Painting Their Portraits in Winter

by Myriam Gurba

  The ghost walked to a stand piled with guayabas, their bubblegum smell taunting her, and she crumpled beside their ripeness. Her lower lip wobbled. Her hands clutched at her nightgown. They bunched it, and scrunched it, and twisted it. A wave of mortal hormones crashed over her nonexistence. Tears sprang and wended down her cheeks, marrying at her chin. Her ducts replenished their streams each time it seemed there shouldn’t be any more non-existent water inside her. She squinted through the wetness. Colors swirled into a pretty gob. Her cheeks bunched. Her chin dimpled. Grief burned her tongue. Trembling, she heaved as she wept.

  Nearby, a clerk was minding the register. He licked his finger and turned the page of the magazine on the glass countertop. His eyes moved along gossipy sentences. Pictures of Argentinian soap stars with mortgaged cleavage. A fly landed on his register. It reached its arms to its cheeks. Groomed its chops.

  The ghost lifted her hands to her cheeks. The feeling of her own touch was soothing. She kept her hands on herself and felt the tremors wracking her growing weaker and softer. Weaker. She rocked but coaxed the rocking to slow. The movement vanished. Her tears ducts ran out of water. Her face stayed warm and slick. She moved her hands down to her neck, letting the warmth toast her fingertips. She remembered the guayabas. Her fists rubbed her eyes, and she blinked. She blinked. She blinked. The fruits came back into focus. The guayaba closest to her nose would be rotten by morning. She reached, grabbed it, and clutched it to her chest, between her never-to-grow boobies. She breathed on the fruit which had no effect upon it, her breath was inorganic, immaterial, and she sensed the wannabe life in the fruit, the multitude of seeds, some gay, some lesbian, some straight, some of infinite other sexualities. She blew on the round thing and jabbed her finger into it. Mushiness ate her invisible skin, and she pushed her finger through, through, and through the fruit’s axis, till it emerged on the other side. With the guayaba impaled, the ghost laughed like a woman. She flicked her arm forward. The orb sailed and hit the concrete, splatting and spraying its insides.

  The clerk looked up from his magazine. His bored expression remained unchanged. Fruit fell from the stands all the time. Lemons avalanched. Oranges rolled down small orange mountains. Coconuts bowled gutter balls. Sometimes ghosts were the culprits behind these fruity hijinks but often the laws of physics were responsible. The clerk scurried around the counter with a terry rag. He picked up the guayaba and ran the cloth over its puke. He carried the mashed fruit to a metal trashcan and held it over the mouth, letting it drop. It landed with a wet clunk. The fly took flight, sailing towards its dessert.

  The ghost tilted her head back. Her gaze pointed heavenward. Instead of Saint Peter, paper mâché idols floated above her. A Dora the Explorer piñata and a cross-eyed Winnie the Pooh piñata and a bootleg Cinderella piñata conga’d from a wire. The ghost sucked in air and blew at them. A cowboy piñata’s fringed chaps danced. The clerk looked up to see them rustle. His eyes darted about to find where the breeze was coming from. His expression turned from bored to confused to hey, wait a minute…

  The ghost stood, straightened her nightgown, and turned. She thought, There’s no point ogling these fruits if I can’t taste them. She walked towards the automatic door. The glass sensed her. It acknowledged that they shared a virtue: invisibility. The clerk watched the door slide open and shut for no one. His daughter’s name breathed into his mind. Is that you, Selena? his conscience asked in Spanish. If it is, I’m sorry I didn’t do a better job of protecting you from your mother.

  The ghost stood under the fist-pumping arms of a half-naked pepper tree in an auto parts store parking lot. The sun had left the sky entirely to the moon, and the moon was enjoying this. The moon was smiling, and the ghost said to her, “I see you. I see you smiling.”

  The moon said nothing back but gave delicious minty moonlight. Her whiteness refreshed the ghost’s mental palate. She savored that astral glow, basked in its maternal influence.

  “Will you be my mother?” the ghost cooed at the moon.

