Eve Morton

Tag: ghost story

  • 31 for 31: The Collectors by Eve Morton

    We are getting so close to Halloween! I can practically feel it in the air and taste the chocolate and tasty things to come.

    And today’s story feels the same way.

    Once again, the setting for this horror story is a hospital. To me they’ve always been the quintessential haunted houses. This was one of my first published stories–way back in 2013–and so when I saw a Halloween haunted call for the small (and now defunct) Black Treacle magazine, I knew what I wanted to do. Hospital as Haunted House on Halloween, but with a no-nonsense nurse who doesn’t scare easily at all.

    So here she is, Maggie Sullivan, as she tries to discourage folktales about ghosts and goblins and razor blades in apples as she also deals with her own demons. The story itself feels very rough in parts, and looking back, I would never write this in present tense, but hey. Here it is.

    And it’s a cute little time capsule for me. I hope you all enjoy it too!

    The Collectors

    As Maggie Sullivan walks to work, kids dressed up as pirates and superheroes pass her by. No one notices her blue and purple scrubs; no one says Happy Halloween or offers her candy. It’s just as well, she figures. As soon as she enters the large waiting room, a sign declares NO MASKS. Next to the fake cob-webby stuff up on some of the large windows, another sign declares NO CANDY. Especially anything with peanuts, though this prohibition is pretty much a given now wherever Maggie works. While the hospital is willing to open its doors on the one night where it is said their morgue could rise up and walk the earth, they aren’t taking any chances with anaphylactic shock. No patrons of the ER may wear masks and they may not have peanuts. This is a government building. What do you take us for, anyway? But Happy Halloween. We respect all nationalities, sexualities, and creeds. Just please no peanuts and we need to be able to see your face for our security cameras.

    Maggie sets her bag down on the front desk.

    “Are you ready for tonight?” she asks, smiling wide.

    Luke, the doctor on-call, sighs. He takes another patient from the full room and then disappears behind a curtain.

    “Don’t look so excited,” another doctor calls to Maggie. “You’re the one to deal with head wounds and drunken men tonight.”

    “Same as every other night,” she quips. “But I have faith I will be given something more interesting.”

    “A trick or a treat?” Luke asks, poking his head out of the curtain.

    “Maybe both,” Maggie smiles. She takes a seat at the front in-take desk and begins her shift.

    Working usually makes Maggie feel better. The order and precision that comes from keeping track of patients when they first walk in becomes even more exciting when it’s Halloween, even with no candy or masks. This will probably be even better than a full moon. Though most people have tried to disprove lunacy and lunar cycles, Maggie knows better. The human body is eighty percent water and the moon is responsible for tides; if the moon can pull and prod bodies of water, why not our own bodies? There is also shared lunacy. If someone thinks they can attribute their behaviour to the full moon, then they will do that crazy stunt they’ve been wanting to. Up until 1940, there was still a lesser murder charge that held the moon and the murderer equally culpable for a crime.

    But Halloween is different, Maggie is sure of this. This is the night where the barrier between the dead and the living is at its thinnest. This means that an ER room, where many people are already flirting with death when they walk through the doors, becomes downright occult. Maggie is not quite sure what she expects tonight, aside from the standard flu symptoms and domestic cases, car crashes and kids who have fallen and need stitches, but she wants something more than a séance or an eerie supernatural tale. Maggie knows that if she gets to see a ghost tonight, she’s asking for something back.

    Some would call it a deal with the devil or scrying a possible future. Maggie just calls it good communication skills and knowing how to ask questions. Spirits have always been known for their insights and connections. It’s not what you know, Maggie repeats, it’s who you know. Though most ghosts probably don’t have the ability to grant Maggie any special request, they can put her in touch with those who can. And quite frankly, she’s sick of waiting or being put on hold, especially when it comes to hospitals. She had to wait long enough to realize she had cancer and she’s not willing to wait through cycles of chemo to see if it gets better. Treatments are always framed in conditional language. If, maybe, perhaps, possibly, we will see. Maggie has grown tired, beyond the illness inside that is draining her life, of wading through vague language. She wants something more solid – a better insurance plan.

    After all, there is no Make A Wish Foundation for adults, like there is for sick kids. Most charities figure that if you’re an adult when you’re sick, you’ve already had a chance to go to Disney Land or be rebellious. You have to find your own way to get your needs satisfied. So Maggie is looking towards Halloween. It’s why she fought for this shift even though her supervisor wanted her to rest a while longer. Tonight is the one night where she can greet death head-on and also get something good out of the bargain.

    When a man walks in with a plaid shirt torn at the front and sits down, Maggie thinks the night has started. She waits at the front desk, helping another man with a broken arm get his x-rays started, for the man in plaid to move. He sits in the rickety waiting room chairs, watching the TV on mute, for a long time. Maggie steals glances, never lingering too long. His nails are dark, possibly covered with dirt. He seems really pale, but that could be the fluorescent lighting. Maggie knows that she looks pretty pale now too, though she’s avoided mirrors the past few weeks. She should probably be a little kinder before she automatically starts thinking this guy is one of the un-dead.

    Maggie’s heart falls when the next time she looks, plaid man is gone. Coming and suddenly going in an ER room is not that uncommon. Sometimes people come for small injuries because they feel as if that is what their mother told them to do. When they realize they could spend all night here, they leave. Maybe plaid man had a broken thumb and after looking at how many broken arms and twisted ankles there were, went home to set it himself.

    “That guy left awful quick,” May, the other nurse taking patients tonight, remarks.

    Maggie nods. “No rest for the wicked.”

    May shrugs and takes a patient. Maggie is left alone again at the front counter, taking names and writing down numbers.

    Ever since her diagnosis, Maggie feels as if she’s talking more and more in platitudes. In epigraphs for her future headstone. She used to think that death made someone really contemplative about life. It made people think things through, make a bucket list, and write epic poetry. But getting diagnosed with cancer when you’re barely in your thirties doesn’t turn you into the Picasso or Dylan Thomas that you thought you wanted to be when you were younger. It makes you depend on platitudes and quotations taken out of context. A diagnosis makes you morbid, even more than before, and you want to stare into open wounds of victims and see if you can see yourself in there.

    What was it that Nietzsche said? Maggie thinks. If you stare into the abyss, the abyss will stare back. But Nietzsche was crazy, anyway. She’s stared into how many open wounds now and the only monster she’s really come face to face with is the one that is growing inside of her, duplicating cells in a rapid succession and eventually turning her blood into puss. There are no monsters, she thinks. Not really, not in the way we’re used to seeing them, dressed in green costumes and made from the body parts of others.

    After attending to another fallen woman with matching black eyes, Maggie sits behind the desk. She waits and looks up when she can. But there is nothing, other than the old squeaking of the nurses shoes in the ward, to keep her company.

    ***

    Another woman comes in shortly after. She’s standing next to a man that’s dressed like Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th films. Maggie points to the sign again that declares NO MASKS and the guy hunches over as he removes the hockey mask. Maggie goes over to the girl, noticing the large flesh wound on her forearm, before she’s brushed away.

    “No, no,” the girl says. She puts her other hand over the wound, making Maggie’s stomach turn for a moment. Oh, make up, Maggie soon realizes. The woman is talking again, frantically moving her hands and pointing to Jason. He remains hunched over, a large hand over his stomach.

    “I think I swallowed some razor blades,” he says.

    “Urban legend,” Maggie states. “The only people who have died by Halloween candy were murdered by someone within their family. Unless you’re girlfriend here is turning the tables on you, I’d say you just ate too much.”

    “No, he’s really sick.”

    “What if some creepy person heard the story and tried to make it real?” the guy argues. “They could put razor blades in apples because he heard about it. All it takes is an idea, man.”

    “Right, okay,” Maggie says curtly. “We’ll take an x-ray and see what we have, then.”

    “Thank you. All I ask.”

    Maggie smiles and nods as she passes the couple off to Luke. The patient is always right, Maggie thinks, at least, until a doctor comes along. If only it were so easy to deny cancer and make it work. She has still not look at the lab results from her latest test, but she knows the standard forms, the sad eyes she has been given, and the silence in certain tones of voices. She knows what death looks like, even if she is sometimes fooled by fake wounds on teenager’s arms.

    There are lots of unrequited deaths in the hospital, lots of opportunities for ghosts to linger between the halls and the rooms. Maggie has seen more than one terrible car crash, stabbing, and domestic case pushed too far. Not to mention unfair diseases and children dying young. The Make A Wish Foundation can only do so much for terminal kids, especially those with imagination. Disneyland may not be a child’s first choice for a wish. Instead of accepting Goofy’s handshake as a fair enough trade for life, these kids come back and wander around, seeking better wishes, the same way Maggie wishes she had a chance to be asked what she wants before she dies.

    What about the ghost of past selves? Maggie wonders in between patients. Every seven years all the cells within a person’s body have become brand new. Decade to decade, you are a new person– at least from a biological standpoint. Could those former selves and cells reform and walk around? What if they took another trajectory in your life? Here is the ultimate use for string theory, Maggie thinks. Maybe if she had taken that art class in college, and dated the woman from the class who always asked her out, she would not have become a nurse with phase-three cancer in her stomach.

    The more that Maggie learns about cancer, beyond her medical school days, the more she thinks it’s a ghost, too. Cancer is like those new cells reforming to make new selves. Cancer gets down inside of you and rearranges what you once knew. It walks around inside of you, and it lives in Maggie now, like a shell.

    It is clearly getting too late for this.

    Maggie goes back to her post, after checking on Jason and his girlfriend again. There are no razor blades, but alcohol poisoning is a likely suspect. He is getting his stomach pumped. His girlfriend waits patiently by his side, and refuses coffee when Maggie offers. She takes her own mug back to her desk, and in between quiet moments, picks up her book to read.

    You can’t work in a hospital without seeing a few Stephen King books tossed around, broken spine and wrinkled cover from being shoved inside a bag so much. Same thing with memoirs, too. Maggie often feels as if she is reading the library of the books left behind, from either death or remission. Many people, when they leave the hospital, leave behind everything they took with them. The flowers, the cards, Oprah’s book club. They want to start again and not think about what happened between the four walls.

    Maggie looks around. There is nothing new or strange. She sighs and goes back to her charts, her books, though the cracked spine of her memoir making her feel weary and bored.

    Ghosts let people know they’ve come through flickering lights and cold spots, right? That’s what all the shows say and that’s what Maggie has learned to look for. But those cold spots are hard to find in a hospital with its AC always cranked, even during winter. If the lights ever flicker here, the generator goes on. So many people’s heartbeats depend on electricity that they’re damned careful it does not go out, not even during electrical storms, not on anyone’s watch. If there are no warning signs for ghosts, then there is no way to tell you are haunted. And that’s the problem with ghosts, isn’t it? Maggie thinks. They follow you around and move things and make you think you’re crazy. But Alzheimer’s patients do that enough. Children do that. Even Maggie is doing it now, moving books and charts and forgetting where she put them. But she’s not a ghost, she’s sure of it. The staff here keep talking to her and treating her like she’s a fragile set of china dishes.

    “I’m not dead yet,” she joked around with Luke one night. He stared back at her, silent. Apparently death is only funny when the real punch-line is much farther off.

    Another person comes into the ER. Maggie looks them up and down, searching for a marker or something that makes them new and strange. But there is nothing. Maggie does what she needs to do.

    ***

    When the clock reaches midnight, she looks out at the waiting area. She looks past the cob-webby doors and into the black night. The moon has moved away and is now above the hospital, around the other side. There is no one else coming, Maggie thinks. There is really nothing else here, no way to make a deal.

    Ghost stories are out of date, anyway, she figures. The golden age of ghost stories, of Henry James and Shakespeare’s Banquo seeking revenge and regret, has long since passed. The house is no longer as haunted as we think it will be, not with so many apartment buildings and condominiums popping up each time Maggie walks to work. Houses were only seen as haunted because so many people died inside them. Now, that special place is reserved for the hospital. Even then, the medical building has a hard time keep spirits. Quite frankly, Maggie thinks, it’s just because people simply live a lot longer. It makes it harder to be an angry ghost when you’ve died in a hospital at age eighty of a heart attack. The older we get, the less we hear about ghosts. The less death scares us, maybe. Though Maggie knows that last platitude is not quite true.

    Maggie likes Stephen King, in spite of his strange narrative choices, and she thinks he’s mostly right when it comes to ghosts. Cars are haunted. Even cell phones and e-readers are haunted. Every single thing that is new carries around a ghost inside of it, the ghost of a former life, of a perceived golden age. Even Maggie’s heard it come out of her voice a few times already: back in my day, when I was young, before all of this happened. Ghosts work their way into our language and remind us about what used to be. It’s hard growing up and watching the world change. So people haunt the present in order to remember the past. It’s another form of nostalgia, another form of love and life.

    Maggie looks up again. There are deserted magazines, candy wrappers, and even Jason Voorhees has left behind his mask. There is another sign, further in the hospital, which displays the request NO CELL PHONES. No candy, no masks, no technology, and from what Maggie can tell, there are no links to the spirit world to be made tonight. She sighs as she leans back in her chair.

    If there is a ghost here, Maggie thinks, it’s me.

    ***

    Just past midnight, Maggie hears a slight knock on her desk. She looks up from her book, sees nothing, and stands up. The top of three tiny heads become visible. All boys, maybe around age seven or nine. One is dressed like a dog, a cowboy, and the other does not appear to have costume. He could be somebody from a television show that Maggie has not seen before, because they don’t keep the large TV in the waiting area turned to that channel. None of the boys have treat bags or masks that they need to discard before getting deeper into the hospital. Though the dog-boy has large dark brown patches under his eyes and other animal features drawn onto his skin, he is still very recognizable.

    “Hello,” she greets.

    “Sorry we’re late,” cowboy says. “We’re here to see a friend.”

    Maggie looks behind them. No adult has come, but she notices a key around one boy’s neck that does not belong with his dog costume.

    “Where are your parents, guys?”

    “They’re coming. Parking the car.”

    Maggie nods. Especially on one of the busiest nights of the year, the parking lot would be worse than a mall on Christmas. “I see. It’s a real nightmare down there.”

    “We wanted to see our friend since he couldn’t come out with us,” the cowboy explains. “Can you take us up?”

    “Visiting hours are over…” she says, trailing off. She looks back and finds May, who waves to her. Maggie turns back to the boys. The small one at the end, wearing all black, smiles.

    “Please?”

    “Well, when you put it that way,” Maggie says. She grabs her cardigan off the back of her chair and throws it around her shoulders. She points them to the elevator down the end of the hallway, which they move ahead to before she has a chance to utter anything else.

    Inside the elevator, the small boy without a costume runs forward and presses the floor. When Maggie asks him if he’s sure that’s the right area, he nods his head. The number eight glows red from the other side where she stands. Oncology, she recognizes. Her stomach turns. She laments the boys’ friend, but also feels oddly at home.

    Dog-boy and cowboy joke around and talk with one another, talking about cars and trains that they have stored away somewhere. The cowboy pets the dog-boy under his large floppy ears and then makes sure dog-boy’s pinned-on tale wags.

    When the small boy to her side, dressed in black, picks out a cell phone from his pocket, Maggie eyes him for a moment. She allows him to finish what he’s doing – probably texting a parent who’s in the middle of the snake-like parking garage – and then she taps on the elevator wall for his attention.

    “You guys can’t have cell phones here. It interferes with the signals.”

    The little boy in black nods. He folds his phone and puts it in his pocket.

    “Sorry.”

    “It’s okay,” she says. She folds her arms across her chest. “Do you mind if I ask about your costumes?”

    “I’m my dog,”

    “I’m a cowboy.”

    The boy in black is silent.

    “And you?”

    “I’m a collector.”

    “Is that from a TV show?” Maggie asks. It sounds like something along the lines of Bob the Builder. Cody the Collector, a sequel or spin-off.

    He shakes his head. “I collect things.”

    “Like what?”

    “He got me more toys,” dog-boy says.

    “And candy for tonight,” the cowboy says. “We’re going around and collecting things.”

    “How nice of him. I’m sorry we had none in this building for you guys,” Maggie says. The two other costumed boys say it’s fine in unison, but the other one remains silent. Maggie narrows her eyes. The boy is staring straight forward, his hands behind his back. He is waiting patiently.

    The cowboy produces his lasso and pretends to wrangle up the dog. They talk together in the made-up language of children, the kind that speaks of a connection that someone eventually grows out of and into the more bureaucratic language of cultural codes and shared idioms. Without the make-up around the dog-boy’s eyes, she would swear that he and the cowboy were twins.

    “He also likes wishes,” the cowboy says. He peers up at Maggie, his lasso now by his waist. “You know?”

    “Like birthday wishes? Candles on a cake?”

    “Yeah. And other kinds.”

    Maggie opens her mouth to respond, but the dog-boy jumps forward.

    “Did you wish to be a nurse?”

    “No, I grew up to be a nurse. I went to school, studied really hard.”

    Dog-boy sighs and rolls his eyes. He repeats, “So you really did wish to be one?”

    Maggie narrows her eyes. She wants to disagree again, mostly because wishes to her do not signal real work. They magically appear, happen from thin air, like a genie from a bottle or a sudden cure for cancer. But these kids are using them as a way to articulate desire, want. They are wishing for candy, not because they don’t want to go through the motions of getting it, but because they want candy. You wish for what you want. Even if it ends up meaning that you have to get it for yourself. They are making decisions with their wishes, decisions that could end up changing their lives.

    Maggie smiles. “I guess I did, then.”

    “What else would you wish for?” the boy in black asks.

    “That’s obvious,” Maggie says. She leans down on her legs and smiles at the small child. “Three more wishes.”

    He smiles back at her. The elevator dings and they step outside.

    In the hallway, the three boys run past her. She shouts at them a quick command to stop, but she does not repeat herself. She smiles at the way in which the dog-boy’s ears flap as he bounces. As she walks towards the oncology nurses’ station, she spots the now familiar face of Theresa, another night nurse. She sees Maggie and waves a quick hello.

    “You’re here awful late,” she says.

    “I’m taking some kids to see their friend. Zachary, I think?”

    Theresa’s face falls. Maggie knows what those facial muscles mean and does not say anything. She looks at the ground, and then back up.

    “I’m sorry,” Theresa says.

    “Yeah, me too.”

    Maggie remembers the boy slowly, in bits and pieces from her former shifts. She brought him cherry popsicles and read to him from his Marvel comic books. He was partial to Captain American. All the good little boys always are. The rebellious ones want Iron Man or The Hulk, like the little boy dressed in black. He would be a good Deadpool, too, Maggie thinks. But the boys who want to be Captain America, they’re just good little guys who really want to help but never get a chance to grow up.

    Maggie excuses herself and walks down the hallway to tell them. She hopes they’re not too scared when they find an empty room or grieving parents. Maggie has done a million death speeches before. She has pronounced DOAs and watched as car crash victims die in her arms. She is used to death, even wishing for it to cross her in a tangible form like tonight. But there is something about these three young boys that she wants to protect without using those platitudes and cheap speeches they taught her in nursing school. She wants to tell them the truth. “Sorry,” she rehearses the new speech inside her mind. “Sometimes you just don’t get what you wish for, or what you deserve. I know and it sucks.”

    After her first step down the hall, she feels her cell phone vibrate in her pocket. Embarrassed that she has left it on, she takes it out to quickly shut it off. The message, from an unknown number, stares back at her.

    “Consider yourself given three more,” the text reads.

    When Maggie looks up, she watches as all three boys, plus another one, run out of the room. She recognizes the red and blue markers of the cape as it trails around the door.

    “Happy Halloween,” Maggie says with a smile.

    END

  • 31 for 31: The Ghost Who Loved Cherry Cake

    A spooky kid-friendly ghost story!

    The Ghost Who Loved Cherry Cake is a simple ghost story with a neat twist involving snacks. Why does this particular ghost like cherry cake? You’ll have to read the story to find out, but I can tell you that this idea came from being postpartum and having my sense of smell still completely out-of-whack. At the time, I was also reading about how hauntings and especially alien abduction stories can involve distorted smells (often amonia and cinnamon). That sounded so gross, but one smell that sounded ideal to me during that time period was cherry.

    And cake.

    And especially cherry cake.

    So this particular ghost was born.

    I also wrote this as a children’s story. The main character is younger and the issues she’s tackling in the story are very kid-centric ideas. Her parents are getting a divorce; they’re having a last vacation as a nuclear family unit; and it’s fun and exciting, yet, of course, things are still weird. The adult world is hidden from her, and so, she seeks solace in the kid-world and supernatural elements of this location. The ghost of this vacation house, and the ever-present cake, is what gets her through this eerie time period.

    The ghost is a good ghost–and so, this story ended up being utterly perfect for Crow Toes Quarterly, a literary magazine of the gothic for kids. I’m so sad this publication doesn’t exist anymore. When I got my contributor copy, I poured over it for hours. There were zany poems, monstrous and yet cute creatures, and even more photos and drawings that gave the magazine an element of an enchanted curio cabinet. The stories were quirky and weird and delightfully spooky, but not scary-scary. Perfect for the budding goth kid in us all.

    Enjoy!

    The Ghost Who Loved Cherry Cake

    By Eve Morton

    It took me about two weeks staying at the summer home my parents’ rented in the Outer Banks to understand that we didn’t have a housekeeper. Rather, Abigail Swanson, with her blue dress and brown eyes that sometimes turned golden in the afternoon light, was a ghost. And she absolutely loved cherry cake. 

    Our first day arriving, we had been late. It was a time before GPS, a time when a mother’s role in long car trips was to hold the book of maps as if she was a witch with a grimoire and to cast the right lot for the road they were to take. Needless to say, my mother was not one for the occult, let alone for reading maps. My father was better at it, and so he’d tried to memorize the remaining route through the surface streets and small towns leading up to the coastline when we’d stopped for lunch at a rest stop. His speculations on the fastest and shortest area, however, only led us to go around in circles in a place called Duck before we finally pulled into the right stretch of highway dotted with candy-colored houses in which we were to stay for the month of July. I had already fallen asleep by then, somewhere around thinking that the third or fourth time we passed through Duck it would change to Goose, and we’d play a game. 

