and ink.

  The long man is a man and a former man with eyes that can find the threads to unravel you. He watches you from across the kitchen ta
ble, now, then. His expression is questioning. “What did you do today?” he asks and takes a sip of wine. You turn his words over in your mind, examining them for their true meaning, replaying the acoustics in your head. What did you do? What did you do?

  To take someone apart piece by piece. To examine their mind for thoughts of you.

  You draw the nine of swords: a young woman waking up from a bad dream only to realize she is living a nightmare. Swords hang over her, nine rising up to the ceiling. Nine brutal blades. Nine thoughts to keep you awake at night.

  Nine by nine. Eighty-one. Eight plus one. Nine. Three by three by three. The length of a long man minus some. A card is just a card, but you squeeze your eyes shut as you try to drift off to sleep. The bed is cold where the long man should be. It is simply you and an old patchwork quilt.

  A woman calls for the long man, and she is concerned. He hasn’t come to work. It isn’t like the long man to just disappear.

  “A trip,” you say, “to visit a very sick sister.” So little notice. The frantic flurry of plane tickets and reservations.

  You curl up on the couch beneath an afghan and listen as the furnace kicks on, then off, on, then off. One, two, one, two. You open a book and find you can finally focus on the words, sentences lifting off the page into a scene you can immerse yourself in, no longer picturing the long man in khakis and a white shirt and a tie, smelling of the cologne you chose for him, moving through his office, a series of chemicals that have nothing to do with you: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, chemicals that once moved for you, chemicals that are no more. You don’t have to imagine all the ways he might compare you with others and find you lacking.

  Later, you spread the Tarot cards before you, the warmth of your hands transferring to the cards. The eight of swords: a woman tied and blindfolded, surrounded by a circle of upright swords. The card of entrapment. The card of self-imposed restriction.

  Fear curls in your abdomen. It smokes out and up, a vapor you can almost smell. Beneath the patchwork quilt, you add the digits of the alarm clock, multiply, subtract.

  The next day you receive flowers, a sympathy card. You pin the card to the refrigerator and study it for a long time. Each letter seemingly floats above the white backdrop, sadness on snow, a long man in the yard, fingers curling with cold.

  The long man’s mother calls. He hasn’t been returning her emails.

  His friends call. Does he want to go out on Friday?

  His boss calls again. Why isn’t he at least answering his cell phone?

  You stop picking up the phone and count the messages: one, two, three, four. Stability hovering on dissolution. There are shirts upstairs that are his and pants and shorts and underwear and socks. You move from the closet to the dresser to the bathroom where his toiletries are kept. He has left you. He was never really with you, his mind a wilderness where you stumbled and fell and searched and could never quite find what you were looking for.

  And he looked into you as if he could see everything.

  Handful after handful, you carry his clothes down into the basement, where you pile them up beside the ironing board. Spray the shirts with cold water. Smooth the fabric, one stroke, then two. One sleeve. Two sleeves. Fold and repeat. The long man takes shape through his shirts, tall, precariously thin, and you remember holding your head to his chest at night, listening to his slowly beating heart, his breath moving in and out. Fear rose up in you then, just as fear rises up in you now. There is so much that can go wrong in a long man. So many ways to suffer: skin cancer, pneumonia, ulcers, heart disease, stroke, leukemia, meningitis. You read every medical book you could get your hands on, and then scanned his body relentlessly in bed, in the shower, as he moved through your line of vision while putting on socks and pants and his shirt.

  You pick up one dirty shirt and wrap it around you, taking in the smell. Then you choose another and another, shirts piling up on your shoulders, keeping you warm, your hands shaking.

  You pull the five of swords before breakfast: a vicious man poised with a sword as other people retreat. The card of tension and betrayal. Victory at all costs.

  At midafternoon, you draw the hanged man: a smug-looking man hanging by one foot. Relaxed indecision. Defiance.

  You draw the sun. You draw the fool, that thoughtless young man and his bounding white dog. You draw the high priestess, the keeper of intuition and the dark arts.

  Again and again you draw the cards, but they seem to make less and less sense. Outside there is the long man and inside there is the furnace kicking on and off, and as much as you try you can’t force these cards into any kind of logical narrative. Panic drifts up your legs, settles into your chest. You take the cards, shuffle again.