  Her pelvis leaned against the hippie pepper tree trunk. The tree’s body was the opposite of the ghost’s. The ghost’s stretched straight and lithe while the tree’s was verging on third trimester. The tree was a woman, as much as Helen of Troy and Kim Kardashian are women with capital Ws, and, yet, the ghost paid no mind to her physique. She rarely thought about what she looked like, though she had wondered, If I ever see a portrait of myself, will I recognize it?

  The ghost kept asking the moon questions and listening for the moon’s answers. She didn’t expect to get one but her ears perked anyways. Occasionally, along the road behind her, headlights whooshed up a lane. As last call came and went, drivers wove and drove into oncoming traffic. The ghost ignored their drunken antics. She was vibing with the moon. She was reaching out to her heavenly aura.

  “Okay,” said the ghost. “If you won’t be my mother, then will you be my sister?”

  Again, the ghost breathed lightly, waiting for her answer. Parking lot dirt, pepper tree leaves, and bottle caps buttressed her feet. Near her little toe, a crushed Tecate can. Rainbow confetti leading to a smashed egg. A poopy diaper someone had tossed out of a backseat.

  The night’s warmth held the ghost. A sense of everything being so beautiful that it must be destroyed squeezed her. Stars impersonated opals. A comet shot in an arc over the roof of the auto parts store, and a tiny green dot glimmered, becoming part of an unknown constellation, vanishing.

  “Aliens…” whispered the ghost. Her body shivered. Her muscles released a virginity into the universe. She was experiencing an orgasm. It had been inspired by awe.

  The ghost asked the moon, “If you won’t be my mother or my sister, will you at least be my friend?”

  The ghost narrowed her eyes at the moon. She fluttered her eyelids. She was intentionally blurring her eyesight so that the moon nodded her assent. A breeze lifted the ruffle at the bottom of the ghost’s nightgown. This breeze tickled the inner parts of her knees. The moon was saying yes to friendship.

  The ghost awoke in a tight space that reeked of the pound. She yawned and stretched but her arms banged wood. Light streamed through a horseshoe hole, and the ghost crawled through it and onto a patio. She turned around and saw a sun-blanched red doghouse.

  “I was in the doghouse!” she gasped aloud. She turned to see a white mutt with black spots squatting next to a kibble-filled bowl that read KILLER. The mutt cocked its head and stared at the ghost. It barked, “Arf!”

  “Why was I in your house?” the ghost asked the dog.

  The dog answered, “Arf!”

  Remembering that the moon had promised to be her friend, the ghost asked the moon, although she’d gone from the sky, “What was I doing in the dog house?”

  In her mind’s eye, the ghost saw herself from outside her own body. She was leaning against the woman-tree in the parking lot of the auto parts store, and, as if under a spell, she stared up at the moon. She nodded at the heavenly body, became a vessel for lunacy, and walked off the dirt island onto the tar. She sleepwalked across the black, across rows of empty parking spots, and through a chainlink fence. She walked the cement till her invisibility bumped against a doghouse. In imitation of a black bear, she crouched, crawled into it, and hibernated. This three-month cooling off period had been a gift from the moon.

  “Thank you,” said the ghost.

  “Arf!” said the dog.

  The ghost flung her arms open at the sky. She drank sun for breakfast.

  “Arf!” the dog cried again. The ghost wanted to kick him in the mouth. He scampered to gravel ringing the concrete and crouched. The corners of his hairy lips turned up. His tail rose. Urine shot onto the pebbles. The ghost stepped through the peeing animal, pulled open the gate, and stepped onto thick dark green grass. It poked between her toes. She shuffled along this carpet, happy to feel a bit of the forest in this town or village or whatever it was.

  She wove through a mint green condo complex, across front l
awn, and onto a sidewalk covered in hopscotch squares drawn in pink chalk. The ghost lifted one leg and hopped from box to box to boxes to box. Landing in the final square, she resumed use of both her feet.

  At the corner, she stepped into a crosswalk. She journeyed deeper into the stupid heart of wherever she was.

  The sights were typical. Of no consequence. McDonald’s. Sammy’s Spirits. The Hotel Broadway. The Greyhound bus station. Memo’s Zapatería. Jones’ Boot Shop. A-OK Furniture Rentals. Wong’s Szechuan Cuisine. Arco gasoline. A park with a wooden gazebo and a frothing waterfall. The Hap E Daze Retirement Community. A sky with no stories to tell. Just a color with a pretty name. Cerulean.