    “Come now,” my father said, scooping me out of the backseat of the car. “We’re here.”

    He carried me under the house, not through it, towards the roaring sound of the ocean. The night was so black, the sand so lumpy under my father’s feet, that it felt as if I was still dreaming. When I saw Abigail, though I didn’t know her name then, she was only a pair of eyes in that darkness. Golden and half-hidden under the stilts that kept the house above ground. I didn’t know it then, either, but those skittles were there to keep the house from flooding, to make sure a storm did not drag out bodies of small children towards the ocean. 

    My father set me down as we reached wooden stairs built into a hillside. He held my hand and told me we had to see the ocean before bed. 

    “What’s that?” I gasped, seeing part of the sand move. 

    “Ghost crabs.”

    “Oh.” 

    “Don’t worry,” he added. “There’s nothing to be afraid of here.”

    “Even ghosts?”

    “Even ghosts,” he confirmed. 

    “Not all ghosts are bad, anyway. Some just want to help.” A woman added that answer, the same woman belonging to those eyes I’d spotted before. She came out of the darkness, right beside me, and held my other hand as we walked towards the shoreline. She said nothing else, but her fingers’ firm grasp on me was a reassurance after being lost for so long and scared by the natural life by the shoreline. My mother was nowhere to be seen, and my father seemed to sense that I was looking for her.

    “Your mom is tired. It was a long drive.”

    His words were short and curt, but like everything with my father, they seemed to hint at so much more. I took his explanation–mom is tired–as the reason this other person was here with us, a person who tucked me into bed after my father had left the room, and told me her name was Abigail. 

    “You can call me Abby. I used to live here. Now I just make sure it’s nice for everyone. What do you want for breakfast in the morning?”

    “Cake,” I said. It was my birthday the next day. All I could think about was cake.

    “Silly goose,” she said. “That is not a breakfast food.”

    I was so tired, the trip weighing on my eight-almost-nine-year-old body, that I didn’t bother to tell her my birthday was tomorrow. I only laughed at the goose remark; after so many ducks, finally a goose! Then I went to sleep.

    In the morning, there was a cake on the counter. It was white frosted with red dots all around it. My mother sipped coffee from a cracked mug at the counter, and shook her head towards my father. He was hiding behind a newspaper, another chipped coffee mug in front of him. 

    “I saw another roach,” my mother said. “This place is filthy.”

    “It’s the south,” he said. “It’s warm and so there are roaches. They’re just like spiders elsewhere. Normal. Don’t worry about it.”

    Their conversation about bugs and cleanliness went on. I ignored it, but in the back of my mind, I’d log it away as yet another reason why Abigail was with us that month in the Outer Banks. My mother needed help with the cleaning, and my father wanted someone else to look after me. I always felt Abigail’s presence before she ever materialized, and so, I never truly saw my parents interact with her. It didn’t matter.

    She appeared behind me that morning, wearing a blue dress and with a white apron over it. “It’s my birthday,” I told her.

    “Well, happy birthday. I should have made a cake I knew you’d like, then!”

    “What kind is this?” I pointed to the frosting that seemed impossibly thick. Even though it was only the morning, when the air was always cooler back home, it was still humid like the afternoon here. It would only get hotter and thicker as the weeks wore on. The frosting would not last long in this climate, and Abigail sensed this and pushed the cake towards me.

    “What do you think? You can have a little bit now.”

    I dragged my finger through the cake, the frosting stacking up against the pad of my finger like snow. Sweetness burst on my tongue when I held it to my mouth. “It’s like a sundae,” I said.

    “It’s cherry. My favorite cake.” Her brown eyes became golden again. “What’s your favorite?”

    It used to be chocolate. But all I could think at that moment was cherry, cherry, cherry. I reached for another dab of frosting when my mother cried out.

    “Hey! Breakfast first,” she said.

    “But Abigail–” I turned back to see that she was now gone. Probably cleaning, making my bed or doing laundry, or something else that my mother’s frequent headaches prevented her from doing. 

    My mother said nothing about Abigail. Only insisted that I eat some oatmeal before we went to the ocean that day. “And then, when you come back,” she said, smiling though it seemed to tire her, “you can have a birthday wish on your cake.”

    I did as my mother asked. My father and I went to the ocean, which was much prettier now that it was daylight, and I walked with his hand in mine as I collected shells. Big ones, small ones, broken shards that sparkled in the light. “I want to make a necklace with these,” I told him. “Maybe Abigail will help.”

    “Maybe,” he said. He, too, asked nothing further about Abigail. He looked off into the distance, glanced at his watch, and told me we were almost out of time. “We should head back to your cake.”

    We did. Abigail waited behind the cake, the candles spelling out ten years–one bonus for good luck–on top of it. The frosting had been fixed. Since no one else mentioned her, I took Abigail’s presence to be obvious. As natural as the stilts that kept the house up from the floods and hurricane waters that sometimes cascaded up from the sand dunes. She remained in place as I blew out the candles, but it was only her smile that seemed genuine. My father’s was distracted and my mother was, as always, tired. 

    “What did you wish for?” my mother asked. 

    “You can’t tell,” Abigail said. “Or it won’t come true.”

    I had wished for more and more time with her, an entire vacation with Abigail and I exploring the Outer Banks with one another. But I remained quiet, shaking my head to my mother. When my mother sliced open the cake, and it was red inside, she let out a gasp. “Oh. They messed up the order. It should have been chocolate. It should have been–“

    “I love it,” I said. “It’s cherry.”

    “It is. You sure?”

    I nodded. My mother’s skeptical glance didn’t fade until I put a large hunk of the cake in my mouth. Sweetness burned against my tongue. Cherry. Something I’d never had before, something that I didn’t know existed until that trip. It was stunning, wonderful, a perfect birthday gift. 

    “Well, okay then. I guess you’ll get your wish.” My mother shrugged. She took a piece along with my father, but they didn’t finish theirs. 

    “Too sweet,” they later said. “You enjoy it. All for you.”

    Abigail took their pieces into the kitchen, cleaned up the dishes, and then ate a big slice herself. I sat with her at the kitchen table, drawing on a piece of paper. “I hope you don’t mind sharing,” she said. “Cherry is my favorite.”

    “Is it?”

    She nodded, her dark eyes golden bright again. “The last time I was at this house, I had my little girl with me. Her name was Cherry. She sort of looked like you, except a little taller and with more freckles against her nose.” She touched my nose and I felt, for the first time ever since arriving in this hotter climate, a chill move through me. “She was a very pretty Cherry. My darling delight.”

    “Where is she now?”

    Abigail grew sad. She ran her finger along the frosting of the cake, though it was under a cover, and brought it to her lips. I didn’t question that she’d moved through plastic then; I only giggled at the deviousness of an adult flouting the rules. 

    “There was a hurricane here,” she said a moment later, all lightness of the moment gone. “A big storm came. Large waves crashed into the house. I thought we were safe. I was wrong. Cherry was swept out into the water.”

    “The house wasn’t on stilts then?” 

    “No. That is something new here. That is a good thing. You will be safer than Cherry was.”

    I didn’t know what to say, never having heard of much death, let alone a child’s death. I looked at the picture I was drawing, and it was the best thing I’d ever done. So I gave it to Abigail. It was of a sun with sunglasses shining down on a few kids from my school who I played with during recess time.

    “Beautiful,” Abigail said. “Can you draw me a picture of Cherry?”

    “I don’t know what she looks like,” I said, then remembered it was like me. So as Abigail watched, eerily silent–this was the only time I ever felt a ghostly presence from her–I drew myself. Then I added dots along my face, to transform me into Cherry. I gave it to Abigail with a smile. “Here you go.”

    “Beautiful!” she praised again. “Stunning, stunning. It is my own gift. And on your birthday! Well, I’ll have to make you another cake. Do you want chocolate this time around?”

    “No,” I said. “Cherry is good.”

    For two weeks straight, there was always a piece of cherry cake for me in the morning on the counter to eat by the afternoon after I had swum in the ocean. I never saw Abigail make the cake or even frost it; it was just always there. My parents, still often arguing in the morning or speaking in hushed tones about something I would only realize was their divorce a month later, never mentioned the cakes aside from imploring me to not get crumbs everywhere. 

    “The roaches,” my mother chastised. “Don’t tempt them with more.”

    “And don’t spoil your lunch,” my father might add. But even he, like my mother, soon forgot their own rules as they argued with one another. Each one probably assumed the other had made the cake for me, to keep me happy and amused during the vacation, to keep me fed and happy and a little spoiled on our last one as a true family. 

    Each afternoon, one parent would trade off an activity with me. My dad and I went swimming in the ocean again; my mother and I explored the dunes and then a fishing museum close by; my father took me out for a special dinner, all alone. When I asked him what Abigail was doing, he shook his head.

    “Don’t know. Probably with your mother.”

    “Is Abigail coming home with us?”

    “No,” he said. “Probably for the best.”

    “Right. She’d miss her daughter. She died here,” I added, and when my father still said nothing, only stared out the window of the restaurant at the dark clouds coming, I figured he was thinking about how she’d died in a storm. 

    “Don’t worry, dad,” I said. “The house is on stilts now. We’ll be safe.”

    He nodded, but we still ate in a rush. When we arrived at home, my mother was on the porch, holding a book, but no longer reading. “Storm’s coming. We should leave.”

    “It’s not hurricane season,” my father said, still shaking his head. “This doesn’t make sense. I don’t understand. We have the house for another month.”

    “The storm’s coming in another day. Who cares about another month?”

    I rushed past the two of them, speaking to one another in harsher and harsher tones, so much like the thunder underneath the clouds. I found Abigail in my room, packing my bags. She met my gaze and nodded with a firm smile. “Time for my second cherry to go before the water comes.”

    “You’re not coming with us?”

    “No, sweetheart. This is my house. I stay here.”

    “It’s on stilts now,” I said. “You’ll be safe.”

    “Yes, but you need to go with your parents.”

    I surprised myself by screaming, “No, no, no!” and kicking my feet. I hadn’t had a temper tantrum–or a “fit” as my mother called them–in such a long time. I had genuinely begun to feel like a grown-up on this trip, with two separate worlds and a cherry cake always to myself. Now all I could do was cry and pout and not even let Abigail hug me to tell me everything was going to be all right.

    “I’m not losing another little girl,” she said and left me with my bags in the bedroom. When she came back, I had stopped most of my crying. She handed me a thick wedge of the cherry cake, all that had remained in a plastic container. “Here. Take this for the road.”

    “What will you eat?” I asked. 

    “I’m home. I don’t need food to remind me of it.”

    Her words were so calm, so confident, I merely nodded. My parents were inside now, no longer fighting but their voices still tense from the storm and the sudden emergency set upon us all. The sky outside my window, once only a pale blue for two weeks straight, was grey and dark and ominous. The roar of the ocean was suddenly drowned out by a siren. A warning from the coast guard. Hurricane coming. Storm coming.

    “Sweetheart,” my mother said, entering the room and pushing her body through Abigail’s specter in front of me. “Time to go.”

    I gasped. It was the first time, the first true time, I understood what Abigail was. A ghost. Not our summer housekeeper, not my new best friend, not even a woman who loved cherry cake because it was her daughter’s name. These things were all still true, but they were also cloaked by the fact that she had died a long time ago, maybe with her daughter or another summer here, and she was a ghost.

    “It’s okay, it’s okay,” my mother said, wrapping me in a hug. “We will be all right. But we have to go. Vacation’s over.”

    I looked over my mother’s shoulder and watched as Abigail nodded. She blew me a kiss and pointed to the cake in my suitcase, which she’d closed now. My mother grabbed the suitcase when she let go of me, and tugged me out the door. 

    The last time I saw Abigail was as we left the house. My father was driving, my mother in the front seat with a book of maps that were all but useless in her lap, and I was in the back. It was only the early evening, but it was as black as the night we’d first arrived. I looked at the house where I’d had my ninth birthday and one of the best vacations ever. When Abigail appeared on the wrap-around porch on the second floor, I knew she was a ghost. 

    But it was hard to be afraid. I had the cherry cake in my suitcase. I had the good memories. And her touch, as ghostly and cold as it had been, still rushed through me and comforted me as my parents fought again.

    Abigail waved as the rain fell in heavy drops over the house and pounded like bullets against the roof of our rented car. She faded as we drove away, as the waves chased the houses on stilts along the shore, and the storm scared away the remaining tourists onto the now crowded highway. As I finished the cake in a Motel 6 that night, with my parents still bickering about directions, I thought of Abigail again and again. Even as we pulled into our home, which would no longer be shared between my parents in a months’ time, I still thought of Abigail.

    I still think of her now, anytime someone mentions the ocean, hurricanes, or the Outer Banks. It’s hard to think of her as a haunting, as that summer vacation as being anything but delightful and sweet as the cake she served. Ghosts to me have never meant something to be afraid of, something to avoid. Ghosts have always been the people who know you the best, because they have lived through the worst, and know that in the end, the sweetest words are always the best. And life, too, can be a piece of cake.

    END

  • 31 for 31: The Joke by Eve Morton

    There is a thin line between humour and horror, and The Joke takes that theme head on.

    The humour in this story is the dark kind. The things that you can’t joke about, or feel bad joking about, but precisely because they are so horrible, you have to say something. Anything. Break up the terror with a laugh–or a scream.

    The story also discusses new ideas about haunted houses–like a haunted campus bar, based on a real life bar on the University of Waterloo’s campus–and some body horror, too. But it’s the joke at the centre of the story that I was genuinely concerned about and would make this story unpublishable.

    Not so much!

    I think I maybe sent this story out twice before Vanishing Point wanted it immediately. Even the editor’s wife said she liked it, and to me, writing as a new mom about things you really couldn’t joke about, having a woman find the things I said to be good and not just plain upsetting… well, that was a relief!

    I hope you all laugh, too. Or at the very least, keep in mind that it’s just a joke. 😉

    The Joke

    By Eve Morton

    When the Graduate House began renovations on the upper level, to expand the antique farmhouse structure to include a patio where students and profs alike could get hammered after handing in dissertations in the afternoon sun, they found a body. It was so small at first the construction workers had no idea what they’d stumbled upon. Then, once they’d unwrapped the strange package that had been sealed into a wall–as if it was a loaf of bread someone forgot on the windowsill–they stared face to face with the small, mummified body of a child. 

    “A baby, actually,” Emily the day manager corrected once the workers brought the issue to her attention. “That’s a newborn. No more than a couple days old.”

    Her stomach flipped with grief and disgust, while her voice remained utterly implacable. Two of the construction workers had returned from their worksite no more than fifteen minutes after arriving and asked her what to do about this. They’d said “this” and held out the infant swaddled in a quilt, dusty with age, but clearly made in another era where fine stitching was done by hand and not machine. She held the package–it really did look like a loaf of bread, the smell almost akin to the sourdough kind that the students in her bar were talking about endlessly a few years back–and fought the urge to cradle it. She fought the urge to think back to her own student days, high school rather than graduate studies, where she’d held her own child for an hour before giving it away. She tried to focus on the moment. She was thirty-seven. She was in-charge. She was–

    “Ma’am.” One of the workers, a tall skinny kid with a buzz cut, interrupted her thoughts. The other worker had disappeared. She heard retching from the bathrooms on the first floor. He had ducked behind the men’s room sign, still plastered with dance notices for the summer session. “What should we be doing here?”

    “Call the police,” Emily said. “And stop all construction.”

    The answer had been so obvious to her, she couldn’t believe the man in front of her had not done it first. Wouldn’t you grab your cell phone and dial 911 the moment you found a dead kid in a wall, partially mummified and smelling of sourdough? But no. She was the one in-charge. She was the one who had to make the call to make the call–and then literally make the call. The construction worker stared at her with blank, youthful eyes, blinking away after he’d nodded. This was probably the worst thing he’d ever seen. And while it was no walk in the park for her, the ten years between them made it so she could at least swallow back some of her own revulsion and keep that ever-implacable voice that had allowed her to work her way from waitress to bartender to assistant manager to day manager at a social club designated for graduate students and professors with PhDs, when all she had was a GED. 

    “I’ll do it. You guys all rest.” Emily walked into her office on the second floor of the farmhouse. It was only as she closed the door that she realized she still held the baby’s body. She looked around the room, wondering where to set it down, but all places–desk, still-outdated fax machine, windowsill–all seemed horribly out-of-place. So she held it in her arms, against her small chest and still-quaking abdomen, as she dialed the police. 

    *

    The police, of course, wished that they had not moved the body. “But we understand that you had no idea what it was,” the officer, another man who seemed infinitely younger than Emily, had said. “It’s also clear that this happened a long time ago. Least a hundred years.”

    “Oh yeah, look at that stitching,” Emily said too eagerly, gesturing to the quilt. She bit her tongue. That was a dumb thing to say. It was a young thing to say, something that swelled up from inside of her, desperate to deflect attention and possible upset from authority figures, though she was one now. As the police officer went over her statement and the construction workers’ statements again and again, she continually repeated in the back of her mind: I am an adult now. I am in charge here. I am Emily Jenkins, no longer Emmy, and I am not in trouble. 

    She continued to repeat this to herself as the Dean of the university showed up, as well as the night manager, Dan, who acted as if he was her boss–since he was the main one in charge of the cash at the end of the day, but who was not, actually, her boss in any official way. The Dean, a man named Gary with a bad comb over and the absolute definition of a stereotypical academic, was her boss. The student’s tuition paid for the bar and subsidized the food they served, and if there was anything to fear, it would be no one wanting to eat here after a dead baby had been found, and so the tuition money dried up, and she would be looking for another job again. 

    “Are you okay?” Gary asked once the police left. They were in her office. The baby’s body had been taken by a paramedic team who had also shown up with the police cars, but obviously, there was no need for reviving that infant. They had put the body in a tiny bag and driven it away to the morgue, where the cause of death would be investigated. The construction workers had all gone home, and the Graduate House was closed for the rest of the day. Most likely the rest of the week. 

    “Emily,” Gary repeated. He put a hand on her desk. He sat in front of her, while she seemed to stare at a set of blue pens she’d just unwrapped. 

    “I’m fine.”

    “It’s been a difficult day. You can go home.”

    “I still need to do inventory. I still need to–“

    “That can wait.” 

    Emily bit her lip. “Do I still have a job here?”

    Gary’s face blanched. Then he smiled kindly, in a way that reminded her so much of the guidance counselor she’d had in high school. “Of course you do. Why wouldn’t you?”

    She stopped and started her explanation several times, before she finally said it in the crass way it came to her: “Will someone really want to eat at the dead baby restaurant? It’s like those bad jokes from the 1990s. I can’t stand it.”

    Gary nodded sympathetically. For a moment, a flash of delight danced on his face. Was he thinking of one of those terrible jokes, too? She couldn’t get the horrific one she’d heard when she was in the hospital, during labor, out of her mind. It wasn’t funny at all, but in the midst of pain and terror and the unknown, she had grasped at it like a cord that connected her to another world. A peak experience, one of the grad students who came in for the same beer every week while grading–that’s what he had called giving birth. The top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. So at sixteen, she’d already experienced self-actualization. Even if she gave her baby up for adoption, it didn’t matter. She still had the joke to remember the experience by. 

    Emily wanted to throw up. 

    “You look pale, Em,” Gary said. “Take the week off. The construction crew is taking it off. And don’t worry–I already see the fear about being fired. And you won’t be. As far as I’m concerned, I want to give you a raise.”

    “But–I… I did everything wrong.”

    “You did everything a reasonable person would do. So what if the cops were a little harsh about moving the body? I would have done the same thing. And I really don’t think we need to worry about the Grad House getting a bad reputation. A reputation, yes, but I think this may actually make it more popular.”

    Emily’s stomach flipped again. “What? Why?”

    “Curiosity. We may not have dead baby jokes anymore–and those were popular in the 1960s, by the way, not so much the 1990s. It’s theorized that they became popular due to the second-wave feminist movement speaking more openly about contraceptives and abortion.”

    Again, another flip. Another feeling like a worm was inside of her. “What?”

    “Also Vietnam, and those crimes against children there. Anything to take away the pain, you know? Gallows humor. Anyway,” Gary said, quickly dismissing his minor history lesson with a wave of his hand. “Jokes aside, kids now listen to true crime podcasts. You know how many profs are pitching courses on true crime now, too? Or local history, or local hauntings. The things that are macabre always interest us.”

    “But… this isn’t a ghost story. That was a real baby. It had a mother. It–“

    “I know. I’m not saying it’s right or that it’s good. Just that it is. And that’s okay.” Gary reached his hand across Emily’s desk. He seemed to want to put his pam over her own hand, to comfort her through touch, but held back because of the numerous workshops they’d been given about harassment and boundaries. She wished he could touch her, though. She hadn’t touched anyone today but the dead baby. And before then, probably not since her thirty-fifth birthday party.

    Emily wanted to say something–touch me, fuck me, fire me, anything–but she just nodded. It is what it is, huh. Such a cop out of a response, but she was used to it. Why did things happen how they did? They just did. Why did sixteen year olds get pregnant? Either they were whores or victims, or it sometimes just happened. And you solved the problem. 

    How could she solve this problem? She should take her paid vacation time and just go home. Watch some Lifetime movies and maybe smoke a joint to relax, because thankfully, it was legal in Canada now. Thankfully, she wasn’t sixteen anymore. 

    Emily thanked Gary once again before she left her office. He followed her out the door, but said he was going to stay around and look at the beginning of the renovations. 

    “I used to be a history professor, you know,” he said. “This really was a farmhouse. I’m wondering if I can find anything else of note here, just to get the story together again. Maybe add it to another book.”