  The four of cups. A young man meditating on three cups while a mysterious hand extends a fourth from the sky. You add it to the line of cards.

  If the long man were here, he would grasp your hands and tell you that these are only cards. There are no messages, no mysterious stories to decipher. He would hug you in the same way he hugs you after you wake up screaming, terrified by the dark objects that flutter through your dreams.

  The long man is everywhere, but he is not here. You whisper his name in your mind, slowly at first, then faster and faster, trying to reel him back from the place he has gone, but the house is still silent, heavy with pent-up tension.

  There is movement outside the window. A meter reader walks past, his vest a blaze of orange. You can never be as alone as you need to be, but you are also too alone. The clock ticks and you gather up the cards, wrap them in their scarf, and try not to think of them anymore.

  You bury a man in the woods behind your house, and then you bury yourself above him, stretched out in the snow, snow on top of you, snow falling from the sky to conceal you. Your body is cold, cold, but that doesn’t matter because you are whispering the long man’s name and watching the clouds make their trek across a slate sky. One, two, three, four. Their movement is slow and soothing, easily countable. There will be more phone calls. There will be police. There will be demands for explanations, and you will think of all the times you traced his footsteps in your head, the panic you felt when you thought of a long man who was only bones and skin, organs and blood. Worry compounded by worry. You would count his heartbeats, hoping for the number to symbolize perfect health, but what that number was escaped you and you could never be satisfied. There was only night and fear’s endless ache and the desire for it to stop.

  You count clouds and then you count yourself, the long man. One, two, one, two. The clouds scuttle past and you wish you could freeze them, hold on to this moment forever, but the only two who are frozen are you and the long man, and you grasp this duality, the gravity that holds you to him, him to you, one plus one, one times one, one times zero canceling, canceling until you, too, are lost.

  Disappearance

  The change first occurred as a feeling of vertigo in open public spaces. There was an awareness of the size and depth of the space around her, followed by dizziness, as if she might fall down and lift out of her body at the same time. Her surroundings opened up and every possible sensation flew in: the sunshine, the sound of traffic rushing past, the movement of the wind, the heat.

  It was worse when she was outside, walking or jogging down the street that branched away from her house and led into the busier part of town, but it could also happen at the mall or the grocery store or the craft store where she eternally shopped for fabrics.

  At first she told herself it was just anxiety. Mild panic attacks, which could happen to anyone. So much had changed in her life. She had moved into a new house, and her husband had moved across the country for work. “We’ll see each other for Christmas,” he promised her, “and maybe Thanksgiving, depending on the cost of plane tickets.”

  “Maybe Thanksgiving,” she repeated.

  “It will only last about a year. Then the company will send me home.”

  She did her best to be understanding. This was the n
ew way of the world. People had to move far, far away for work. Families had to be flexible and tolerate each other’s absence. Military couples had it much worse. Still, the silence of her house at night took its toll on her. Every creaking door and settling floorboard was a ghost, which she believed in somewhat during the day and fervently in the middle of the night. Every strange meter reader at the door or unfamiliar maintenance worker became cause for concern. She circled the interior of the house every morning before she left for work and every night before she went to bed, checking and double-checking and triple-checking every door and window lock, every burner on the stove. Left to her own devices, she was sure she was going to overlook something important.

  In her spare time, she read internet articles about how climate change was killing species all across the world, agonized multitudes that people didn’t even see because they couldn’t be bothered to look up from their phones occasionally. She read about the increasing gap between rich and poor, the new Gilded Age. She followed links to articles about problems in education and education being pointless when machines would eliminate most jobs and about machines that could slam particles together until they broke down into their component parts, which seemed to be nothing, and then formed small black holes that could swallow the earth and the moon and the sun and pretty much everything else whole.

  Her breakdown was swift and occurred in her beloved craft store. One minute she was running her fingers across a silky pink fabric, and the next the lights above were boring down on her and the ground slipped out from beneath her feet. One of the teenage workers, not a big crafter herself, found her there in the aisle, clutching her head in her hands and rocking to and fro.