  Breezes whistled at the ghost the way fuckers in trucks whistle at females of all ages. At times, the breezes whispered more than they whistled, and the strongest breeze of all — the breeze that picked up sycamore leaves in the gutter and played with them, swirling them into a cyclone — made no noise. The ghost watched these dirt devils with shrewd eyes. They reminded her of nature’s evil nature. They reminded her that the clear sky above her was a lie, and that the sky and everything under it could have potentially murdered her.

  “Whwhwhwhwhwhw...” she called back at the wind.

  Signs nailed to a three-story building’s boarded up windows read For Sale or Lease. On the next block, Botánica San Miguel and Botánica de Allende flanked Mama’s Thrift Shop. Through Mama’s windows, the ghost saw dark-skinned women pushing recycled shopping carts down clothing-stuffed aisles. Both botánicas reeked of incense, candle wax, and small-time juju. These obscured the smells emanating from Mama’s. A neon sign blinked in San Miguel’s window. One letter at a time, it announced P-S-Y-C-H-I-C R-E-A-D-I-N-G-S-C-O-M-E-O-N-I-N. The ghost paused and stared at the green and purple words, letting the sign repeat its message several times before making up her mind. Too predictable, she thought and kept going.

  A Presbyterian church and City Hall and hearty magnolia trees blossoming in well-trimmed squares of grass. Behind their polished leaves, a concrete sign announcing City of Ayulas Public Library. This, thought the ghost, is IT. She visualized herself sliding the perfect hardback off a shelf in the occult section. She imagined hugging the book to her ribs. She imagined understanding herself. The ghost thought, There will also be beanbags!

  She set out across the lawn. Magnolia seed maracas lay here and here and there. She kicked these out of her way and traveled under the eaves. An automatic glass door swung open, she entered, and she dillydallied by the seaweedy carpet that ended at the circulation desk. She gazed to her right, at the entrance to the children’s section. Behind glass, in a display area scooped into the wall, a paper-doll diorama of Maurice Sendak characters danced around propped up copies of Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen. Huge Sendakian butcher paper trees slouched at the tunnel-like entrance. The ghost felt compelled to head over there. God, it looked fun.

  She looked to her left. Boring, but probably a wiser choice. Everything about the grown-up area seemed a few steps away from purgatory. Plenty of uncomfortable seating. Fabrics permanently defiled by bodily odors. Caca-inspired earth tones. Signs fixed in place with yellowing scotch tape. People who looked like ghosts but were not. Reading material. The ghost headed into the grown-up area.

  Since it was noon on a Wednesday, the people patronizing the library were those with the time, or need, to be there. Leathery men in ball caps skimming jobs classifieds. Ladies talking to themselves and unseen companions. Folks with AARP cards in their wallets. Stay-at-home spouses. Flashers.

  The ghost passed through a wide doorway and saw Vogue, Seventeen, The New Yorker, and more magazines resting face up on display shelves wrapping the walls. Shelves jammed with books filled the center of the room. A sign suspended over them by fish wire read FICTION. The ghost curled her upper lip in a sneer. Since she was in search of knowledge, fiction could lead her astray. Fiction was a lie. She turned left, ran past the elevator door, and mounted the stairs two by two. The staircase curled in a series of squares, and the ghost gripped the railing to make it easier for her to move her short legs across big space.

  Arriving in Nonfiction, she took stock of the reference desk, the shelves to her left, and the tables. At one, a man who couldn’t recall the last time he’d combed his hair stared at the sports pages he held close to his glasses.

  The ghost crept towards the shelves, shelves crammed with serious reading choices, no fiction, no lies. Glorious nonfiction. She ran her fingers down spines that announced geological titles, horticultural titles, botanical titles, and architectural titles. She touched these books about plainly physical things, and snaked up and down the stacks till she arrived at selections that were about things as invisible as her. The metaphysical. The philosophical. The theological. The spiritual. She found these books and more at chin-level and stroked their spines with her knuckles. “Hmmmm,” she purred. “Hmmmmm…”

  She yanked Immanuel Kant’s Critiques from its shelf. “Critiques,” she said aloud. “I like it. It sounds bitchy.”