    “Oh. Sounds interesting,” she said, and meant it as much as she could. Down the stairs and passed the front bar, she noticed Dan the night manager on his phone. She was surprised he was still here. When he caught sight of her, he grinned widely. 

    “There you are. Perfect.” He rushed over to her with his phone, clearly recording. “Can you tell me what it was like to find the body?”

    “Why?”

    “I’m working on the social media campaign for this. It’ll bring in customers later on, you know. So I want to get the details right.”

    Emily wanted to grab the phone and shove it in Dan’s mouth. She wanted to tell him what the closed mummified eyes and skin of the baby felt like against her skin, but she just shook her head. Her hand went reflexively to her stomach. “That’s sick.”

    “It’s the truth.”

    “Then ask the history professor upstairs.”

    Dan let out a dismissive sound, but he was soon taking the steps two by two. Alone in the first floor of the farmhouse, Emily let out a loud sigh. She swore she heard it echo back, like a soul that had not yet been old enough to bless trapped inside the walls. 

    She ran out the front door and towards her apartment downtown. Halfway home, she remembered the joke she’d told herself during labor. She cackled in the middle of the street. No one looked at her, no one seemed to see her–it was a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of summer when almost all students were gone from the university town–but she still tried to muffle her mirth. She was not able to stop until she got to her empty apartment, and shut herself tightly inside, and the laughter was replaced by tears. 

    *

    Much to Emily’s dismay, Dan and Gary had been right. The moment they had clearance from the historical society and the police to return to the Graduate House to finish the renovations, they also had a boom in customers. 

    “We’re only at half capacity,” she tried to explain to a party of seven who came in without a reservation, and wanted a full table with alcohol and lunch service. “So the wait times might be a bit longer.”

    “That’s fine,” the man–boy, really–who had come into the Grad House said nonchalantly. “We can wait upstairs, right?”

    “No.” 

    “No?”

    “No,” Emily repeated, her brows furrowed. The constructor workers had done most of the intense labor on the expansion, but there were still regular sounds of sawing and grinding. “Do you not hear that?”

    The kid shrugged. “We just wanted to be close to the ghost.”

    “There is no ghost,” Emily spat out. She cleared her mind of her anger and then extended her hand, fake smile on her face, to the adjacent room. “But we can seat you in the dining area to the left.” 

    The group of boys in front of her shrugged and then spoke animatedly to one another as they went to their place. Emily put their order through the computer system and supervised as the rest of her staff–all grad students themselves–handled the order and the rowdiness of the group.

    Then another group came in. A couple on a date. Everyone wanted to go upstairs, and no one seemed to care that it was louder and louder in the Grad House as the day wore on. By the time Dan arrived for his night shift, he was trying to figure out ways to open the second floor since the construction workers would no longer be there, though there was sawdust and plastic sheets everywhere else. Even she had a hard time getting into the second-floor office. 

    “Seating people upstairs is not safe,” Emily told Dan. “There are nails and saws and who knows what else up there.”

    “Like another bouncing baby boy?”

    Emily shivered. “So we know it was a boy?”

    “Yes we do. The school newspaper put out the story. Died of natural causes, though I don’t know what that means when you’re sealed up in a wall.” Dan shook his head. He went on expanding his plans for the upstairs party area. Emily was no longer listening; she was seeking out a copy of the student newspaper she’d seen earlier in the day. She’d thrown it out, since it was half-grease stained, but now she was desperate for it. She found the page she needed, but didn’t get much more information than what Dan had already told her. The story was your basic student writing, with ridiculously added inaccurate and otherwise embellished details like the fact that the baby had been found with a rattle and now there were other ghost sightings. 

    “This is ridiculous,” she said and threw out the pages again. She made sure to ball them up, tear them on the weakened parts where the grease was, so they could not be taken back out of the trash. “None of that is true.”

    “What is true about true crime?” Dan said, thinking he was being philosophical. “Not even the murderers tell the truth about their crimes. Yet we watch it all.”

    “I don’t.”

    Dan didn’t respond. He was busy hooking something up to their TV monitors and speaker system. Her shift was already over, but Emily was rooted in place. Dan turned on the movie The Shining. The DVD intro had the image of Danny, the young boy, riding his trike in the hallway until he got to the twins. 

    Then it started over again, in a repetitive loop. 

    “This is sick,” Emily said. She clutched at her stomach again, then lower towards her abdomen. She whispered, “I feel sick.”

    “This is business.” Dan narrowed his eyes. He seemed as if he was about to ask if she was okay, but she scowled. So he raised a hand and waved. “Buy-bye. Have a good sleep.”

    Emily wanted to give him the finger. She wanted to take the rattle that she still had, after almost twenty years in a box in her closet, and leave it on his desk to see if he thought it was so fucking funny and good for business. 

    But she left. She tried not to be discouraged as she saw students reading the newspaper, or the many other copies she could not tear up and hide away in the trash, as they skittered across the campus in the wind. 

    *

    The next week was off-set with thunderstorms, complete with massive rains and flooding in some of the other buildings on campus. The construction needed to be put on hold, yet again, and now the Dean was visiting more and more frequently, worried that the additions would not be completed in time for the Fall semester. There was nothing that Emily, or even Dan could do to assuage his fear, though, so they merely buried themselves in the upkeep of the restaurant part of the business. 

    Customers were still trending upwards, so Emily’s staff had plenty enough to keep themselves focused on. Meanwhile, Emily had taken to hiding out in the basement of the farmhouse, where most of the inventory was kept. She didn’t have to interact with customers that way. She didn’t have to hear a half dozen student and stupid stories about the baby in the wall, and the woman who had had postpartum depression, and sealed herself away in another part of the farmhouse after drinking cyanide. 

    Emily knew that story wasn’t true, anyway. She’d now read Gary’s book on the history of the campus, and this strange farmhouse that had once been owned by a founding member of the town but had since been turned into a bar where drinking contests were held every Thursday night during exam season. Gary’s book was titled The Underside of Uptown; it was a slim book and that had not been checked out very much at all at the local library. Emily had been the first person to crack it’s spine. To spill coffee on its pages. And since she was already defacing an old book whose glue was starting to come loose, she’d written in between some of the lines instead. Just in pencil, but she’d been compelled to fix typos and errors in grammar. Like she’d been compelled to underline the name Mary Roden three times when she’d stumbled across it. 

    Mary Roden was the farmer’s daughter. She was the fourth out of seven kids, six of whom survived (the first son, the second born, died of complications at birth). She was the most likely mother of the child. At least, according to Emily. While most of the students believed it was the mother, Agatha Roden, who had sealed the baby up in the wall, or even possibly a peasant woman that the Rodens had found sleeping with their horses one morning, Emily knew it was Mary. Not any of the other daughters, but Mary. She had nothing to fall back on for her decision, but the longing stare in the girl’s eyes in archival photos. The large dresses she wore. And the fact that she was sixteen when the baby was most likely dated to have been born, according to the coroner. 

    Mary Roden had also never married. She left her father’s farmhouse at eighteen for the convent, but soon changed her mind and went into teaching. She lived as a religious teacher in a Catholic high school for some time, before she became a painter in the last years of her life. She never left the university town.

    Much to Emily’s dismay, Gary barely spent any time at all on the latter half of Mary’s life, especially her painting career. He spent very little time at all on the Roden women, mostly focusing on the history of the farmland the men handled, the travels that led them to the town, and all the other historic stuff that made them part of local legend. Emily supposed that only made sense–Gary’s prerogative was different than hers. 

    So she went out on her own and got to know Mary. It was hard, at first, to find anything beyond the archival photos reprinted in Gary’s work. Even harder to locate any record of her paintings. But she’d gotten lucky on one of her day’s off. After visiting one of the other historic sites in the city, she’d noticed a painting on a wall. A small scrawled signature in one corner and a familiar landscape pattern pulled her in closer and made her fetch the curator behind the front desk. 

    “Who painted this?” Emily asked. “And what is it?”

    “That’s the sun over the river, visible from the farmhouse that’s now on the university campus,” the curator explained. “And it was painted by the founder’s daughter.”

    “Mary Roden.”

    “Yes,” the curator answered, though Emily had not asked it as a question. “How did you know?”

    “I work at the Graduate House,” Emily said. The conversation ended there. The curator’s face had gone ashen. The dead baby. Its mention always made people go mute, go crazy, or laugh.

    So Emily’s research could only go so far. 

    Maybe that was why she spent more time in the basement. It helped to escape the rubber-necking student crowd, but it also gave her time to contemplate the life this girl must have lived. She painted landscapes, which was to say, she painted what she saw from her farmhouse window. She painted what she lived day in and day out, and she was the one who probably made the quilt she wrapped her child in. A last creation–or maybe her first? Emily didn’t know. But she liked to think about the woman who had given birth, maybe right here, maybe where the ice machine and the giant cans of chickpeas were located. Maybe she’d been raped by a stranger or had sex willingly with a farmhand or someone else forbidden, and it had been in the same place where she had given birth. Had she felt her baby move as she stitched her quilt? And when she gave birth, did that baby live very long after?

    Emily was filled with so many questions some afternoons she completely lost track of time. Other afternoons, her curiosity was tinged with nausea that made her wonder if there was mold in the basement. She wanted to throw up, but she didn’t want to move from her spot keeping vigil on a mother and child she knew nothing about, but had lived through as her own history lesson. It was only Dan’s heavy footsteps on the stairs, or her employees’ struggles, that brought her out of her reverie. She liked the basement. It was cold and cool on her back when she leaned against a wall. It reminded her of giving birth in the hospital, and all she’d wanted was the cold and cool ice chips in her mouth. 

    “Hey girlie,” Dan said. She hadn’t heard his footsteps this afternoon. “You okay?”

    “Fine.”

    Dan looked at her with true compassion in his eyes. His round face betrayed all of his emotions, including the kind and the callous alike. “You getting sleep? Or are you having bad dreams, too?”

    “You’re having bad dreams?”

    He shrugged. “Just all the baby stuff. The people. It’s creepy, really.”

    “Yes, it is. And no, I’m not having bad dreams because I respect the fucking dead.” 

    Emily pushed past Dan in the doorway, grabbed her coat from her locker, and stomped up the stairs. She left without saying goodbye or even finishing her inventory. It didn’t matter. Dan would cover for her, and then he’d probably explain her moods away as another form of being haunted, like PMS, though she hadn’t had a period in six weeks. 

    She was not pregnant. That was impossible without the man to supply something vital. But there was a moment, if only for a second, that she remembered that feeling of maybe. Of possibility, then fear. Was that what Mary had felt, too?

    No one at her work or in her current personal life–no one but her parents and that little girl’s adopted family–ever knew she’d had a kid. She’d been so worried having sex for the first time after she’d left her hometown that someone would know. They’d take one look at her vagina or stomach or even her face and just see the trace of motherhood there. The loss of a child, that wasn’t really the loss of a child, because she’d freely given her up. 

    But no one ever knew. 

    There was pure freedom, but also despair, in that knowledge. 

    When Emily stepped outside, the rain was still coming down. She darted away from the farmhouse and into one of the university buildings in the surrounding area. A long time ago, right around the time when the campus was given historical status, a bunch of tunnels underground were discovered. All the university buildings attached to them in some way, so profs and students could walk to and fro and not get pummeled by rain or hail or snow. The tunnels were no longer the rustic treks that servants and other farm workers had used in olden days, but there was still a rustic quality to them. A haunted quality, Emily knew now. 

    Inside the building that was normally designated for math students, she found the tunnel entrance. If she turned left, she’d keep going underneath the campus and into the parking lot, where she’d emerge on the other side and close to a bus stop that would take her back to her apartment. 

    But she went right. She walked underground past more math buildings and other entrances to classrooms. She walked and walked in what felt like a never-ending circle, but with a steady gait. She only stopped when she was sure she was directly underneath the farmhouse. 

    No students were around. Her breath had become shallow. She held it and heard nothing but her own heart. She put her hands against the concrete wall. She was positive this was where her back had been laying all week, as she counted out cans and then daydreamed about her adventures with Mary. As Mary. She felt so much like Mary in that moment she had to shake herself off like a wet dog coming in from the rain. She closed her eyes, saw quilts and paints, and then opened them and felt her own body. Her older body, thirty-seven-almost-thirty-eight and past her prime childbearing years. Yet she also felt that sixteen year old body, so young and skinny, suddenly blooming with life and fecundity. Then, that postpartum body that felt so saggy and like it was always floating, her uterus adrift underneath her stretched skin. 

    Emily shook violently in the tunnels. Worse than chills from the rain, her body felt as if it was now wracked with labor pains. She’d gotten the epidural at sixteen the moment she could. She wanted nothing to do with natural childbirth. She just wanted it out of her, and so she could hand her off to the family who would adopt her, the family who had taken care of her when her own family kicked her out. The Stevensons. They would not take care of Emily after the baby, she understood even at sixteen, but it didn’t matter then. She’d just focused on one day after another, one step at a time. And when her baby girl was gone from her arms, and no one met her for a ride after she left the hospital, she’d walked. 

    One step at a time, one foot in front of the other. She’d continued walking until, somehow, she ended up here. Twenty years later, in an underground tunnel. And now the pain had caught up to her.

    Emily fell to her knees on the tunnel floor. Bruises bloomed on her kneecaps, but it was nothing compared to the creeping sensation along her spine. The shaking of her legs, absolutely unable to walk. Her back smarted and flooded a warmth towards her front, her pelvis. She shook again, her entire body smarting, and then she blinked black spots. She opened her eyes and saw the yellow-painted tunnel, the school colors. She closed them again and it was dirt under her legs and hands. She saw a man in front of her, a young man, skinny and so much like the students who tried to order alcohol from her, thinking she’d not ID them. She touched the boy’s skin and found it to be warm. She was holding a boy, a live boy, and she longed for him. 

    “Mary, almost there,” he said to her. 

    Emily’s body shook. She blinked and saw the yellow tunnel again. She was not alone. A student–a young man, so much like the lanky boy in the distant vision–was at the other end of the tunnel. 

    “Are you okay, ma’am?”

    She moaned. She wasn’t thirty-seven, a ma’am, anymore. She was herself again at sixteen. She blinked and she was Mary again. She felt the sensation of something being ripped, and then something else dropping out of her. A baby. The sounds of crying. 

    Then nothing at all. 

    “I’ll get help,” the boy said in modern day, to this woman that was and was not Emily hunched over and bleeding with pain. 

    “I’ll get help,” the boy Thomas in front of Mary said. He left her with the baby in her arms, the baby that was turning blue, the baby she’d wanted to name Joshua but told no one else about. 

    Thomas left. The student left. 

    In Mary’s vision, the baby died and she wrapped him in her most prized possession, the quilt, and then locked her secret away. She did not talk to Thomas again. She went to the convent. She forgot. But she never forgot, because she painted and she painted. 

    Emily held nothing in her hands in modern day, but she was bleeding. It pooled between her legs as if she did give birth, and it stained her palms red. The student came back. So did a bunch of other paramedics. They took her away from the school, out into the rain, and she felt it like the cooling balm it was on her face. 

    She tried to repeat her mantra–I am an adult now. I am in charge here. I am Emily Jenkins, no longer Emmy, and I am not in trouble–but she slept instead. 

    *

    A cyst had burst in Emily’s uterus, which had then led to a nearly fatal hemorrhage. If the student had not come by, she may have died. “Have you ever been pregnant before?” the doctor asked in the hospital when Emily woke up. 

    To Emily’s surprise, she answered yes. 

    “That’s probably what happened, then,” the doctor–a young man with the surname of Thomas–said. “Sometimes we don’t get everything after giving birth. A small piece sticks around. Becomes a cyst, a tumor, something else inside. Then for whatever reason, it bursts. You’re lucky.”

    She nodded. She wanted to thank Mary, Dan, and Gary. The stupid construction workers. The unknown boy who saved her in the tunnel, and Mary’s child’s father, too. Instead, she asked, “Will I be able to have kids again?”

    “Um. I don’t know,” he said. “You still have your uterus, but you’re past age thirty-five. It comes with risks at that age.”

    “I know. But it seems like a lot of things come with risks.”

    The doctor didn’t argue. He left her in her room to complete her recovery. Dan and Gary both came to see her in the afternoon, but they awkwardly talked around the issue. She would miss the first week back during the new semester, when they would roll out some of the more official changes. “You know, like the patio upstairs now that’s finally been finished. And the presentation from the historical society about the ghost. I mean baby.”

    Emily blinked, seemingly in pain. Gary touched her hand–for real this time–to comfort her. 

    Emily pulled her hand away. “You should put one of Mary’s paintings in the upstairs room. Over the part of the wall where the dead baby was found.”

    When Gary showed no sign of comprehension, though he was a historian of the farmhouse, she went on and told him about her own research. He seemed more delighted that she’d read his book than anything else.

    “Will you get the painting, though?” Emily asked. “You may have to borrow it.”

    “I’ll look into it.”

    Emily knew Gary wouldn’t get the painting. Either he’d forget the moment he left the hospital, or he wouldn’t be able to speak to the curator without sounding like an arrogant ass. Emily couldn’t stand the sound of his voice as he and Dan both continued the conversation about opening day at the Graduate House without her participation. All the energy that had once flowed through her, making her experience her life from a new angle, seemed gone. Poof. She ran a hand over her belly but nothing happened. She was empty now, though for a few hours in the tunnel, she’d been so full of life. Pain, too, and haunting, but she sort of liked it. 

    She thought of holding her girl before she gave her up. Empty, too. And she’d stayed that way for too long after. 

    Emily turned away from her past and stared at Gary. Too old, she decided. She regarded Dan. He was older than her, unmarried, and she’d never seen him date. Probably because he, like her, was always at work. She considered his kindness–if she could call it that–that day in the basement before she almost died. 

    She considered his face, round and cherubic. His long arms and legs. His suaveness, his intelligence (at least for marketing and the student body at the school), all his other inheritable traits. She could do worse, she thought. When Dan’s gaze caught her own, she smiled. 

    “You’re feeling better?” he asked. 

    “I am,” she said. Then she leaned close, grasping his hand in her own. “Do you want to hear a joke?”

    END

  • 31 for 31: The Patchwork Girl

    My queer Frankenstein story is next: The Patchwork Girl

    This story was initially written for Derek Newman-Stille’s edited anthology for Renaissance Press back in 2018. I was friends with Derek from my master’s program, so when he posted a call for submissions asking for new interpretations on the Frankenstein mythos, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

    Part American Mary meets Silence of the Lambs, “The Patchwork Girl” follows a queer, nonbinary narrator as they become enchanted with the ‘vampire’ woman who seems to lure trans people back to her house for some unknown reason. What follows is my mix-mash of Igor and Victor Frankenstein’s relationship, and some death-defying transformations.

    I had so much fun writing this, so I was even more happy to have it accepted into the anthology, and then (I believe) long-listed for a Canadian award. Didn’t win, but hey, tis always a pleasure to have been considered.

    Enjoy!

    The Patchwork Girl

    “They say she’s a vampire.”

    “And who exactly is ‘they’?”

    “I am,” I chimed in. No one in the group laughed. It was a bad joke. A bad joke about neutral pronouns, which were already precarious at best. You should be more serious, Iris. Each joke may end in death. Laughter is one of the last things trans women hear before the bashing. And so on and so on. My skin already prickled with embarrassment and shame. 

    I went down one aisle of the poorly lit store, searching for shirts that could button over my too-large chest. Bailey and Marta went down the other aisle towards neon athletic wear. Over the hum of the Muzak and the shuffling of a dozen sneakers, I still heard parts of their conversation. They seemed fairly adamant that the woman with dark hair and a sharp nose who let us into the department store after hours to shop was a supernatural creature — a vampire, no less — rather than a godsend.

    I’d first heard about The Night Shift runs when I was still working an actual night shift at the gas station. Hormones were still new to me. The always persistent fuzz above my lip became a ‘stache in no time, but I looked more like a twelve-year-old boy from a trailer park than a twenty-seven-year-old nonbinary person. I was still figuring out the right tone for my voice and the clothing I could wear. The night shift at the Gas ‘n’ Go made the perfect cover. I could still talk to people — more often than not truckers who couldn’t use a credit card or someone who wanted to know where the bathroom was — but I was mostly in the dark. I waited for my shift to end, watching YouTube videos on my phone and restocking candy. 

    When the woman — or vampire — came into the gas station, she had been a bright light at the end of a long night. She read me instantly as a trans person, but it wasn’t with disgust. Her slight tilt of a head and a ghost of a smile was how Marta had read me in our university class together. It wasn’t gender pieces falling out of place but falling into place. Recognition rather than revulsion.

    “You ever have any nights free?” she asked.

    I avoided answering. If she wasn’t a trans person herself, then she was a trans chaser. And I wasn’t interested in women anyway. 

    “I run a business. But it’s only open at night. You should come by.” She left a card on the counter and took her iced coffee back to her vehicle. I barely had a chance to see the plates on her van before she sped away. 

    The Night Shift was printed in the centre of card, indented and embossed, followed by the store’s tagline, private shopping for the private client. It listed a dilapidated department store in the middle of a strip mall along the border of Ottawa and Québec. The hours were all from midnight to dawn. A trans symbol was in one corner of the card, along with a disability sign, and two others that I didn’t recognize. I almost wrote the whole thing off as a strange invitation to a sex club, but when I ran into Bailey in my apartment after he’d stayed the night, I ended up telling him over coffee. He made me repeat the story several times before he called Marta, his dark eyes wide.

     “The rumours are true. The Night Shift exists. And we’re going.”

    Three weeks later, we were still shopping whenever we could get the time off. The Night Shift really was a private shopping experience for private people. A minute after midnight, the woman would show up in her dark van, or sometimes on foot carrying a large suitcase, and open the clothing store for a crowd of waiting people. She let them shop in peace while she worked the cash register. Everything had to be done in cash to keep the computer system and security system from coming on. Most of the time she screwed up the amount of change, but none of that mattered. Bailey, Marta, and I could shop for clothing. It seemed so quotidian when I tried to explain it to other people — cis ones especially — but this was so monumental. Marta wasn’t thrown out of the lingerie section. Bailey could find what he wanted without eyes on the back of his head. And I could bounce from the kids’ section to the women’s and men’s in an attempt to find something that fit my awkward body and gender without worrying. Some nights we spent the full six hours here, while other times we just went in for one specific item. 

    Tonight, I was trying to find a shirt. The buttons on my plaid button-up kept busting open under the strain of my chest. I could only depend on my compression binder for so much and I was getting sick of sewing buttons back on. There was no sign of surgery in my future. Gas station attendants weren’t exactly paid well. And doctors didn’t believe in nonbinary identity. While Marta and Bailey already had their future paths figured out like a tarot card spread, I was still stuck in the in-between realm of the querent. Maybe that was why they suddenly seemed to turn on the woman who had opened up the store for us and given us a new lease on life — or at least, a new impression of fashion.

    “She’s gotta be a vampire,” Marta insisted. “Why else do this?”

    “And she’s always up at night.”

    “I’m up at night,” I said, walking over to them. “And I’m not a vampire.”

    “But you’re trans. She’s not. I don’t mean vampire-vampire.” Marta rolled her eyes. “Obviously. That’s not real. But psychic vampires are. I mean, what exactly is she getting out of this arrangement?”

    “The change from my twenty?” I suggested. “The feeling of doing a good deed in this transphobic world? PC points?”

    “Pffft. She’s getting something more than goodie-goodie points. She’s feeding off our energy in some way. You know how people think trans people are magic.” Marta went off to list the mythological figures who were trans in some way, and then how this lore had been appropriated into a sci-fi book she’d been reading. 

    Bailey nodded alongside her. “I can see that. Maybe we shouldn’t keep going here. Something does feel off.”

    “Yeah. You notice how almost no one is a repeat customer?” 

    Marta gestured around the store. We’d been there four times, which was hardly enough to establish a pattern, but I could see Marta’s point. Each time we went in, there seemed to be a new crowd of people. I thought that was exciting — more people in the trans community to know — but everyone seemed to be quiet, evasive. No one wanted to speak, except the three of us. 

    When a tall person came out of the change room, holding a red cocktail dress in their hands, some form of recognition panged inside of me. I pointed to them and insisted I’d seen them before. Bailey and Marta shook their heads. We all watched as the person went to the cash register to buy their dress. The woman smiled, embracing them in a hug as if they were old friends. Then she slipped something in their cellophane bag before they left.

    “Was that… that was a blood bag, wasn’t it?” Marta said. “Oh my God. Oh my God. We’re leaving. Right now.”

    “No,” I said, but the two of them had already stashed their clothing items at the end of the aisle. The customer service worker in me wanted to stop and clean, but I followed my friends out the door. The woman’s eyes followed us as we left without purchasing a thing. Even through the thick panelled glass of the department store window, I was still sure she was watching us. 

    “That was fucking close,” Marta said. “Let this be a lesson, though. Never trust cis people. Ever, ever, ever. All of them are damn vampires.”

    Bailey echoed the sentiment before adding that he’d like some coffee. I followed them both, knowing that until dawn, this was the only path I could take.

    #

    When the sun came up, I walked back towards the strip mall. Bailey and Marta lived on the other side of town and took a bus long before I departed. They would never know that I’d doubled back to see the woman — which was as good as it was bad. I now had privacy so I could explore, but it also meant that if she was a murderer like Marta now believed, I could disappear like a ghost. I tried not to think of that possible reality, or how the papers would address me if I were to turn up missing. 

    I didn’t have to wait long before the low lights of the store flicked off entirely. The woman walked out wearing a trench coat, carrying her giant suitcase, and locked the door. Her dark hair was tied in a ponytail and buried under a red baseball cap. She had sunglasses perched on the edge of her nose. Though she tried to disguise herself, it was definitely her. Her suitcase was distinctive, battered and covered in patches, but there was also an aura which hung around her, one I hadn’t quite noticed until now. Whether it was supernatural or not, I still wasn’t sure.

    She turned a corner and headed towards the downtown core. I followed close behind, ducking under awnings and pretending to light a cigarette every so often. I figured I wasn’t memorable. Anywhere I went, people seemed to do their best to not look at me, because looking meant deciphering my curvy body plus a moustache and short hair. Looking was too confusing. Being in-between meant I was everything, but also nothing. I banked on that feature of myself as I watched the woman walk to an apartment building with an ornate facade. The sun had fully risen. She hadn’t turned to stone or flames, so she couldn’t have been a vampire. When she stepped inside the building, I lost my eye on her entirely.

    I examined the tenant list on the apartment building but found zero names. They were all numbers and floors. For a moment, I wondered if this place as an office rather than a residence, when a buzzing sounded. The lock on the door clicked open. I knew I didn’t have long so I darted inside without thinking. A camera hung in front of me, fixated on anyone who entered the foyer. 

    I’d be caught. Wherever she’d gone, she was watching me. 

    “Shit.”

    “Don’t worry,” a voice came over a PA system. It was low and sensuous; familiar from the gas station. Definitely her. “You’re not in any danger. But I could use your help.”

    “I. Um. Okay. I don’t think I have any choice.”

    There was a beat of silence before she asked, “What’s your blood type?”

    “O-.”

    “You seem sure.”

    “I am.”

    Another beat of silence. Followed by another. She seemed to wait for me to tell her the story of my blood, but I refused. I wondered which one of us would win the standoff; I wondered which one of us had more to hide and more to lose. 

    “Well, okay. If you’re right, then you’re a universal donor. And you’re exactly what I need. Come on down to room six hundred. I’ll pay you for your time.”

    I walked, knowing that again, this was the only path I could take.

    #

    She was in her office with the tall person from the store. They were naked, save for a green cloth over their genitals and chest, blocking their bits like a censorship bar. The table they were on was thick and seemed to be made of stone, rather than metal and plastic. Their body seemed to shine as the lights above them cascaded over the flecks of granite and quartz in the slab. They were clearly asleep, knocked out for some kind of surgery. The woman wore a sleek, black outfit, her hair still tied behind her slender shoulders. She wore plastic gloves that reached to her elbows and a doctor’s mask around her neck, giving her space to talk. The mask and gloves were the only items that matched the operating room decor. There were no machines to monitor heart rate or blood pressure; no typical equipment common in an operating room. The walls were littered with charts and posters depicting the human body, bisected and full of colour. There were flowers, rather than organs under the ribcage. Each image outlined chakras, not bloodlines. 

    “What… what is this place?”

    “This is the operating theatre,” she said. “But I take the term theatre more seriously than others.”

    “Is… are they…?”

    “They are okay, yes.” Her use of neutral pronouns was with practiced ease. Somehow, this made me feel better. She wasn’t some strange surgeon trying to open up trans people to see if they really were unique snowflakes inside or draining their blood to consume gender magic. She wasn’t one of us, but she was next to us. Peripheral. She was a doctor, or something like it, trying to help. “We have run into a snag, though. Nin thought they were O+ but now I see that this is not the case. So I need to have a universal donor to even out what I’ve already done.”

    Nowhere did I see blood. But I sensed tearing, ripping of flesh, and a state of emergency that tinted the room. Not an aura, not quite — but a feeling of pain that I could taste. Nin was in trouble and I was the only hope.

    I started to roll up my sleeve without being told. The woman nodded with a pleased smile as she placed the mask over her face. She retrieved a lawn chair, painted in bright pink, and set it down next to one of her side tables lined with instruments. Each one was gold tipped and covered with a sheen of glitter. Some had pearls at the end, others had what seemed to be more quartz and diamonds. A deck of tarot cards was at the centre, the Devil card flipped up, along with the ten of pentacles. 

    “Inheritance. Wealth,” she said, gesturing to the card. “It’s Nin’s time to get what they deserve.”

    I didn’t say anything. I watched as she withdrew a clear rod that was attached to a blood bag. She moved her hands like a magician using the clear rod as a wand. She tapped the crease of my elbow. My blood came out. The glass stained red. I felt nailed to the floor, filled with a sick sense of my body’s blood leaving me. 

    Then it was over. She placed a hand on my head and another card emerged. The five of cups. Two of the cups on the card were upright, while three were spilled. A man in the centre crossed his arms angrily.

    “Ah,” she said. “Bad things have happened — your cups have spilled, but you need to focus on what’s in front of you.”

    Again, I was silent. She added the blood to the body in front of me. The body of Nin, who was still sleeping, still dreaming in some far away, in-between place. The woman appeared by their side and did more sleight of hand magic tricks. Blood spilled everywhere. Before it pooled and turned black on the floor, the blood became dust — glitter. Nin’s body started to change. The green fabric covered their genitals fell away. 

    And there were no genitals. Nin was smooth like a doll, like a Ken or Barbie or both all at once. The front of their chest was devoid of nipples. All the glittered blood that had once been spilt was now clean. The woman turned away from the body on the slab, her breath heavy. Whatever she had done had taken all her strength. I could feel her exhaustion in the air, taste it like the coppery patina of pennies in a fountain.

    “Are you okay?” I asked.

    “I am. Nin will wake up in an hour or two.” She removed her medical gear into a blue bin on the far side of the wall. When she turned back to me, she extended her hand. “I should introduce myself, though. I’m Mary Michelle Frances Stein. But most people call me Shelly.”

    #

    I had coffee with Shelly until Nin woke and left. After their hug, Nin slipped an envelope into Shelly’s coat pocket. A payment for services rendered. I watched from her office window as they entered the late morning Ottawa street, now nearly barren after rush hour, and then walked into their new life. Nin would never come back to the store at night. There would be no need. 

    Nin was not the only person Shelly had helped. Ever since she opened The Night Shift to allow trans and disabled people to shop without worry, she realized that the clothing was only the first step of the magic, as she called it. Trans people could use clothing to transform their bodies on the surface. That was easy. But the internal matching of the external was always the last stage, always the hardest path to endure in order to be rewarded. That type of magic required someone else. So she offered her services. For payment, of course. 

    But there was also something else she was getting, I was sure of it. Marta’s words were like a warning on the back of my eyelids. I wanted to ignore her, but I had to ask. “Why? Why bother with all of this?”

    She set down her coffee with a deliberate motion. She stared into the black void as she considered my question. 

    “Surely this is not the first time you’ve been asked?” 

    “No. But I still don’t have an answer beyond ‘why bother doing anything?’”

    “That’s not an answer.”

    “Exactly. But I find origin stories boring. I think you would know that most of all.”

    I huffed. I thought of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health doctors in Toronto who rejected my surgical application. Gender must always have an origin. It must have an answer and a clear definitive beginning. Being two genders at once, or none of the above, made no sense to the panel of experts. So I made no sense to them. 

    But someone who was two at once and nothing at all was what I had watched come out Shelly’s door. Nin was real. I was real. And so was Shelly, even if she didn’t want to tell me how she had come to be this way. 

    “You want to know why I know I have O blood?” I asked.

    She didn’t nod or say a thing. I went on.

    “Because when my mom was pregnant with me, she needed those shots to balance out the proteins. Dad was O+ and mom was O-. Right from the start, I was an issue. Things couldn’t mix or balance in us. I came out as O-, and my mom always thought that meant I was always going to be like her. Sorry to disappoint, Mom. But I prefer to be in the middle. As always.”

    “You prefer to be universal,” she said. “The universal donor is also the universal door.”

    “Exactly.”

    “I’m glad you knew your type. It’s fascinating when people don’t. I can’t fathom it. How can you be so sure of some items about yourself, but then forget others? It’s not the first time something like Nin’s issue has happened here. They thought they were universal too. But when I opened them up, I saw for myself. Not a lie, but a convenient myth they had told themselves.”

    “But… there was no wound. How could you tell Nin’s blood type without a wound? And why does the blood matter?”

    She smiled. “The blood, like the clothing, is part of the show. Part of the magic.”

    “You keep saying that, but what does it mean?”

    With a heavy sigh, she explained to me the nuances of psychic surgery. Her brand, of course. She wasn’t like one of the duplicitous cult leaders who perpetuated a medical fraud in order to leech every last penny out of poor people who didn’t know any better. She even cited a case of a con man who had contracted leprosy from doing too many fraudulent psychic surgeries, as a way of showing how irony and karma would catch up to those who used magic for trickery alone. “Cons are not what I do here. I use the pomp and circumstance of psychic surgery, but I actually pull something out or put something back in. I actually find what is useful inside of someone and then I allow their body to reach that potential.”

    “Their potential? How is this not a con job too?” I asked, but soon bit back my words. I saw the smooth skin of Nin and I was awash with the memories of the operating room once again. No, the operating theatre. Surgery was always a show. 

    She reiterated that point over and over again. “Surgery’s a show — and gender’s a cultural artefact. Both are made up fairy tales, but they are still real. Very real. It has taken me a long time to understand the magic behind gender, and then perform surgeries in this way, but I assure you, my intentions are true.”

    “How long?” I asked. 

    She leaned into her coffee, her body folding into sadness. The tempo of the room changed. I heard music inside my ear, Brahms or Mozart, and then I saw a face. A man’s face — but not a man’s. He was caught in-between like me. He liked the pronouns he/she but hated the skin and body that came with them.

    “My husband Eugene — Genie — died before his show could end. When a bus crashed, he was one of the many injured. The paramedics cut open his shirt and found a bra underneath, along with panties now visible above the rim of his jeans. Instead of performing CPR, they laughed. He died. Story done. Poof. Over.” She sighed. “I never knew these parts of him. He kept it all hidden at the back of his closet like a dirty secret. So I opened my store at night, hoping to make amends in some way. If I could be open to others, maybe his spirit could rest. I started to feel the force of gender. Not his gender, but all genders. I started to acknowledge that we don’t just have physical bodies, but four-dimensional ones. He left the mortal world. He became matter and energy. In a way, that was what he wanted. Pure energy, magical and ethereal. But if I could synthesize a process to bring the fourth dimensional magical bodies to the surface, then no other trans person had to die to achieve it. I could help. I could find what people wanted.”

    I had to laugh. It was funny, right? I wanted it to be funny. A long-extended joke. Marta putting me on, hiring an out-of-work actress to deliver a strange sci-fi monologue. A pit in my stomach would have even wanted for Marta’s other hypothesis to be right. This coffee talk was a long con and I would eventually be skinned and made into a Buffalo Bill suit. It would only be appropriate. 

    But Shelly was serious. I felt it inside.

    “The blood is the portal,” she said. “The link between planes of existence. And I have to say… my surgery is stronger when it has access to a universal donor. How would you like a more permanent job?”

    Before I answered, she divided the money that Nin had given her and handed a section of it to me. It was over one thousand dollars. Rent for the next month. I wouldn’t have to do a night shift at the gas station ever again. 

    But I already knew I was going to say yes. 

    #

    For the next three months, I performed seven operations. I watched as her technique morphed from the sloppy and slap-dash emergency lifesaving surgery of Nin to the high art performance where her talent was obvious. With my blood as the universal door opener, she could access the fourth dimension without worry. 

    Colours spilled forth from the next surgical client, a trans man named Carl who wanted his breasts removed. Since he wanted to keep his genitals, Shelly presented him with an aura around his thighs, like a halo of good feelings. No more dysphoria. Each time he touched himself or someone touched him, bursts of colours erupted in front of his eyes. Next was a trans woman named Julie-Anne. When Shelly opened up her chest cavity in order to construct breasts, a rabbit burst forth. It hopped around the operating room until I caught it and put it in a cage. When I realized that Shelly already had the cage set up prior to the surgery, I learned that sometimes creatures moved inside of us. One day it was a rabbit, other days it was a cat, or a misshapen demon creature that Shelly had to kill the moment after it was out. Depending on what a person experienced, what they internalized as part of their life story, and what they considered to be their own special kind of magic, that was what came out of them. That was what made up their fourth dimensional bodies and their quixotic gendered souls.

    The most boring surgeries were the standard ones. A trans woman named Callie who wanted a tracheal shave had a balloon float out of her and then bust. That was it. Even the atmosphere of the surgery had been lacklustre. When a trans man wanted larger hands and feet, small stones fell out of his fingers and toes, turned grey, and then turned to dust. No show whatsoever. 

    But each patient was grateful. They hugged Shelly as they left and sung her praises. They even started to hug me as they left, once they realized I was the assistant to the master; Igor to the gender saver Frankenstein — a neutral party in every way.

    I earned more than I ever dreamed. I let the money stack up in an ornate music box my mother had given me at age seven and that I couldn’t bear to part with, even if my mother had parted ways with me. The music soon became stifled by crumpled bills and wouldn’t shut. But I couldn’t deposit that level of cash without looking suspicious. It also didn’t seem real. The magic I had witnessed from my own blood paled in comparison to commerce. One morning, as I counted, I realized I could afford my own surgery. I could remove the breasts from my chest and then buy all the shirts I wanted and needed without the fear of busting a button again. I could shop in daylight hours. I could pass as something. Maybe not a man or a woman, but my invisible identity would yield safety. 

    The daylight didn’t interest me anymore. I put my money back in the music box and returned to Shelly’s place, eventually letting my lease lapse and my apartment become vacated. After weeks of helping Shelly, though, she had not asked me about my own psychic surgery. Even with all of our successes, I still seemed to be a lowly Igor and nothing but. 

    One night, after she’d pulled a live dove from the centre of a trans man’s chest, I felt something like wings flutter inside of me. Was I filled with feathers? Would I explode under the real lights of a surgical room? I wanted to know. And I couldn’t take it anymore.

    After John had left with the dove in a cage to keep as a pet familiar, I walked right over to Shelly. “Why haven’t you operated on me yet?”

    “Whoa, whoa. I feel the anger. It’s blue and purple by your eyes.”

    “Is it because of the blood?” I asked, ignoring her. “Am I not a universal donor if you perform surgery on me?”

    She sighed. She gestured to the table and we sat down. I thought I was going to hear a lecture about how psychic surgery would make my fourth dimensional body become manifest, therefore I would no longer be in-between, so I could no longer be a helper. I expected her to reject me. Doctors had always rejected me. Why wouldn’t the magical kind of doctor be the same? But instead she grabbed my hand. Warmth radiated from her.

    “You’re far stronger than you could ever imagine.”

    “Because of the blood?”

    “Yes and no. The more you witness here, the more you learn. The more you believe and the more magic that gets stored inside of you. If I perform surgery on you, it would be a miracle. It would be like opening a new world and watching as a new mythology comes forward.”

    I felt that flutter again, but it wasn’t wings. It was like a multitude of different pathways and identities coming out of me all at once. A house of tarot cards collapsing and rebuilding. All future trajectories — everything and nothing — available before me. 

    I wanted that more than anything in the world. “So why won’t you work on me?”

    “Because… I fear that you won’t come back after it’s done. And I’ve enjoyed our time. It’s been such a long time since anyone’s been around me.”

    The loss of her husband tinged her sadness — but again, there was something more. I squeezed her hand. I sent her silent waves of approval, of hope, of understanding. Eventually, she crashed under my waves. 

    “I’m a monster.”

    “What?”

    “I’m a monster,” she repeated. “I’m Frankenstein. In the story, the creature is never the monster. That was not what Mary Shelley wanted or intended. It was science. It was technological progress. It was the horrors of discovery. I am all of those things at once. So I will always be a monster.”

    “That’s…” I couldn’t argue. Her words were true. Dr. Frankenstein was the monster and all things that I had been through only confirmed that doctors were still monsters. Especially to trans people. I thought of Marta’s words about the soul-sucking nature of cis people. Shelly was cis. She was the enemy.

    But she had also created so much magic. I could feel it inside of me. She had created at least half of the pathways that I now felt under my skin as emergent possibilities. I wanted to burst forward, to achieve what I wanted, but I couldn’t without her help. I never could have without her help. 

    “Why is the monster always a bad thing?” I asked. “Why are doctors always bad?”

    “Because they exploit. Because they…”

    “Because they can’t see what’s already there. Because they don’t listen to the patient. The science itself isn’t bad, though. Cis people aren’t bad. And monsters aren’t bad. But the lack of insight and understanding always leads to bad things. That’s it. Everything else is neutral.”

    She tilted her head in the same way she had when she first met me. I saw so much behind her eyes. The colour of her husband’s lingerie, the patina of desire mixed with tragedy she felt for him, and my own lineage of rainbow pathways bursting forth. It made me think of a game I had played as a kid, which was really more like a story told through computer links, called The Patchwork Girl. It was about Frankenstein too, but in this version, Mary Shelley made the female monster for herself. The story was told in bits and pieces, completely out of order, and overlaid over an image of a bisected female body that acted as the home screen. It was the first game that made me realize I had desire for something more than my own body. I thought it meant I was queer. I thought it meant I was trans. But maybe it meant that I was magic inside. Or held so many magical possibilities underneath me, just like the story suggested. 

    In a way, all of these answers were right. And that was the real point of both the game and the operating theatre now. There were no monsters or victims or innocent people or even fully men or women anymore. There was a patchwork; a cluster; a bursting forth of so many different options that every single one was golden.

    “You’re not a monster. You’re a patchwork girl,” I told her. “I’m patchwork too. We’re both made from borrowed parts and we work to stitch together and open up the fourth dimension.”

    My words felt silly. They felt like reading in another language. But she smiled, as if I had finally presented her with an alternative way of seeing her life. As if I had finally given her a word for her identity that didn’t make her feel like shit. 

    “Okay,” she said. She touched the centre of my chest. The fluttering happened again. “Let’s open you — all of you — up.”

    #

    “They say she’s a vampire.”

    “And who is they?” I asked, stepping close to the two trans women as they shopped in the blouse section of the store. They baulked under my gaze. Then they turned to one another, as if to confer an answer like school children before answering.

    “No one. Just this woman named Marta. She runs the counselling centre.”