  She carried the Critiques past the bathrooms and into a reading room with microfiche readers on one side and a wall-sized county map on the other. The ghost sat diagonally across from the table’s only other occupant, a man dressed as if he’d survived Armageddon. He rocked to his own beat. His eyeballs stared forward but couldn’t see what was in front of them. They were only able to look inward. His eyes darted at the ghost. He looked her in the eye while staring inward.

  “Hi,” she told him. “I’m here to read.” Curiosity tugged at her. She really wanted to know what was going on in her neighbor’s head. She wanted to know where his rhythm came from.

  As she poked in through his nostril, a baby’s orphaned screams blasted her right out of his head.

  She didn’t know what to say, and was too spooked — yes, ghosts can get spooked — to ask why that noise filled him. She decided the best thing was to pretend she hadn’t heard shit. She looked down at her book and opened it to a random page.

  She placed her finger against a word and read: Synthesis, generally speaking, is, as we shall afterwards see, the mere operation of the imagination — a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no cognition whatever, but of the working of which we are seldom even conscious. But to reduce this synthesis to conceptions is a function of the understanding, by means of which we attain to cognition, in the proper meaning of the term.

  The ghost looked up from the page, at the ecru wall. She thought, So John Lennon was right: Imagine. She imagined herself back in the forest. She imagined eating and tasting bananas. She imagined eating and tasting meatloaf. She imagined milking a brown goat. She imagined finding blood in her underwear. She imagined blowing out fifteen candles. She imagined herself reflected in a mirror. She imagined herself with a heartbeat. She imagined herself as the unimaginable. She imagined she had Yoko Ono’s hair. She imagined herself kicking a ball.

  Deep in the hominy of her soul, the ghost knew — knew — that though she found soccer drop-dead boring, she was still definitely Mexican.

  She whispered, “I’m dead. I’m a girl. The best things to come out of México came out of the state of Jalisco. And I’m Mexican!”

  Looking at her neighbor, she hissed, “I’m Mexican! Are you?”

  She waited for his answer. Emboldened by this important morsel, the ghost snaked back up her neighbor’s nostril and into his memory bank. Again, she heard the baby wailing. She swung from the tree branches of his mind. The green was dripping with chunklets of dead Vietnamese people. She could hear the man crying for them. His sobs had a guilty melody. The baby’s wail screeched out of a cave. Its wails vibrated the trees. It wailed in the man’s dreams.

  “I’m sorry,” the ghost said to him. “I’m sure that if that baby’s ghost could talk to you, it would tell you that everything is okay because someday, you’ll be a ghost, too.”

  The ghost noticed his beard moving. Lice were tooling
about. She squirmed. She thought, I’m dead. I don’t need food or water or clothes or a nice bath, but he does. And nobody gives it to him. Living people are awful. Who cares if his brain is full of jungles and dead babies? Every baby will die someday. He was a baby one time. Even Caligula was a baby.

  The ghost felt her nightgown for pockets. She knew it had none but even ghosts are susceptible to wishful thinking. She wanted to give the man spare change or nuts or berries. She wanted to push something nourishing across the table to him. It shamed her that she had nothing to give him.

  She turned back to the book. She flipped to a new chunk. She read: There exists in the faculty of reason a natural desire to venture beyond the field of experience, to attempt to reach the utmost bounds of all cognition by the help of ideas alone, and not to rest satisfied until it has fulfilled its course and raised the sum of its cognitions into a self-subsistent, systematic whole.

  The ghost’s mind summoned a black hole.

  She returned to the text: Is the motive for this endeavor to be found in its speculative, or in its practical interests alone? Hmmmm, thought the ghost.

  Text: Setting aside, at present, the results of the labors of pure reason in its speculative exercise, I shall merely inquire regarding the problems the solution of which forms all other aims but partial and intermediate. The highest aims must—

  Pee-pee. The ghost couldn’t hear it but she smelled musky ammonia. The man was peeing himself. His shoulder trembled. The smell of three hundred and sixty-seven showerless days suddenly became too much for the ghost’s nose. That was how long it must’ve been since her neighbor had last bathed. She thought, I Kan’t do this.