    “And she warned us about this place.”

    “Mmhmm.” I nodded. Years had passed. Marta had obtained her surgery. Gotten a better job with her new license and birth certificate, but she still worked within the community. Bailey also obtained his surgery and better identification, which he used to disappear into complacent masculinity. Their chosen pathways, their lives. Not my magic — but still no less valid. “Well, I used to know Marta. She means well. But I also know Shelly, and I can tell you that she’s no vampire.”

    “Then what is she?” one of them asked. “Because this seems too good to be true.”

    I smiled. I touched my chest. My breasts were now gone. But inside my front shirt pocket was a figurine that once used to belong inside a music box I had as a child, which had now been pulled out of the centre of me through psychic surgery. The tiny ballerina dancer was clear glass, but not opaque. Whenever I wanted to see inside myself, in the magic that Shelly had tapped and rearranged, all I had to do was hold the tiny glass dancer up to the light. 

    I held the figurine up in the store. Rainbow colours burst forth. The women gasped. They probably heard music, though not the same music I heard. I’d realized that part was different; everyone had their own stereo in their heads, but the emotions were all the same. Joy and elation. Freedom. 

    Pure magic. 

    I pocketed my glass figurine once again. The music stopped. 

    Their eyes were still wide. “What is… how is…?”

    “You should ask Shelly.” I shot her a look across the department store. She hugged a person by the cashier and slipped them the address for her place. We would have to leave soon. I turned back towards the girls. “Just be respectful when you talk, okay? Shelly is not a vampire or a monster. She’s just like us.”

    One of them scoffed. “Impossible.”

    “Not so.”

    “But for real, though,” the other one said. “If she’s not a vampire, then what is she?”

    “A patchwork girl. Stitched together from second hand parts, but still no less real. Like me, like her.” I flicked my glass figurine once again. I left them with a cascade of light, the doors to our world now open.

    END

  • 31 for 31: Biology’s Void by Eve Morton

    An alien story for today!

    “Biology’s Void” was written after I had an amazing conversation at an academic conference with another grad student who was really, really into aliens. Like really-really. She was doing her entire dissertation on the abduction narrative; she laid out the stages as she saw them, and as she’d built from her research. Meanwhile, I told her about Betty and Barney Hill, the interracial couple from the 1960s who were abducted, and who had just been covered on Last Podcast on the Left.

    We talked for hours.

    I always think I’m not very into alien stories–and then events like that happen, or I end up getting sucked into X-File marathons, and I remember my absolute love of the horror behind these experiences.

    The main character in “Biology’s Void” is directly inspired by Betty and Barney Hill, and the concept of ‘missing time’ as it relates to alien abductions (and also traumatic experiences; see Mysterious Skin for the other major influence here). It’s still one of my favourite stories that I wrote, probably because after that hours-long conversation, it was pretty much a breeze to write.

    I hope you enjoy it too! It would be published a few years later in an anthology that now seems to be defunct, but I found here.

    Biology’s Void

    It is November 12th 2017. 1:05 AM. My name is Barney Addison, and I am missing time. 

    Barney clutched at his throat. The words echoed in his head, but didn’t come out of his mouth. When he found no wounds on the front of his trachea, he reached behind his ears. Nothing. Next to his pulse and ankles. Nothing. His chest. Only the ruddy scars from his mastectomy six months earlier. They weren’t bleeding, but wetness clung around his dark T-shirt chest that smelled like plant matter or vacuumed space; like an office building basement after the cleaners come. His cargo shorts were singed at the edges. All of this could have been from falling asleep on the building roof with a cigarette in his mouth and a drink in his hand. Or it could be what his father always prepared him for.

    Barney stood up from lying down. The glow of the North York hospital and IKEA anchored him. He was the Sheridan building apartment roof, close to the Leslie Street subway station. He only recognized the building’s position from when he’d explored the neighbourhood earlier in the summer when he began delivering mail; he had no recollection of climbing the stairs or taking the back elevator entrance. All he could recall was coming home from work, changing his clothing, and then—three hours were gone.

    Barney’s heart rate skyrocketed. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be. Alien invasions were something his bipolar father fixated on during his youth. They were something syndicated on the Syfy channel and Space Network, closed inside paperbacks. Not real, not real, not real. 

    “It is November 12th 2017. My name is Barney Addison,” he said aloud, repeating a drill he hadn’t done in at least ten years. “And I am missing time.”

    *

    Gordy’s window was open when Barney arrived.

    “Welcome,” Gordy said as soon as he saw Barney swing in from the fire escape. “By all means, come right in. Be sure to wipe your feet on the matt I’ve put out just for you.”

    Barney’s shoes crunched against newspaper by the window. He’d been coming into Gordy’s bedroom by whatever means necessary since the two were teens and next door neighbours. His window jumping was a hard habit that he’d maintained until this day, even when Gordy lived on the first stop on the Leslie Street subway and in a third floor apartment building.

    Barney opened his mouth to tell him about the aliens, but Gordy had turned around and walked into his kitchen. Music played on a speaker in the front area, sending low vibrations through the barely lit apartment. Several people in brightly coloured shirts sat on Gordy’s couch, lost to their own drug-induced world. Gordy’s pill collection was all over his end table, guarded by Chris, Gordy’s long-term boyfriend who also moonlighted as a nurse. Chris didn’t wave or look up. The apartment was already booming with business. 

    In the kitchen, Gordy took down a bottle of cheap scotch and started to pour it into glasses. He made sure to line up the drinks in front of Barney so he could watch every step of the drink making process. He let Barney choose what glass to take before he took a sip of his own.

    “So what’s up? I sense a meeting between us.”

    Barney clasped the glass, but didn’t drink until Gordy swallowed his first sip. His hands were shaking. “I’m missing time.”

    Gordy furrowed his brows. “Like…a black out? A Rohypnol episode?”

    “No.” Barney shook his head. “I know it’s not that. I was on a roof when I woke up.”

    “Wait. Back it up. Tell me from the moment you lost time.” Gordy leaned on the counter, sipping his drink. His eyes fixated on Barney, his face marked with concern. In spite of the party going on in his kitchen, it was clear that Gordy this was his first drink of the night.  

    After a sip, Barney went through the night as he remembered from work to changing clothing to three hours gone. “It’s not a bad date or a dream. I was alone. And nothing in my apartment was tampered, and I wasn’t taking any drugs.”

    “But you do go creepy crawling sometimes.” Gordy gestured to his own window and to Barney’s lifetime of climbing buildings or houses. When Barney worked as a maintenance man, he’d explored during his down time and basically had an entire layout of the Toronto apartment building complexes memorized. Once you figure out how to get into one building, you can get into any other. And with Barney’s array of grey uniforms from all his jobs, he could easily pass a worker to gain access on the ground floor before exploring bigger heights. He’d never break into strangers houses–only friends like Gordy who had given baseline consent to creepy crawl inside–but Barney liked roofs and did what he could to find as many as possible. He liked the lights of the city. It was all an escape from the mundane existence of being a teenager in small town Tweed, and then being an adult in a city so big everyone was anonymous. 

    “Maybe you hit your head,” Gordy suggested. “And this is a concussion.”

    Barney bowed his head in front of Gordy so he could examine his crown. “Nothing. Absolutely no marks like that. I know what a concussion feels like–and that is not it. There are no other marks on me except for the singe of my shorts and the smell, Gordy.” Barney bit his lip, utterly terrified. “That means one thing.”

    “And it has to be aliens, right?” Gordy took a drink, but didn’t shut Barney down. He let him explain how the smell signalled a particular alien theory popular in the 1990s, and how the singe meant they must be the Grays, not any other species, because of the technology in the spaceship. 

    In that moment, as Gordy listened and never said a word, Barney knew he could love Gordy–like a boyfriend, more than a friend. He was the only person through Barney’s entire gender transition who heard every last theory about his gender identity as if it was valid, and the only person who had gone through the same nonsense in their teenage years when both of their families realized they had queer kids on their hands and sent them away. Gordy and no one else understood the allure of believing in aliens in order to make sense of a world that seemed cruel, or to stave off the reality that his father was completely losing his mind.

    “So, okay. Say you have been abducted,” Gordy said, his voice clear and logical when Barney had talked himself hoarse. “Then what do you do next? Obviously they dropped you back here, so are you done with?”

    “Sometimes. I think. I’m not sure. It’s been a long time since I’ve even been into this stuff.”

    “Right. And who exactly do you tell about it? Cops and FBI—or the Canadian FBI CSIS—are out. We’re not exactly close to Roswell, either so we can’t go backpacking for answers. I don’t even think Canada has its equivalent.”

    It did. Barney could recall the name and the circumstances like an old song he’d listened to on repeat. But he kept his mouth shut–instead he thought of his father, his dark skin and even darker eyes, and how scared he used to look whenever he’d be missing time, too. He couldn’t tell how much of his father’s descent into madness was now actually real or if it was a perfectly valid response to an insane experience like being abducted. Or maybe even a side-effect of being abducted. Did his disorder allow him contact with the aliens, did the aliens cause the disorder, or was there nothing wrong with Jason Addison at all? All outcomes blurred together into the same ending. 

    “I… I don’t want to end up like my dad.”

    Gordy nodded. He remembered Jason being taken away just as clearly as Barney did. “I know. You won’t. You’re long passed the age where hereditary illnesses like that form. Don’t most schizophrenics or bipolar people start in their early teens? We’re nearly thirty, Barney. You’ve long since passed the safety point. You’re fine.”

    Barney nodded, but he wasn’t so sure it was that easy. He’d only been Barney for ten years, on testosterone for five or six. It had made his hair thicker and given him a beard, along with giving him thick muscles and a deeper voice–but what if the internal clock on family illnesses started again, and he was a teenager in his body? Or what if it was testosterone in the first place, and being a guy made him more susceptible to his father’s lineage? He wondered what would fill in biology’s void in madness—his synthetic hormones coursing through him or father’s blood that did the same? And all of this was assuming that the mental illness was real, and not an excuse cooked up to cover up the alien’s invasion.

    Barney took another drink. His head swam. He didn’t even know where his father was now, so there was no way to ask him. He would probably be just as impossible to find as Barney was now with a new name and new likeness. 

    “You won’t end up like him,” Gordy said again, rubbing a hand over Barney’s elbow. “You’re not crazy. There is nothing wrong with you. We’re both absolutely, one hundred percent normal.” 

    “It’s the other people who are strange,” Barney said, echoing what the two of them had told one another in their youth. Barney was amazed at how many chants he had stored away in his head; his dad’s alien drills and Gordy’s pep statements against homophobia only being a handful. His mind felt like a locked cage of Japanese Koans, or at worst, bumper stickers. 

    When the music in the other room grew louder, Gordy invited Barney to stay the night. “The party is only beginning, you know.”

    “I know. But I should go back home.” 

    Gordy nodded. He topped up Barney’s glass before leaving to go to his living room. He didn’t bother to tell Barney to use the door to leave; the window was always open.

    *

    The next day at work, Barney fought a wave of nausea as he held up a package. He thought it was the alcohol coming back to have its revenge, but he was steady on his feet. Every time he looked away from the package, the world righted itself. His body achieved equilibrium. But the name and address on the package made him shudder deep inside. 

    He knew that building. He swore he did. He closed his eyes to see if he could conjure the place from a deeply held memory. Tables, needles, and doctors with face masks. Black out days and long, long stretches of nothing but beeping. He opened his eyes. The package in front of him was like a bruised aura leading him down a road he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go. Each time he looked away from the package–nothing. Just the sunny day and the streets of Leslie and Shepard, and his post office truck. The other mail for that street was for the North York hospital, yet another place that Barney knew all too well. Those memories weren’t pleasant either. The therapy program he and Gordy had gone to for being troubled kids (the code word for being queer) had been in one of the hospital’s basement rooms, too close for comfort to the other address that made his head spin. But maybe he was mixing and matching his memories, still in a hungover state, and merely poking an old wound when he was too sensitive. 

    Yes. That had to be it. He was just in a bad place, so everything became The Singular Bad Place in his mind. He loaded the hospital letters into his mail bag before he touched the package. The back of his eyes felt heavy.  

    “Fuck.” 

    Barney heaved at the side of the truck. No one was walking by, but he was sure he was going to arouse suspicion. And he couldn’t just forget his mail route. He had to deliver the package. Since it was so close to the hospital anyway, if he couldn’t take it and passed out, someone could deliver him to the ER. 

    On shaky legs, Barney made it to the front wing of the hospital. Though he looked nothing like the fourteen-year-old girl who had once been admitted to the psych ward, the front area made him weary. He was not going to be put away; not again–and not even for the same reason. There was no more conversion therapy in the Toronto wing of this hospital. People still had a hard time configuring trans identity, but at least people didn’t think they were possessed or troubled anymore. A lot had changed in those fifteen years since he was put into a room and told to confess all his secret sexual deviant thoughts, and then given proper sexual object choices and roles he was told to perfect like a marionette. 

    By the time he finished the mail route for the hospital, Barney felt as if he had walked through the fire and come out on the other side. People called him sir. Barney. Even Mr. Addison if they knew him. 

    He was a guy. Not a sad, afraid girl. But by the time he wandered around to the wooded area close to the hospital, in search of the package address, the sinking feeling came back. He meandered through the path, a parking lot, and more wooded area. He expected to find nothing but a dead end, but right there, on a street that seemed to come out of nowhere, was another steel building. Down the alleyway was a door and a dumpster. A red doorbell taunted him; he could ring it and know exactly what this place was beyond his nightmares–but his feet were lead. 

    He flung the package to the ground and ran away, through the woods and the parking lot and right by North York Hospital. He got into his post office truck and floored it, nearly crashing into a dark sedan. The horn blared and anchored him to this world. 

    “Mr. Addison,” he said to himself. “You are one hundred and ten percent normal.”

    He merged onto the road and went home, humming a tune he didn’t know. 

    *

    “Do you remember North York?”

    “Of course I do,” Gordy said, bitterness in his tone. “I was there for three weeks before you. And even when you got to leave, I was still stuck there.”

    “Right. Of course. I just… Do you remember where our therapy was located?”

    Gordy scoffed on the other end of the phone. Barney had his headphones in with the mic pressed close to his face. He’d gone to the gym after work, but the strange alleyway in the middle of the hospital’s grounds had frustrated him. Familiar, yet strange. And the song in his head now had lyrics—there is no self in cell division / all we know is human prisons / join biology’s void / and say hello to millions—ones that he couldn’t feed into Google to find an answer. The mystery package that had once made his knees weak seemed to be a blurry recollection as the song took dominance in his mind. It wasn’t quite like losing time, but it had been reshaped and remodelled in a way he didn’t like. So he’d called Gordy, the only other person he knew who had shared his therapy experience at North York when they were teens. 

    “I don’t understand why we’re walking down memory lane,” Gordy said. “It was not exactly a pleasant experience.”

    “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just…I had to deliver the mail there today.”

    “Right. You’ve done that before. And they don’t do conversion therapy anymore, thank fucking God. They still have a psych ward, obviously, but sometimes those are needed.”

    “Sure,” Barney said, not wanting to argue the point. “But do you remember another building?”

    “Like the cafeteria?”

    “No. Another building, like close to North York but maybe on the other side of it. Near the woods. Do you, did we… ever get therapy there, too?”

    “I don’t know if what they did could be called therapy but…” Gordy seemed to think a long time. Barney wondered if his memories were coming back to him in the same way as his did earlier in the day. If so, he didn’t sound nearly as pained as Barney felt. “I don’t think so. I mean… No. I don’t exactly like to dwell on the many and varied treatments, but I remember most of it occurring in the main hospital.”

    “So no blinking lights or sleeping for days?” 

    “Barney,” Gordy said, carefully. “What happened today? Did you lose time again?”

    Barney pushed up a barbell, attempting to work out instead of answering. Gordy was always a stoic, though, and waited patiently until the silence became too much for Barney. “Not exactly. I didn’t lose time… more like retrieved a memory I thought I had forgotten and then promptly lost all form and shape of it.”

    “About our conversion therapy?”

    “I think so, but I don’t know. It seemed more medical than psychological.” Barney put the barbell up and sat on the bench. His story sounded so ludicrous, but he was sure that these two random events were tied. That the pieces of this puzzle were adding up. When he tried to explain the doctor masks and needles to Gordy, though, his voice was thin and angry.

    “No.”

    “No?”

    “No,” Gordy repeated. “This isn’t some MK-Ultra bullshit. Or some alien conspiracy to steal memories. The people who told us we were sick when we were kids were not some masterminds. They were just working with faulty psychology. This isn’t anything bigger than gigantic stupidity and shame about sexuality and gender identity. And no one in conversion therapy prodded us with needles. They didn’t need to in order to make our lives fucking shitty.”

    “Right,” Barney said. He nodded. Sweat fell from his brow onto his gym shorts. He’d been working out far too hard before he’d even called Gordy. He was just low on electrolytes after drinking. That was the only explanation for his random fuzzy memory because Gordy was always right. The people who fucked them up as kids were never the monsters they wanted to believe. They were just stupid and following orders. Most people who commit horrible mistakes usually are. 

    And the other stuff with aliens? Well, maybe it was time to see a therapist about grief over his father. Even if he didn’t exactly trust the profession. Things had changed a lot in the last fifteen years. Maybe therapy was a good thing again. “You are totally, one hundred percent right, Gordy. I’m just… having a rough week.”

    “I know. It’s okay. I think we all deserve a little break from reality every so often. It’s why Chris and I do what I do. You can come over tonight, you know. If you want. No charge.”

    Barney genuinely considered the offer. He’d gotten high at their place before, but the weightless feeling of being on opioids didn’t resonate with him. It was too much like slinking off the first veil of reality; like falling so deeply into a sunken place he couldn’t emerge from. It was, to put it bluntly, like the Rohypnol incident in his first early college years, when he’d been raped and woken up the next morning with the definitive idea that he wasn’t LeeAnne anymore, but Barney. 

    “You there?” Gordy asked. “You got really quiet.”

    “Yeah. I’m fine. Just at the gym and thinking of heading home.”

    “And then to our place?”

    “Maybe. I’ll see where I end up.” 

    “Okay, Barney. Take care of yourself.” 

    Barney followed up with some pleasantries before ending the phone conversation. He headed into the male locker room and waited for a stall to change in. As he waited, he removed his tank top to ring it out, allowing his scars to become visible. A man across the area seemed to gasp. Barney’s body went rigid, worrying for a moment if he had been outed as trans. 

    “Sorry, bro,” the guy at the other end said. “I didn’t mean to gawk. Looks like a nasty accident.”

    “Sort of,” Barney said.

    “You mind if I ask what happened, man?”

    Barney paused for only a minute. He’d long ago cooked up a dozen stories to explain away his mastectomy scars, years before he could even afford the surgery. I’ve been shot. Super bad piercing experience. And he’d even considered covering the scars with tattoos. But now, a more delightful excuse came through his head. “I’m an alien with two hearts. You know, a timelord.”

    “Oh, shit man. You can just say you don’t wanna say.”

    Barney nodded. A stall opened up and he went inside to change out of the rest of his gym clothing. He ran his hands over his scars, remembering the same feeling of weightlessness as the surgeon gave him anesthesia. You won’t remember a thing, she’d said. And she was right. For a long time afterwards in his drug haze, everything was gone. LeeAnne. His mother who disowned him. His sister who was fine to think he was a lesbian, but thought this ‘trans business’ was too strange and who had moved to California anyway. He forgot his father being taken away when he was twelve and the criminal record that soon followed his father. Breaking and entering, carrying a weapon, trespassing. His father had gone from a youthful Jamaican immigrant to a paranoid gun-toting alien contact survivor. And Barney had just forgotten it all. 

    Now though, he ran his fingers along his scars. He remembered the steel building next to North York, and the doctors who stood over him with needles and machines. They were just like the ones telling him he was a criminal for liking women, except that they were silent with darker eyes and longer fingers on their hands. Except that they were aliens. And they had a message for him. There is no self in cell division / all we know is human prisons / join biology’s void / and say hello to millions.

    Now, Barney remembered everything.

    *

    The next time a package from the steel building came in on his post office run, he wrote down the address. When his hand shook too much, he snapped a photo with his phone instead. He typed out a text to Gordy about the place—but soon decided to save it as a draft for later. Gordy had already gone through enough. He’d been in the psych ward much longer since the therapists never really believed him when he tried to convince them he was cured. In retrospect, Barney’s queerness had been easier to hide because he hadn’t even known what it was like to be a trans man fully. He was just a tomboy, and saying that he liked men got them off his case, and easier for him to do since it was half true. So Barney’s conversion therapy had only been a fraction by comparison to Gordy. 

    And maybe, because Gordy was cis and Barney turned out to be trans, there was another line dividing their experiences. Barney didn’t like to think that way, but he knew it was true. Cis people engaged with the world in a different way; their bodies were never quite marvels in the same way that trans bodies were. Trans bodies morphed and changed; obtained a second puberty and new facets of physicality. Maybe because of this morphing and changing, Barney was somehow more susceptible to whatever was going on in the steel building.

    Maybe. He didn’t know for sure. But he was determined to find out more than before. 

    As soon as Barney reached the door down the alleyway, he rang the red bell. He’d conned his way inside of enough apartment buildings as a maintenance man, he was sure he could get inside here if he had a package that he said needed signing. To his surprise, though, he didn’t need to con. As soon as he rang the doorbell, it opened. 

    “Hello?” Barney pushed his way inside. “Anyone here?”

    Silent. Pure silence, the kind where Barney heard his own blood in his ear. He put down the package between the door so it didn’t close. The package was heavy–like several phone books all bound together–so it worked as the perfect door stop.

    “Hello?” Barney asked again. He’d gone down a long corridor with numbers, rather than names, on each one. He tried each door knob, but nothing worked until the very end. Door 725 opened easily. A light flickered above a filing cabinet and next to a chalkboard that had the same number written on it.

    A chill passed through Barney. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. He touched his throat, behind his ears. His arms, his ankles, and his chest. Nothing. He wasn’t being abducted or missing time, but an electrical charge in the air made his coarse hair stand on end.

    He opened the first drawer in the filing cabinet. It was easy enough to find the name Addison, and it was no shock that his old name LeeAnne was there next. With trembling fingers, he pulled out the file that was at least three CMs thick. The first page was the hospital intake form from the exact date he entered conversion therapy at North York’s psych ward. Nothing was amiss in the subsequent pages; everything was familiar and had checked out. 

    Perhaps this place was just an old filing centre, a storage area to keep things that they had to legally keep for a certain amount of time. He wasn’t that keen to keep on reading how “LeeAnne displays a preference for the same sex, but has spoken about dating boys if she can also become one” and wanted to put the file away. His creepy crawly mission seemed like a wasted afternoon until he came upon the last page of the file. A body chart had been laid out and marked off with round hollow dots, like crop circles on the elbows and viridians of a human body. Underneath were times and dates, along with injections. 

    “What kind of MK-Ultra bullshit is this?” he asked aloud. Seeing nothing else other than the cryptic writing that seemed to trigger long buried memoires, Barney put down his file and searched for Gordy in the large stack. Gordon Zednichek was the last file in the drawer and less thick than Barney’s. The last page bore the same chart with a body, crop circles on elbows, and the injections. The final words made Barney bit on his lip so hard he drew blood: Subject incompatible with desires. He will be sent back to the conversion centre. 

    Barney swallowed the blood in his mouth. He checked the last words of his file again. It was a date and a time and an injection rate, followed by the words “Pending…” It seemed like a lack lustre ending, nothing as definitive as Gordy. Barney tore through random files now, comparing the charts and the results. When he found another file that also bore the “Pending…” final words, he memorized the name: Casey Thompson. Age twenty-six now. The address was out of date–a parents’ place that Barney knew was now a vacant lot since he had delivered mail to that address years ago–but the name itself was familiar. He knew he had seen it before. 

    He took another photo with his phone and closed the filing area. A creak down the hall made his heart catch in his throat, but no one was there. The steel building really did seem like a storage area–but for what, Barney still wasn’t sure. 

    When he got back to his post office truck, his heart was pounding. His hands were shaking. But the elation that came over him once he found Casey Thompson’s name was worth it. He delivered mail to that address in the past–the Sheridan Apartment Building over by Leslie and Shepard.

    The same one he’d woken up on two weeks ago, when he’d lost time. Barney let out a deep, low breath, knowing that for once, he was onto something. 

    *

    He didn’t call Gordy, or even wander up to Casey Thompson’s apartment and ask them what had gone on years ago, and what was going on now. Hearing the answers from someone else didn’t seem to ease the itch that Barney had inside of him–and had had inside of him for a long time. Instead, as soon as it got dark, he put on one of his old maintenance uniforms and left his cell phone behind in his apartment. There was no note, but the phone itself and the last images he’d taken should be good enough.

    He conned his way into the Sheridan apartment building and went right up to the roof. The familiar scent of plant matter and vacuumed air greeting him, but it had faded significantly since his last lost time episode. There was a shed filled with tools for the building, along with a folding chair in the back. He took it out and put it in the centre of the roof. The North York Hospital insignia glowed blue like a beacon, along with IKEA and a McDonalds in the distance. 

    He waited. And he waited. 

    He thought of the first time his father had woken him up from sleeping in the back of his van. He’d told the then LeeAnne the ways to make sure you knew who and what you were when you lost time. He’d told the then LeeAnne that he’d had to pull the car off into the corn fields because a bright light had come over the car and tried to lift it up. 

    “But we’re here again. Everything is fine. It’s just like Betty and Barney Hill,” he said. “They were abducted in 1961–but they came back. They always come back. And once you do come back, you have to keep talking about it and keep telling people about it in order for the experience to become real. When you lose time, you lose a piece of yourself. So you have to keep talking. You have to keep remembering.”

    Barney knew he had been scared as a kid. His father had nearly totalled the car and then ranted in a near-yelling voice about identity and invasion. But now Barney thought of the coalescence around his own naming; how he’d woken up from a date-rape stupor and realized that his body had been taken from him the night before. How the experience bore so much similarity to conversion therapy, where he’d been brought into different buildings and made to feel and say and think things that weren’t true. Barney had been born out of LeeAnne in those moments, when his body and biology had been taken from him, and he’d fused his identity with his father’s alien conspiracies. It was why the name Barney, in a baby name book, seemed like the perfect fit when he’d skimmed over it.

    But Barney also thought of the feeling of having no body, of having no self as he was put under for his surgery. The weightlessness that came from drugs he controlled. His surgery was the last shed of LeeAnne being removed from himself, but Barney had also been removed in that black-out waiting period. You won’t remember a thing—and he hadn’t. He was a void then. A perfect and nothing void; no self to worry about, no memories to hold him down. Good or bad. Boy or girl. Right or wrong, under the knife he was cosmic. He was everywhere. He was alien. 

    There is no self in cell division. He went through the song until it abruptly ended. Across the street, the lights started to shift and change form. Barney braced himself. Pending… Pending. The blue turned to a gauzy green and violet as it was removed from the hospital. It swirled around in the air and then fixated over the apartment complex. It hovered there, seeming to check out Barney in the same glance that Barney checked it out. His heart beat very fast. He put a hand over his chest and his scars and felt the beats course through him like an electrical jolt. 

    He was afraid. He was relieved. 

    The lights lowered over him, embracing him like a hug. 

    “It is November 24 2017 4:25 AM,” Barney said. “My name is Barney Addison, and I have found my lost time.”

    END

  • 31 for 31: Skeleton Key by Eve Morton

    I hope spooky season has been treating you well!

    I’ve really been enjoying going through my old stories to compile this list. It has reminded me how much my stories have changed–but also remained the same.

    One key theme that’s come out is my resistance to, or fear of, institutions, doctors, and the psychological industry. It can be so easy to declare someone unfit or unrecognizable in some way, and then have them turn into monsters on paper. So often that leads to a self-fufiling prophecy, and people who are declared monsters may as well become them.

    Or become haunted by them.

    The next story is one of many stories I wrote on those themes, but exploring them through the lens of gender transgression, transition, and trans identity. My PhD dealt with these themes, too–but I never got to truly express how horrible some of these scenarios were, or the lingering haunted feeling that stayed with me long after penning my research papers.

    “Skeleton Key” is a story that explores what is left behind when you are not recognized in a medical system–and then in a death industry–where your birth name and birth identity is the only thing that is ‘real.’ Be warned that this story–and many more invovling trans protagonists–confront the realities of being a minority. Sexism, racism, and many other -isms are the ‘monsters’ in these stories–but there are also literal monsters lurking around the corner. Because why not have both?

    Skeleton Key

    The last time I heard from Sally was in the ER the night I broke my wrist. We spent two hours waiting before a doctor saw me. Then, when my sex marker (F) didn’t match how I currently looked (M) or my name (Ryan), it was another two hours before the doctor came back with x-rays. 

    Sally made a jerk off motion behind the doctor’s back when he left for the second time and refused to meet our eyes. When we were alone, she made the jerk-off motion to me, too.

    “I bet that’s how you broke it. Too aggressive with your sex toys. I know you’re all about sex positivity, but you positively snapped that wrist.” 

    I laughed. Sally and I were quite the pair. I looked like a twelve year old boy before the testosterone shots made my chin sprout fuzz and my body bulk out. Her hormones made her face heart-shaped and gave her breasts. She was thirty-seven, but still dressing like she was in tenth grade and wanted to get the footballer’s attention. 

    I couldn’t blame her. I had broken my wrist trying to impress the local jock at my gym, only to slam backwards and snap against a wall. 

    “You know, you’re right,” I told her. “I was jerking off when I broke this.”

    “Told ya.” 

    I already knew the procedure for broken bones in the Ontario ER system.  After my x-rays, I was supposed to get a cast, but at this rate, I’d be there all night. 

    “You don’t have to stay, you know,” I told Sally. “Thanks for driving me, but I know you have a date.”

    “I do. A pretty date.”

    “The guy with the red car again?”

    “And the scar on his chin. The scar and the car,” she said and laughed. She was dressed in two inch heels and a pink top that matched the highlight of her eyes. When I’d met her in group, she said pink was her favourite colour. No one let her say that before she was thirty five, so she was catching up for lost time. Her nails glittered as she went through the file the doctor left in my stall. She held up my x-ray towards the light, her nails still shimmering.

    “Goddamn. It looks like you fractured this.”

    “Nope. Just a lot of little breaks,” I repeated the doctor’s words. “One of the most common injuries in adults. Not a big deal.” 

    “Yeah, but if you’re not careful, your bones will be all you have. So you gotta take care of ’em. That’s why you always gotta be on hormones. If you ever get your uterus out, you know to take them forever and ever, yeah? Don’t be like me. Don’t cut your balls and run.”

    I didn’t laugh at her joke this time. Her harsh lesson in biology had been her follow up to her favourite colour story in group. She’d gotten an orchiectomy, thinking it was the smart way to rid her body of testosterone. As it turned out, hormones are good for bone growth. And not just menopausal women break their hips. Sally had shattered her hip pelvis when she was thirty-four, three years after removing her nuts without actually transitioning. So when everything was all repaired, metal holding her skeleton together, she figured it was better late than never to start liking the colour pink. 

    “And if, you know, God Forbid we ever die,” she added, her tone just the same as when she asked if I had jerked myself off into this broken wrist, “our bones are gonna be the only things that identify us. So always make sure to check with your dentist. Change your name there first. And everything else, well, die in the proper clothing. And hope to God gender doesn’t’ exist in the goddamn afterlife.”

    “Stop,” I said. 

    “Too dark?”

    “Yeah, kind of. And my head hurts.”

    “You’re probably hungry. I’ll get you a snack.” She dropped the file back down on the counter and came back with a package of chips. We both ate them until the doctor came back and I was casted up. 

    “I have to go, love,” she said. “I have that big date.”

    I waved with my other hand, not in a cast. Sally raised a brow and grabbed a Sharpie from the counter. “Let me leave you with a last laugh,” she said. She wrote something on the back of my cast, something I could barely see without twisting my body all around. 

    “There you are,” she said. “I’ll see you around.”

    “Have a good night.”

    The next day, she was gone. 

    *

    I had theories about what happened to Sally. Most of the happier ones ended up with her living it up with the scar in a brand new car, him paying for her surgeries, and purchasing a mansion in Tahiti. 

    But I knew it was far more likely that the guy had shattered her skull instead. 

    When my cast came off six weeks later, I read about a body found in a local park. The doctor called me in from the waiting room before I could finish the article, so I tucked it under my hoodie and took it with me. 

    “Do you want to keep it?” the technician asked me, holding up my cast. “Sometimes people want to keep it.”

    I was about to say no, when I saw Sally’s writing. She’d signed the cast before leaving.

    I held open my backpack and the technician gave me the remnants of my cast. On the bus home, I read the newspaper about the dead body in the park. No head. No hands. No clothing.

    “It’s her,” I told my roommate. I put the newspaper down on our table, but he barely looked up from his video game. “It’s Sally. The body they found in the park.”

    “How do you know for sure?”

    Because bones were all we had. I didn’t say it aloud. I continued reading the article. The entire body hadn’t been found, and at the rapid rate of decomposition, it wasn’t likely they’d find any other pieces due to scavengers. Her pelvis, the one that she’d shattered and that doctors had to piece back together with metal and screws, must not have been found because there was no mention of tracing the serial numbers. 

    “DNA testing,” a reporter said, “noted that the skeleton belong to a man.”

    My heart sunk. This was Sally, I was sure of it now. I still had a toothbrush from when she’d stayed over and we talked all night. But if I came forward with her DNA, her body would be released back into her family. They would give her back her old name, bury her in a family plot, and call her their Darling Son.

    So I stayed quiet. I wrapped my cast with her last words on it with the newspaper that announced her death and hid it under my bed.

    Six weeks after that, I walked by the local commentary and saw them burying a bunch of bodies in pine boxes. Unnamed, unclaimed by family, and given a pauper’s funeral

    My wrist ached for her again. 

    *

    “You know, you have more masculinity in your pinky finger than most guys I know,” Sally told me in group. This had been after I reiterated the story of my broken home in front of everyone without shedding a tear. Absent father, daddy issues. The standard stuff that therapists wanted to hear about transgender men. 

    And I nailed it. 

    “Thank you,” I said.

    “You know, that’s not a compliment. Masculinity will be the death of this planet. So fragile. It snaps off like it’s nothing and then we’re left picking up the pieces.”

    I paused. My binder cut deep into my chest and I could barely move an inch without pain ricocheting through my body. My D-breasts were sandwiched across me, never moving. And that pain remained me of why I was here. “Masculinity is what I want, though. It’s what I need to pass.”

    “What you want is a body,” Sally said. “New skin. More hair in places you didn’t have it before. A voice. A little less fat off your chest. You don’t want masculinity. Most cis men don’t want masculinity. It’s something thrust upon you.”

    I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t really talk with my binder so tight, anyway. I hoped my silence counted as a response. In most conversations with men, I had learned that it did. 

    “You want to get breakfast?” she asked. “I’m feeling like eggs. I think eggs would be good right now.”

    It was four in the afternoon, but I said yes. We talked all night and into the morning. I laughed harder than I had in weeks. The next day, when I woke up and saw bruises across my chest, I went to the emergency room. 

    “What have you been doing, Rachel?”

    “It’s… Ryan. My name is Ryan.”

    “What have you been doing?” The doctor asked without looking up from the x-rays. “You have four fractured ribs. Has someone been hurting you?”

    “No,” I said. “I’ve just been having fun.”

    *

    “When the hyoid bone, located in the throat,” the medical examiner from TV said, “breaks, it means the cause of death is usually strangulation.”

    I shut off the TV. Another crime drama had paraded out transgender women as set design when talking about a prostitute’s death. Every single episode was the same, all the medical and legal information a rehashed version of the previous episode. When I was twelve, I used to find these shows comforting. Someone was killed. Medical science and detective work found the killer. And they were put away. 

    Now, at twenty-seven, everything seemed to ring hollow. Sally had been dead for months. There was no way anyone would ever find the scar with the car. Even if I came forward, I could barely make a dent in Sally’s case file given what I knew. So I went to bed instead of watching TV. 

    I slept with a hand around my throat. Sick fever dreams that pinned me to the bed. Pressure on my chest, like someone was weighing my breasts down with sandbags. When the bone in my throat–hyoid, hyoid I repeated, named after the Greek word for U–snapped, my body shot awake.

    And Sally stood in front of me.

    Her bare feet didn’t touch the floor. She was made up of light and gossamer, so thin I could see through her body and to the next wall. She wasn’t wearing loud colours or sequins or pink eyeliner. Her hair was short, too brown, and cropped close to her head. She wore a jean collared shirt over jeans. One of the worst cardinal sins of fashion.  

    “Sally?”

    “Ryan. You’ve gotta help me.” Her voice was soft, but dry. She sounded far away; like she was trapped under glass or underwater. “I’m dead.” 

    “I know. I’m sorry.”

    “Shut up. Sympathy is for the weak. I need you to do something.”

    “What?”

    “You have to make me the Skeleton Key.”

    “What?”

    “Skeleton Key,” she repeated, voice softer. Her silhouetted outline disappeared against my bedroom wall. 

    She was gone. Again. 

    I touched my throat and looked at it in the mirror, expecting to find bruises. There was nothing. I stared up at the ceiling, repeating the words in my mind over and over again. Her blue demined madness splashed in front of me. 

    We have genders in the afterlife, I realized. What a cruel, stupid fate.

    I made the jerk off motion with my hand. My wrist smarted from where I’d broken it. My ribs hurt from my binder earlier that day. And my hyoid bone still ached as if it had been snapped in two. 

    Had Sally been choked? I didn’t know. I shouldn’t care how she ended, only how she lived. That had been the motto at group when she disappeared. No one had had a funeral, excerpt for private eulogies we all had in our minds. To everyone else, Sally wasn’t dead. Just gone.

    A ghost.

    I saw her–except not her–in front of me again. How do you get rid of ghosts? I Googled all the options on my phone and only came up with burning the bones, burying the body. None of which seemed to work for her. It wasn’t that Sally was a ghost; it was that she wasn’t the right ghost. 

    Make me the Skeleton Key. That was what she wanted. So I searched up that next. A skeleton key was a master key that could open any door, usually part of a hotel. It was also a novel by Stephen King, who Sally read voraciously.

    “I’m always in waiting rooms for treatments,” she’d say. “So you need a couple hundred thousand words of nonsense from King to keep you going.”

    Her voice was so clear in my mind I started to laugh again. Then I nearly cried when I remembered her rant about Carrie, the girl with telekinetic powers who went to prom. It was evidence that Stephen King was a little bit trans. 

    “What other apparent middle aged man writes a revenge fantasy using period blood and prom as the main M.O.? Come, on,” Sally said. “That’s total Venus envy.” 

    Everything we touched, everything we read, became a little bit trans because we wanted it to be. Before Sally was a ghost, she was always haunting things. 

    So of course our bones were haunted. Of course they were already cursed. If a skeleton key opened all doors, could it also put her soul back together? If I found all of her bones, could I put Sally back together?

    The thought kept me up until morning. Then I went for a drive. 

    *

    I found a metal detector, the kind that beach combers use, from a pawn shop. I brought it to the local park where her body had been found. There were indentations in the grass from the spokes the crime scene unit must have used to put up barriers from the public. When nothing but bottle caps came up in this area, I expanded my search.

    And found tire tracks. From the scar with the car? I wasn’t sure and certainly didn’t know enough about cars to be able to trace the treads. I followed them from a picnic area into the back woods. Months had passed, I told myself. I was unlikely to find anything more but bottle caps again. But the beach comber went off. 

    A screw. Metal, industrial strength. From her pelvis. I followed the beeping and came up with another pile of bones. Her pelvis was shaped like the hyoid bone, only bigger. U-shaped and caked with dirt and metal that kept it intact. Next to the pelvis, I saw scattered bones from a hand. I picked up her pinky and slipped it into my pocket. Warmth flooded me. 

    “Hi, Sally,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

    I put what remained of her hands and other small bones that looked no more than stones into my backpack. Her pelvis slipped from my hands, shattering like it must have done years before. The bone shards fell down into a pattern, then rearranged themselves. They spelled out an address.  

    135 Stevenson Drive. 

    I looked it up on Google Maps. It was a hotel at the edge of town. 

    *

    My car was the only one in the lot. A black man sat at the front desk, a thick red-covered book in front of him. He raised his eyes from the words as soon as I stepped inside. “Hello.”

    “Hi,” I said. “I don’t know if I’m in the right place.”

    “What do you need?”

    “A skeleton key.”

    “Well, I need a skeleton.”

    “A whole one?”

    “A piece of one will do. But your favourite piece.” 

    “I’m… I’m very confused.” The pinky finger in my pocket warmed again. The shards of her pelvis now were too dangerous to handle; I’d barely been able to put them in my backpack without cutting my thumbs to ruins. 

    The man behind the counter, teeth wide like china bowls, smiled.  “You need to open a door and deliver a wandering soul, I’m guessing?”

    I nodded.

    “Good. Find that person’s body. Bring me a little bit o’ bone and I will give you the key to get to the other side. Deliver the rest of the bones to the portal–the door to the next world. Then your person will make it through.” 

    “And she’ll be better there?”

    “What is she like right now?”

    “Angry,” I said. I touched my neck and he didn’t seem fazed by it, like it happened all the time. “She’s also not who she died as.” 

    “Hmmm.” He pondered this a moment. When he set the book he’d been reading down in front of him, I realized it was all blank pages. Nothing there but tiny pin pricks like Braille, expect that the man could see. He looked passed me, through me, down to my very bones themselves. 

    “How did the ghost appear to you?” he asked.

    “As a man. But she’s a woman.”

    “Her bones–“

    “Her bones lied. She is a woman. I know her as one. She knows me as a man.”

    “Are you the only person who knows she’s dead?”

    “I think. Now. But someone found her body and they labeled her wrong.”

    “There you go. Our ghosts are only memories reread too many times until they manifest. So you need to counter the rumours with your facts. You need to bring her back to life.”

    “Can’t I do that by pushing her through the portal? Bringing all of her bones here?” I asked, exhaustion seeping into my tone. I ached and wanted to sleep. I hadn’t gone to my job in two days, and I had no sick days to draw from. “I just want her to rest.”

    “You need to counter with a memory. One that will last. That’s why there are headstones. People read the name. Name stays alive. Right now she’s anonymous. So you need to bring her back.”  

    “Do I do this before or after I send her bones through the portal?” 

    “Either will do. But within twenty-four hours.”

    I glanced at the clock in his office. It said three PM, but it seemed so much later than that. “Okay. I can do that.”

    “Good. Now give me a bone.”

    I took the pinky out of my pocket and handed it over to him. He sniffed it and smashed it into dust. It fell into the book and dissolved into the pages. His eyes turned to black orbs. 

    “Thank you. You can go.” 

    “But the key–you haven’t given me anything.” 

    “You need her skeleton. She is the key.” He drew his pen and wrote down several words. “Here is the address. Bring her bones there and give her a headstone. Then she will be free.”

    *

    When I was nine, my father threw me down the stairs. I broke my first two toes and fractured my shin. As I waited with my mother in the ER, I started to see spots. We learned that he’d also cracked my skull, like he’d cracked my mother’s years before. 

    The doctor who saw me was kind and spoke in an even voice. He told me random facts about this hospital, about the X-Men when he noticed my T-shirt, and then random facts about bones. Anything he could think of to keep me awake, so I didn’t fall asleep and never wake up. 

    “You know,” he said. “When you’re born, you have almost three hundred bones. As you grow up, you get fewer, right down to two hundred and six. “

    As I waited out my concussion, I also waited for my body to get bigger so I could break less. Instead, Social Services were finally called and my father was locked up. 

    I became the man of the house, then. 

    “Your father was awful,” Sally said when I told her my version of the story. “You don’t deserve to think of awful people. They’ll shrink and shrink and shrink out of your life if you don’t think about them. The good times will grow and grow and grow.” 

    My shins ached again, like they had when I was nine, as I dug up Sally’s body. Her grave was in the corner of the cemetery with little lightning and virtually no presence. It was dark enough, and warm enough at night now, so I could do this and not be caught. 

    At around midnight, I cracked open her casket and took out all the bones. I still had her hands from the park and her pelvis in a thousand pieces. The pinky had been used to pay her way. I had everything I needed… except for her head. 

    I ached as if it’d been split open. Could I get away without having her skull? Surely I had enough. As I stacked her bones up in my backpack, I worried that she’d be forced to live her life as a headless horseman, haunting the playground and warning little children about the dangers of gender.  

    The address the man at the hotel had given me was an hour away in the middle of a lake. When no boat rental place was open, I hacked the locks, grabbed a boat, and sped out into the middle of the lake. 

    I dropped each one down and counted them up. The din of the mosquitoes sounded inside my head, but none of them bit me, as if I was protected by something.  By the time I’d reached the end of the backpack, I tilted it open and scattered her bone dust on the surface. It dissolved. The water was blacker than the night around me. Nothing happened for a long time as I waited for the crushing feeling of my chest to disappear.

    The lake started to bubble. White mixed with the black surface. And Sally’s bones rose to the top. Her femur, her ribcage, and sections of her hands. They all floated. 

    “Oh no,” I cried out. 

    Sally’s jokes about her osteoporosis and how she was like a flightless bird thanks to her hollow bones rolled around in my mind. “Call me ostrich. Call me emu. If I keep eroding, maybe one day I’ll fly away.”

    I started to sob.

    “Sink, sink. Please go away. Please sink down.” 

    I paddled back to the shoreline and found rocks, flat black ones used to skip across the surface. I dug through the sand, ravenous and desperate for something heavy to weight her body down and get her to the portal. The more I dug, the more I felt something take over my body. Dirt clung to my nails. My skin split on the rocks. I uncovered a stone so white, so pristine I thought it wasn’t real.

    I pulled out a skull from the sand on the shore. A skull with a small bullet hole in its centre, like the plug of a basin that let life slip through. I held Sally’s skull in my hand and sighed. 

    “I have all of you now.” 

    I filled her skull with rocks to weigh it down and got back into the boat. In the centre of the lake, I dropped her into the water. The skull cracked. More bones, tiny and numerous like a baby’s, flew everywhere.

    But she started to go down. Down and down and down into the water, Sally disappeared. 

    The lake was black again and still. The humming of mosquitoes turned to the humming of music. 

    I still had one last piece to solve. 

    *

    “You know,” Sally said. “I don’t think I want surgery anymore.”

    We lay back on the car from the scar she was dating. Cherry red, hood long and flat. The two had had sex on it, but she still thought it was better for lounging than fucking. 

    “So why go to group?” I asked. “Therapy is only there so you can talk out your demons before the knife cuts you open and repurposes the flesh.”

    “Oh, creative. Since when did you become the Adam from clay?”

    “Since the doctors promised to make me but forgot to breathe life into me.”

    “You see, that’s why I don’t want surgery. I already have a life. I’m full of it.” Sally grinned and nudged my shoulder. “And I really think I have found someone who likes my body the way it is.”

    “A fuck on the hood of the car is hardly a vow.” 

    “Yeah, but I don’t want to be a wife.” 

    “What do you want to be?” I asked. “I mean who. Who do you want to be?”

    “Sally. That’s it. I don’t ask for much.” 

    All I thought of was how hard it was for me to be Ryan. Sally could forgo surgery, but she had an option. I could only have a penis crafted out of the skin of my thigh, called a franken-dick by most other trans men in group. I could only ever dream of having something I could reject. I always had to take whatever was handed to me. 

    “But you know,” Sally went on, “I also go to group for you. Where else would I get such cutting commentary about the state of men?”

    “The scar doesn’t talk?”

    “Oh, God no. Why would he? Masculinity makes them silent. Please learn from those mistakes.”

    I told her I would try. I knew those mistakes were the ones that had knocked me down stairs and broke my toes. Crushed my ribs and left me with purple bruises everywhere. Two weeks after the conversation on the scar’s car, I’d be in the hospital with a broken arm. 

    I’d always break myself to make myself feel whole. 

    And Sally would be dead.

    Both of us never fucking learned. 

    *

    When Sally’s body was under the water, I rowed to the shore. I picked up the piece of paper the man at the hotel had given me and a pen from the bottom of my backpack. I wrote down Sally’s name. Her date of birth (give or take) and added that her favourite colour was pink. Hot pink. 

    I floated the paper into the water. Watched it dissolve. I checked the black water. 

    Nothing moved. 

    When it wasn’t enough, I picked up my phone and called Sally’s answering machine. There was still enough space. I listed off all the bones that I had broken and what I had learned from each one. Shin, toes, skull, ribcage, wrist, hyoid (if only in a dream). I was still talking when an orb of white light appeared in the middle of the pond. The light constituted itself, piece by piece, until Sally was formed.

    She wore the same sequined top in bright pink she had on when she disappeared. Her hair was the same shade of bottled-blonde and down to her shoulders. She had no shoes, but her toes were painted in pink. 

    She waved at me. I waved at her. The wave turned into the jerking off motion, and I finally hung up the phone.

    “Thank you,” she said. “What a fucking relief.” 

    “I hate that the after world has genders. This is the worse lottery I’ve ever seen.”

    She laughed, loud and throaty. It made the water ripple towards me. 

    “It sucks, but you do what you can. Remember what I said, right?”

    I nodded. 

    “Good. ‘Cause I gotta go,” she said. “Never fall in love with men and their cars. And always speak up. Something else, too. Make my last words good, bro.” 

    I waited until she disappeared under the water again. When I couldn’t breathe, I thought I’d been choked again. Tears stung my face instead. I reached into my bag and pulled out the cast from my arm. 

    I left it in the hollow from where I’d dug up her skull. Her signature faced the dawn as it crept up over the trees along the lake. Water lapped at its surface, dissolving into nothing but dust.

    END

  • 31 for 31: The Witch of 1000 Mirrors

    The first witch story has arrived!

    Although there is always a little bit of witchcraft in my stories, this is the first witch to make an appearance–and the witch is bad! I don’t usually have bad witches, only bad craft, but this title came to me in a half-dreamy state & I knew instantly she was ‘bad.’ Not misunderstood, but straight up bad.

    The Witch of 1000 Mirrors is an imposing, shadowy figure and I hope I’ve managed to convey this eerie-ness in my story itself. I wrote it early on in my pregnancy with my second son, fighting off morning sickness, and still adjusting to writing, parenting, and teaching all at the same time. No wonder I came up with this distorted figure of motherly love & craftiness that I was afraid of leaving behind and also becoming in my worst moments.

    And honestly–after I wrote this story, I loved it immensely–but I also almost gave up on it several times. It has one of the highest number of rejections of any of my stories, in the mi-double-digits. I think I pitched and queried this work for at least two solid years before–FINALLY–in 2024, it was accepted and published by Penumbric Magazine.

    And thank goodness for that!

    I still really, really like this story. Even if the witch is bad.

    Alas! A good witch is coming soon.

    The Witch of 1000 Mirrors

    By Eve Morton

    Maurice didn’t know where to look in the courtroom. He didn’t know where to start the story, so he simply spoke to the hushed air. 

    ‘She was ugly, lived in the woods, and hated people. 

    ‘When I say she was ugly, I do not mean her looks. Looks are trivial when you start thinking beyond time and space, the body a mere vessel to keep the soul. She was ugly in her manner, in the things she valued, in the thoughts she kept in her head but let leak out through the mirrors. 

    ‘Maybe I should explain the mirrors first? Ah, but they’re the piece that ties all of this together. 

    ‘Her name was Agatha. Even as a little girl, it suited her. She was a small and sickly child, always coughing and sneezing whenever people asked how she was feeling. She could barely talk without sending something out into the atmosphere that did not belong. Her brother, Mort, was born soon after her. Parents’ and villagers’ attention turned towards him. No one asked about her anymore, and truly, it was for the best. She could barely speak until she was five anyway, and by then, she was only speaking to the dolls. 

    ‘The dolls were the first form of mirrors: the things she looked into in order to see the world, to see her invisible thoughts, and then to cast them out. Even though her family was not rich, she repeatedly threw out her toys. That was how she caught my attention. I was and still am a scavenger—please, no judgment, I know you never like to meet my eyes on the roads, but you do not have to look at me to hear a story all the way through to the end—and her family’s abode gave me piles and piles of riches. Counterfeit riches, as I would soon realize. No one wants broken toys. No one wants pieces of a puzzle that don’t go together. Yet, I returned over and over again because what was thrown out was almost as interesting as the whole picture from which it came. 

    ‘Then one morning, there was a girl with dark hair, dark eyes, and an absent smile on her face staring at me. She stood on her family’s porch, broom in hand. 

    ‘”Hello,” I said. I smiled because one always smiles at children, especially those who have not yet learned the rules about not meeting stranger’s gazes. “How are you today?”

    ‘”You took the dolly’s leg.”

    ‘”I did.” I held out the prize she coveted. “Do you want it back?”

    ‘”No. But you’ll get your leg back eventually, too.”

    ‘A tingle entered my spine. I knew from all the folk magic I had overheard in bits and pieces that this was going to be a spell. It had to be one. But from this small child? From a family that seemed merely one step removed from my own fortune? Back then, witches were coveted. They were chosen amongst family lines to learn the arts to be of service to others. Their power was dangerous in the wrong hands, without careful practice, and it needed assistance. 

    ‘This family had no such assistance for this girl. I used that as a way to ignore her claim on me then. But I shouldn’t have. I should have realized that like some people do not meet my eyes because of what I do, the skin I have, the legacy from which I came, some people also do not like little girls. Especially ugly ones like Agatha. Even if they were the blood that made them. 

    ‘I broke my leg three days later. I could not scavenge. My wife at the time almost left me—or at least, she was gone for three days and I had no idea where she’d gone. When she came back, I was ravenous and filthy. She took care of me but without meeting my eyes.

    ‘”What happened?” My voice spooked her.

    ‘”I have to go after this,” she said quietly. “When you are better, I need to go.”

    ‘I knew before she told me that she’d found the little girl with the broken dolls in the woods. The witch in training, except without any training. I told my wife it was okay. Just get me better, and we could part. She seemed relieved. I did not ask for any more information because I already knew what I’d hear. A heart broken. A smashed face. Whatever Agatha could do to the dolls, she could do to people, and then claim it was fate. 

    ‘I arrived at the house as soon as I could walk. With my wife now gone, I had space in my own small house. Though I knew if I was caught there would be literal hell to pay, I offered the right answer regardless: “Agatha,” I called to her when we met gazes. “I want you to come home and play with me.”

    ‘She made demands. “Do you have cookies? Do you have more dolls?”

    ‘”I can make you cookies, we can make them together, but I do not have dolls.” I pulled out one of the first mirrors she would ever get. “But I do have this.”

    ‘My charm worked. She saw her reflection and moved towards it. She touched the edges and then tried to put her hand through the mirror as if it were water. “It’s solid. It’s an object,” I told her. “I think it would be nice for you to see how—”

    ‘”It’s me.”

    ‘”Yes. But if you turn it,” I said and did as I said, “you can also see me. My name is Maurice and—”

    ‘”I like it. We can go.”

    ‘She grabbed my hand, mirror under her arm, and left the home where she was born. She did not look back. Though I knew she had very little to miss, the ease with which she walked away was still startling to me. It’s still startling to me now. 

    ‘The next ten years were much of the same. We rose at dawn and went through trash. We found items to sell, items to keep. She gathered her mirrored objects like a small crow, my little magpie, and she seemed happy. Her powers diminished—or at least, her intentions wielding them were softened—because if she saw herself and saw someone else in the same item, they must both be the same. She didn’t like pain, so they didn’t like pain. I could not, for some time, get her to think beyond the notions of pain and no pain, but it was better than what we’d had before.’

    Maurice sighed. He didn’t know how to continue for some time. When he did, he met the eyes of the jury straight on. 

    ‘You know the stories some people tell of demon children? The ones who know no better, who have been corrupted since birth? Sometimes people claim a changeling did it. Others claim a curse. Black magic. I never wanted to think the same with Agatha. That at some point, there was no way she could have been helped. That she was a lost cause and the only thing I could do was to keep her powers from reflecting out and damaging those in her wake. I wanted her to change her values, change her mind. I believed she could for years. 

    ‘Then puberty happened. And her true power took hold.

    ‘I am an old man now, and truly, I was an old man then too. I did not know how to deal with a young girl coming of age. I thought too much of what was happening was normal, was part of the times of challenge before her moon and then the slump after her moon passed. I should have watched closer, but I did not. When she wanted to go off into the woods by herself, I let her. I did not question why she wanted to take her shiny objects with her, like a magpie. I just let her go.

    ‘That was my mistake. I accept responsibility for that. Please keep this in mind as you hear the rest of the story.

    ‘She found her first customers in the woods. People alone, wandering away from home, their lives in transition. Cheating spouses who had moments of conscience. The cheated on who needed guidance on what to do next. Those in love and wanting to share it, but within a family that did not accept. Those who had lost fortunes and were afraid of what the next day would bring. What to do, what to do? They saw this little girl, almost a woman, and came over to her. She had the mirrored objects, and the power, so strong now because of her growth, radiated off of her. They asked her questions. 

    ‘They never had a chance. 

    ‘”I don’t know why people come to me,” she told me months later, after the first funeral for the wounded spouse. “I tell them what they want to hear. What they already know, deep inside them. I see it in the mirrors.”

    ‘”What did you tell this woman?” I asked Agatha, though I already knew the answer. She dispensed advice like the clairvoyants and tarot readers of the city. Like the midwives and cunning folk of the country. She was a seer, that was true, but no one understood that the only thing inside her was darkness. 

    ‘”I told her that her husband would miss her more if she was truly gone,” Agatha said as if this was the weather. “And now it’s true.”

    ‘Another funeral, another death. Another soul moment where she connected with someone’s pain and thought that was all there was to their world. “If life is so bad,” she said, “you could kill yourself. If you don’t like your boss but you need the job, what if you got rid of him? There’s no problem with you. But the rest of the world needs to go.”

    ‘People knew better, of course. The people who came to her were not permanently broken, just in need of help. But her words came with them a spine-chilling sense of truth. You did have these thoughts. We all have these thoughts. Murderous and ugly through and through. But we should not act on them. “We should never act on them,” I warned Agatha. “People do not want to act on them. They want to see the good.”

    ‘”Then why do they come to me?” Her dark eyes and youthful face seemed too old in that moment. “I see what’s already there. I tell them. Nothing else is my fault.”

    ‘I didn’t know what to say for some time. “People do not come to you for advice. They do not want it. They–“

    ‘”Right. Not advice. They go to Meriwether for fortunes,” she said, listing one of the more famous clairvoyants. “I’m going to get better than her and take all her customers.”

    ‘”People do not come to you for fortunes. Or to Meriwether. They come to you for recognition. They want to be seen in their pain.”

    ‘”Right. I tell them–“

    ‘”To act on it. You can’t act on it. You must simply sit with them and understand.”

    ‘She huffed. She left the room for her bedroom. I heard the clanging of metal, of shiny objects, and she shuffled them around. Then it was eerily quiet. I hoped and prayed she had gone to sleep, though deep down I knew better. When I came to get her in the morning, she was gone. So were her mirrors. 

    ‘I looked all around our small village. I could not find her. When I went on my typical route for scavenging, I realized all the shiny bits, the reflected objects normally present on the curbs, were gone. She’d cleaned out where we’d once bonded and set out on her own.

    ‘It wasn’t until I was summoned here, to this court to defend my surrogate daughter, that I understood what she had become. I plead with you: she is ugly. I tell you over and over, I gave her all the chances I could. I gave her all that I could and I know that it was not enough. But please do not be fooled by her mirrors, by her powers, by the things about her that seem so powerful. She is not a witch in the traditional sense, those who are wise and use their cunning for the service of others. She is an ugly person, one who claims to see the truth, but can only understand pain and treachery in her mirrors. She has a thousand different names for the same pain, the same morose condition she calls humanity, and when you have a thousand names for the same thing, it all leads to the same conclusion: death, destruction, violence. There is no hope in her. Please do not see anything else because you know there is hope in you. Do not let her find the blackness that we all have, and let her convince you it is truth.’ 

    As Maurice turned away from the jury, he let out a single, ancient-sounding breath and looked into the palm of his hands. ‘Please.’

    The story now over, his role in the defense complete, Maurice settled into a rickety chair and observed the courtroom. It was a small, squat country building three villages over. He’d truly been surprised that Agatha had only gotten so far. A few hundred miles, that was it. He’d expected her to reach the city center, find the king and queen, and do something on a grander scale. But that had been false thinking, too, he knew that now. She did not need to go far and wide for her powers to reshape the world. She only had to find one village in peril, one schoolteacher desperate for a solution for educating children who did not have a hope of surviving in the rough world, and to hold up a mirror on all the grimness and despair that floated inside of her.

    The schoolteacher was not in the room. She’d hung herself once the spell had been broken. In her small farmhouse, her body hung in the barn, and all the mirrors in her house had been smashed to pieces. Maurice wondered now if those pieces had been thrown out, and if someone like himself had discovered the shards. He hoped in his heart of hearts that someone else like Agatha had not found them. 

    The only person on trial was Agatha. Maurice learned of her last name for the first time during the trial: Blackmore. It seemed fitting, but it also seemed like part of the show.

    Maurice focused on the jury for the rest of the trial. He remembered one woman, red hair and sympathetic eyes, who would surely be the problem. Or maybe the older man, a fatherly figure like himself, might be the problem. But there would be a problem. No one could look at Agatha and think that she was responsible. The schoolteacher had committed the heinous act, and she was dead now. All was right with the world, fairness restored. So why punish this witch?

    ‘Look into your hearts,’ Maurice whispered under his breath. Agatha flinched, as if recognizing his voice even from afar. He became scared of his own magic and drew silent for the rest of the trial. 

    There were more arguments, more evidence, and a few formal elements that he’d never been privy to in his life. Agatha sat on the sidelines, her dark hair curled behind her ears. She wore a standard brown uniform, loose and hanging off her thin frame. She’d been in the county jail awaiting her time. She’d had all of her collection removed from her. All she had was her own representative. 

    The evidence was stacked against her. But Maurice had been worn down. He was old, very old now. He did not know if he’d be able to make it back to his home after this. He considered a hotel, considered many things, before he understood that Agatha was going to take the stand. 

    The room was quiet. She rose from her spot with her representative and then sat next to the judge. She smiled at the jury.

    Maurice’s heart sunk. Her teeth. Her teeth had been capped since he’d last seen her. The bottom incisors and the top were now shiny and silver. They were mirrors. Mirrors that she could not see for herself.  

    ‘Wait!’ Maurice stood from his seat. His can slapped against the ground. ‘You can’t let her speak. You can’t–‘

    ‘I have a right to my own story,’ she said, the shiny parts flashing as she spoke. She turned to the jury. ‘We all have a right to our own story. No matter how painful, no matter how horrible, we can all benefit from a story. As someone wise in my life once told me, people don’t come to me for fortunes. They come for recognition.’ She smiled again, and caught the first juror with red hair, the first broken doll in her new collection, ‘And I know you will recognize me.’

    END

  • 31 for 31: The Institute by Eve Morton

    Happy Monday!

    What’s a better way to celebrate the start of the week than a horror story about institutions and the way we can sometimes eat each other alive to get out of the four walls we spend the bulk of our time inside?

    That’s what “The Institute” is more or less about; instead of dreading a 9-5, our narrator dreads the eating disorder program she’s forced to spend her life inside as she purportedly gets better. Whereas most places that claim to heal are inspiring–or at the very least, boring–this narrator is forced to reckon with a callous system, neglectful counsellors, and a horrible ritual that will allow her to be free–but only if she can swallow it.

    I wrote this story back in 2015 and had it published in 2016. It was a tough time for me personally. The television show Hannibal, oddly enough, was my main comfort show around then. A lot of my academic writing was about it–and I suppose, this short story is yet another Hannibal-inspired tale. It’s also inspired by my own experiences in a similar program, though of course, I got out without the horrifying ritual.

    (Or did I?)

    If you hate hospitals, or are easily upset by discussions around eating disorders, I would recommend skipping this one. Tomorrow, I assure you, there will be a different kind of story with a new and spooky monster. I can’t wait!

    The Institute

    By Eve Morton

    They called us shadow women. Trinket girls. When we checked into the hospital, the nurses whispered about us and our small bodies. Only a thin layer of skin separated us from our bones. As we stepped on the scales, we were weighed in double-digits. The staff wanted to know our secret formula, our magical cure for fat. But then the doctors diagnosed us all with anorexia nervosa and the nurses stopped asking questions. They stopped speaking to us all together. 

    From the hospital, we were sent to the institute – a large treatment facility just outside of a busy highway. We were to spend our days here, eating all our meals on campus, so we could return to normal life – and normal weight – all over again. We would have therapy. We would get better. Our parents dropped us off on the institute’s doorsteps after our electrolytes were balanced and our family GPs had written our condition down on prescription paper. 

    “Your daughter is sick. I can’t help. These people can.” 

    “Anorexia Nervosa is a tricky illness. It affects the body, but also the mind. It has the highest mortality rate out of any mental illness.”

    “Anorexia nervosa is a permanent condition. You only cope. You cannot hope for a cure. These people will help your daughter to cope.”

    The doctors talked about us like we were not inside the room, like we really were the shadow women the nurses saw. Everyone had had about enough of us, anyway. We were too visible to forget about, but not present enough to treat inside our homes anymore. So the institute welcomed us inside.

    I was the last to arrive. 

    “Good afternoon,” a tall, blonde woman greeted me. She shook the hands of my parents first, before she looked down at me. Her eyes x-rayed my body, sensing all the bones under my clothing. She sighed, sadly, and then turned back to my parents. “We will take good care of her.”

    My parents drove away without worry, as the woman, named Rhonda, and I walked around. 

    “I’m one of your counsellors. You will be given the best treatment here. Lots of therapy, lots of group discussions. You’re one of many, here. You won’t be alone.”

    She said the last part more like a threat than a comfort. 

    “What will you do?”

    “Me?” Rhonda smiled. “I help you eat.”

    “How do you do that?”

    “Don’t get too far ahead. You need to rest here.”

    We walked through the sterile doorway of the institute. Black writing on all the doors marked rooms for therapy, rooms for examination, and rooms for eating. I felt as if I was walking into a fairy tale. The oak doors looked vaguely like gingerbread.

    “The first case of anorexia nervosa was a girl who wanted to be a saint,” Rhonda began. “She starved herself because she thought it would take her closer to God.”

    Rhonda opened the door at the end of the hall. We walked into a small kitchen with a long, rectangular table in the centre. The girls sat on the sides of the table, all of their eyes down. A different counsellor, one with red hair, sat at the head. Her name was Kellie.  

    “You’ve got to eat,” Kellie stated. She looked directly at me as she spoke. “The doctor told the first anorexic girl that she could honour God by eating. God is all around, even in our food.” 

    “We do not need divine light,” Rhonda stated. She moved towards the curtains over the windows, and closed them tightly. “Any more than anyone else. Please. Sit now.”

    I sat next to a small girl with sharp bones protruding from her wrists. There were eleven of us at the table. We were missing our last apostle, our Judas. With the counsellors watching us, there were almost thirteen people in the room. 

    “You need your humanity back,” Kellie said. “Humans are hungry. They will always need to eat. Show us you are human. Thinking about the Divine is okay, but human – that is what you all are.”

    “And what exactly are we to eat?” another girl, a patient with sallow hips, snapped. 

    The two counsellors looked at one another. They smiled.

    “You will see,” Rhonda said. 

    “Just give it time,” Kellie echoed.

    The next day, the first man went missing. 

    ***

    In psychiatry, many doctors believe that patients are forced to repeat their traumas, until they find what they are and face them. This is why confession is important. You must confess your indiscretions so you stop repeating them. Binging and purging was one of the many symptoms of an eating disorder. But, if you purged your anxieties, your family history, and your nightmares, then you weren’t sick anymore. You were ahead of the curve, ready to get better and face your fears. 

    As the days went on in the institute, the meals we all shared became our new traumas. They were our new rituals that we were all forced to repeat. 

    Meal times were half an hour. All food must be consumed during those times. Then, for half an hour after the meal, no one was allowed to leave the table. Even when we were lucky enough to go to the bathroom, someone would remain on the other side of the door, listening in to make sure the only thing we purged was our psychic revelations.

    Our group therapy sessions were an hour long, with a break in between for snacks. 

    Three girls in group therapy claimed abuse when they were younger. Two were real, I thought. Another was a false memory produced from the ether, so the counsellors would stop asking questions. 

    Melanie, the first girl-victim, was abused by a man with dark hair. On Tuesday, during lunch, a man with dark hair was presented on the table. His thighs were cut, his skin peeled back to the bone, so the flank could be cooked inside the small kitchen in the institute. He was made into a victim, into a piece of meat. 

    Kellie set up the timer for the meal. “Three minutes, everyone. Then we can begin.”

    As soon as the buzzer went, Melanie picked up her knife and fork. She ate the man so she was not a victim anymore.

    The rest of us had our standard meals, issued by the institute’s dietician. Applesauce and egg sandwiches. Normal, bland food. Only Melanie, with her sandwich full of human meat, got to indulge in order to heal.

    “How did you choose him?” I asked. “If we’re not God, then how are you playing his game?”

    “He got too close to school children,” Rhonda stated. “He was bad news from the start.”

    I nodded, considering this. Melanie grabbed another piece of bread, adding mustard to it, before she ate more of him. Her dark eyes turned blue. The colour came back to her skin. She was getting better – and we all despised her for it. 

    “In some parts of the world, some people believe that when you eat your enemy, you gain their strength,” Kellie said. “You are getting his strength, Melanie. You are becoming something different than before. No longer a shadow or a trinket. But real.” 

    She nodded and smiled. The clock ticked on, another three minutes to go before the meal was over. Melanie ate in a sudden fury, cleaning her entire plate as the buzzer rang. 

    We were no longer Gods, I thought between the sounds. But monsters. 

    ***

    There was a rose garden around the institute. I was always dropped off too early for therapy, so I followed foot trails made by other people, who often dragged their IVs behind them and left marks in the dirt. This morning, I followed a trail to the back of the garden, near the woods. 

    In between two pine trees, I saw a man with dark skin. His eyes were black and his legs were large, like the back haunches of a wolf. I stepped closer. We were too close to a highway for it to be a real wolf. The skin was too dark and the bones were too prominent. He looked like a dishevelled man with oil over his body, as if he had been tarred and feathered. As if he had been shamed. 

    “Hello?” I asked.

    He extended one of his long fingers, pointing towards a hill. Fresh dirt lined the area. I walked closer to him, only to watch as he disappeared in sunlight. The creature was a shadow too. 

    I began digging where he had pointed me to. I got down on my knees, feeling the dirt against my skin. I found a finger bone first. Then, I found a jawline with teeth, rearranged and out of order. I kept digging, knowing that I would be late for therapy. 

    Was this skeleton of the man? I asked myself. Was he an old patient, one who had refused treatment, until his body had folded in on itself and starved to death? I didn’t know, but I grabbed the clavicle from the dirt. 

    “I will be back,” I told the bones. “I promise.” 

    Inside the institute’s examining room, I kept the bone under my arm, as if he were a part of me. When Kellie came into the room to weigh me, I asked, “Have you ever had men at the institute?”

    “Anorexia nervosa primarily affects women. Young women.”

    “But there are outliers, right?”

    She narrowed her eyes at me. “You need to be weighed today. Don’t worry about the past patients.”

    “Has anyone ever failed? What happens then?”

    “Anorexia has the highest mortality rate for any mental illness. I suggest you not test its limits.”

    “But—” 

    “Take off your clothing,” Kellie demanded. “Put on the gown. Get on the scale. You should know the drill by now. We need to see how much you’ve improved. No weighing yourself down.”

    “Okay, okay.” 

    Kellie came closer to me, her green eyes inflamed. “You are to wear nothing. You know what happens if you lie, right?”

    I nodded. Even as she left me alone, I still held the bone close, under the stiff gown they gave me. When she came back in, I tipped the scales.

    “What are you doing? What are you hiding?”

    Kellie found the bone right away. She held it up to the light and then began to search through my stuff. I was pulled into a new room like a child, cornered like a dog, and treated like a criminal.

    “I told you not to lie to me,” Kellie said. “Why didn’t you listen to us?”

    “Is this where you want your life to go?” Rhonda asked. “Why are you preventing your own therapy? Do you want to die?”

    “Or maybe you just like being thin. You like your bones, don’t you? You think you look good? You’re signing your own death certificate with this type of behaviour.”

    “This condition is permanent. But it does not have to be deadly. We are only trying to help.”

    “What else was I supposed to do in the mornings?” I asked, snapping out of the interrogation. “I’m bored. I wanted to be alone, so I went for a walk. And then I found him – I found his bone. I was walking because I wanted to leave, but I knew I would never get very far.” 

    Rhonda and Kellie exchanged looks. They questioned me more, but I refused to tell them where the rest of his body was. They called my parents instead. 

    “Her behaviour must stop. This excessive exercise, the secrecy… She will never get better at this rate.”

    I stood in the corner of the room as they talked. They acted as if I was the one who killed him. As if I was the one who put the bones in the ground, instead of discovering them. I had uncovered atrocities, and they could only focus on the steps I had taken, the exercise I was trying to sneak in.

    “It’s part of her condition. She must walk and walk and walk, as if she’ll run away from problems.”

    “But I carried the bones back,” I argued. “I told you what I found. I kept them safe, under my arms.”

    No one heard.

    “What is wrong?” Kellie asked me after she hung up the phone. “What are you keeping hidden? What are you running away from?”

    I held my breath. I had no memories to bring forth, no confession hidden under my skin. Not like Melanie or the other girl-victims. Not like anyone else here. 

    “I have nothing to confess,” I said. “I have done nothing wrong.” 

    Kellie only shook her head. She wrote something down in my file and then slid it away. 

    “We can talk about this later,” she said. “For now, there is more work to do.”

    As Kellie led me out of the room, I saw Rhonda devour the bone from the corner of my eye. When I looked back, she only smiled. 

    ***

    Every Thursday, we had something called “food desense.” Short for food desensitization. We would gather around and pick a forbidden food to eat. Not apples, not usually. According to the counsellors, we were all afraid of cake and soda and unhealthy things. So, to counter to most doctors’ orders, we were set out on a mission to gather junk food. 

    On an April afternoon, we were sent out beyond the institute’s walls. We held hands like wandering children, with Kellie at the front and Rhonda at the back. There was traffic all around us and a concrete bridge to the left – no escape possible. We couldn’t run even if we wanted to. 

    There were only eight of us now. After Melanie, two more girls had eaten their final meal to pass the test. Gained the weight to hide their bones. They were called cured and sent on their way home.  

    “Here we are,” Kellie stated. We stopped in front of a McDonald’s in a mall. Some girls groaned, but most had learned to be quiet about their food preferences this far along. We were only allowed two “dislikes” for the institute’s menu. Most people had used their “dislikes” for chocolate or milk; butter and gravy; sometimes brussel sprouts and green beans. Valentina, a small girl with dark hair, had used her two dislikes for chicken and beef. She was the only person in the McDonald’s without a burger. She ate ice cream and fries, as the rest of us were given Big Macs and told to stay together.

    We sat at another long table, stretched out, facing the jungle gym. We all ate sad beef and greasy fries and called it therapy for the eating disordered. 

    “Be normal,” Rhonda said. “This is how normal people eat. Not all the time, but every so often.”

    “Shouldn’t we be worried about death?” one girl, Ashley, asked.

    “The cows are fine. Don’t worry about them,” Kellie said. “All life must come from death. If you want, you can thank the cows for their sacrifice. You deserve to live too.”

    “No, I mean the workers. The corporations,” Ashley said. She was a hippy. She had gone too vegan, eating nothing but salads before she came into the hospital walls. It was a simple mistake, really. Most of the girls that sat at the table were nothing but simple mistakes, spelled out with poor food choices and too few calories. 

    Rhonda and Kellie shrugged. “One life leads into another. Don’t worry. Just eat.” 

    “Even sacrificial cows should be worshipped,” Valentina said, sipping her milkshake. “When you sacrifice an animal, it must be well. You cannot use one that’s sick, or else it’s a bad omen. It becomes the conscience of the tribe or the group it represents. This is one of the reasons I can’t eat meat. I just can’t.”

    “Why?” I asked. 

    She looked at me, almost begging. “Because my conscience won’t let me.”

    “Girls,” Kellie said. She narrowed her eyes at us. Rhonda tapped her fingers, beating a tattoo like the time from the institute. “You only have an intrinsic responsibility for your own life. No one else’s. And we are almost out of time.”

    We ate the rest of our meal in silence. We walked back into the mall and towards the elevator that would take us outside again. A woman with blonde hair approached us, staring intently, as she shook her head.

    “The stairs are right there, you know.”

    “We know,” Kellie said. “Thanks.”

    “Why don’t you use them?” she asked.

    Kellie stared daggers at the woman. I knew that stare. It was the same one I had been given in the examination room, the same one that felt like x-rays. I looked away. 

    “I told you: we don’t need the stairs. We need the elevator.”

    “But you all look fine,” the woman argued.  

    “You don’t know these girls,” Rhonda said. “You don’t know their stories.”

    The woman sneered at us like we were leapers, as if we had grown a skin with disease over our shadows. 

    “It’s good to be healthy so easily,” Kellie said, staring at the woman. “Appreciate it while you can.”

    I felt the hair on my neck stand up. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see what I knew was coming from inside Kellie’s threat. The woman muttered under her breath. Her flip-flops smacked against the tile floor as she walked down the stairs, just as our elevator came. 

    “Let that be a lesson to you, girls,” Kellie said when we were inside. “Never let anyone tell you you’re not sick. You all are. And you must follow us in order to be well.”

    On our way outside, we formed a line. The woman who had called us out before moved ahead of us on the sidewalk, her eyes on us. Disgust evident. As she stepped out onto the road, she was struck by a car. 

    We kept walking. No one said a word.

    That night, Valentina ate the woman’s brains, finally breaking her vow of not touching meat. 

    And the next day, she was allowed to go.

    ***

    I had dreams of food often. Real food – not what they gave us wheeled in on carts day in and day out. Not the fast food places or overly sweet cakes they gave to us. Not even the men that they put on the table as therapy. I wanted food, like the kind I ate before I got here. The kind my parents gave me for lunch every day. But the institute kept us starving near the end, knowing that it would cause desperation. No matter how much I said I wanted to eat, they would put it off. 

    “A calorie is a calorie is a calorie,” Kellie said with a wide grin. “If you can’t eat what we tell you to eat, then how can we expect you to survive in the real world?”

    Because I want to eat that food, I thought. I remained silent. She sat down next to me, placing a heavy hand on my shoulder. 

    “Eat the meal. Then you can go. We will know you’re loyal, then.”

    “Loyal to what?”

    “Your recovery. Yourself.”

    I sighed. I thought I was loyal. I thought that was what turning up every day meant and ignoring the bodies and bones on the front stops. I wanted to get out so badly. I tried to be a model patient. But the rules they gave me made no logical sense. When I followed them, they changed. The only way I could leave was eat, but there were too many forbidden foods, too many meals repeated until they were traumas. Everything became divided. The food always had two sides, two stories. In order to get past all the trauma, all the things that had turned me into their patient with anorexia nervosa, I had to break the final taboo.

    Alive and dead. Flesh and bone. Life and death. Monster and God. Even if I was still human.

    “Anorexia nervosa is a permanent condition,” Kellie reminded me. “But not if you eat where you came from. Not if you eat someone healthy.”

    “You are what you eat,” Rhonda said. She strummed her fingertips again. 

    The rest of the girls – there were only four now – stared at me from the table, their faces sunken in. They waited for my response, to see if they could get free too. We all needed one another, but not for comfort – for sustenance. We all needed to eat. We all needed to survive.

    “Let me survive,” I said, turning to Kellie. “I want to eat. Please.”

    “We need to confer with others. We need to see what the doctors would say.” 

    “Why don’t you trust me? I’ll eat.”

    “You got yourself this way,” Kellie said. “You’ll get yourself right back if we are not careful. We have already worked so hard, we don’t want it all falling apart.”

    “I am not a bridge or a building,” I said. “I don’t require an architect.”

    “You are damaged.”

    “I am not a car, either,” I demanded. “I am a person. And I want to eat.” 

    Rhonda and Kellie looked at one another. They looked back at the fridge. 

    “Okay,” Rhonda said. “You’re next.” 

    ***

    On Tuesday, the table was set. They brought out the body from the back cellar. The man was older, one of the oldest bodies yet. His skin was pale and his hair was grey. I heard the scratching of the counsellors’ pens as they wrote their field notes, judging my response like all the others. 

    “She has come so far.”

    “She has gained twenty pounds since treatment began.”

    “She can go home soon. Almost. She is so close.”

    I looked away from the man’s eyes and his navy tattoos. I tried not to think about his backstory as I cracked open his ribcage. The noise was so sickening and yet so full of pleasure, like cracking knuckles. The counsellors smiled at me, proud of my accomplishment. The four girls looked at me with wide eyes, horrified and hungry, as I slipped my hands under the man’s skin. 

    I took out his heart. This was my designated piece to eat. The heart was one of the largest muscles, yet still a delicate organ meat. It looked too small, too light – and like it was still beating. I placed down on my plate as Kellie passed me a napkin.

    “Go on,” she encouraged. “Eat up.”

    I stared. I took another breath, fear gripping me. 

    “Are you okay? Do you need the tube?”

    I blinked. The tube – no, I thought, shaking my head. Too many other girls had had the gastro-intestinal tube shoved down their throat like an amoral organ, where their liquid meals were fed into them before they were forced to swallow. I closed my eyes. 

    In my mind, I saw a creature from the woods. I saw the skinny body leftover from the program, a patient who had refused to become a monster and had died instead and was now buried like a bad omen. I saw the boy that had been tarred and feathered and forgotten about. He hovered over me like my conscience, reminding me not to become a monster. 

    “Are you going to eat?” Rhonda asked. “Or are you wasting our time?”

    I looked up. The buzzer clicked on, the seconds passing by. 

    The black creature from the woods shook his head. He said no. But he was the thing to fear, wasn’t he? He was a totem of my death and permanent destruction if I didn’t do what I was told, right? I saw the boy covered as a shadow, a former self lost inside bones and under dirt. I turned away from the creature and looked down at my plate.

    I raised my knife and fork in my hand – and then ate the heart of the stranger. I thanked the man I didn’t know for giving me life again, closing my eyes in a silent prayer. I tasted iron and rot, my nose filled with the smell of blood.

    When I was done, I looked up at Kellie and Rhonda with blood around my mouth. I wanted to move onto them next, to tear them apart limb from limb. They were the ones who had made me into a monster, who had taken the very thing I thought made me who I was. But my stomach heaved. 

    Now, for the first time in a long time, I was full.

    “Wonderful,” Kellie said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “You’ve done a great job.”

    “Yes,” Rhonda agreed. She rose from her chair. The girls’ eyes followed her as she moved around the table and placed another hand on me. “I think you’re ready to go.”

    I was silent. I worried my voice would never come back again, and if it did, I would speak in a language that was not my own. 

    When the bell rang on the buzzer, Rhonda and Kellie allowed me to rise. I gathered my coat and clothing that I had worn when I came into the institute. They gave me my discharge papers and called my parents. Finally, they took me out through the institute’s door, crossing over a small pond and bridge by the front parking lot where my parents would soon come. 

    “It’s okay,” Kellie said. “You don’t need to say goodbye.”

    When they left me there, I turned around, back towards the glass. No one was there watching me. They had truly let me go. 

    I walked towards the rose garden and found the bones of the body I had left behind. He was incomplete now, because they had taken the bone I carried with me. All of my bones were gone, too, now hidden by layers and layers of flesh. 

    It was okay, I figured. I didn’t need to see them anymore to know that they were there. 

    When I looked up, I saw the black creature. He moved towards me slowly, his eyes dark and judgemental. I had eaten the thing I promised I would not.

    But I had done it to survive.

    “I’m sorry,” I whispered. 

    The creature merely stared at me, like my own former shadow. I raised my hand, hoping he would touch it. He lifted his dark fingers, twisted like tree branches, just as a car pulled up. I blinked as a horn honked. Then he was gone.

    “Hey, Emma,” my parents greeted. Their car engine idled. “How are you feeling?”

    “Okay, I guess.” 

    “Would you like to go home?”

    “Yes,” I said. I raised my eyes. “I would.”

    “Who were you talking to before?” my mom asked once I was inside. I looked out at the woods, from the backseat of the car, and saw the creature wave me a goodbye.

    “No one,” I said. “Just a friend.”

  • 31 for 31: The Ghost of Sunday Dinner

    Another ghost story!

    “The Ghost of Sunday Dinner” is yet another ghost story in my 31 for 31 challenge, and another story about mental illness & how we hide things from ourselves, even if it means becoming haunted. I wrote this while pregnant with my second son, as a warm-up exercise for the morning before I headed into work to teach writing. I ended up loving the process of writing, and so sent it to the feminist horror publication The Last Girls’ Club & it was accepted right away. That happens rarely in this industry, so I was thrilled.

    Please note: This story deals with subtle abuse/neglect and eating disorders, but also the comfort that can come from being seen, especially if we feel invisible.

    I don’t want to say too much else–I just hope you read and enjoy! Or if you need to skip because of the content, I hope you return again for another story tomorrow.

    The Ghost of Sunday Dinner

    By Eve Morton

    Cassandra was staring at the mashed potatoes when she saw the ghost for the first time. She was wondering whether or not to eat, like always. She thought back to Hamlet, studied in her makeshift classroom in the hospital, and rephrased that famous line as ‘to eat or not to eat?’ She laughed. She thought she was being clever. 

    That was when the ghost showed up. Straw-white hair, as if bleached. Bony, but then again, most of the girls she saw from Monday to Friday in the eating disorder clinic in downtown Toronto were bony. Barely 100 pounds, if that. Could ghosts have weights? What about ideal weights, current weights, and statistics that she and the other girls on the ward traded when the docs and counselors weren’t looking? Cassandra’s head was a mess of thoughts and her hunger made it hard to focus on anything but the calories of the dinner in front of her. Four hundred ninety-five. That’s if the package is correct. This one looks heavier than the others in the grocery store. For a while, she didn’t even care that something supernatural was happening to her.

    She just cared about her weight. She cared about disobeying the doctors and counselors, proving them right and wrong at the same time as she continued to participate in her own eating disorder.

    When the ghost disappeared, she dismissed it as nothing more than a fainting spell. She’d had those before. She threw out the rest of her dinner and went to bed early. 

    *

    “You’ve lost weight,” the counselor told her on the Monday weigh-in cycle. Her dark eyebrows narrowed and she tsk-tsk’d through her gap teeth. “Have you been following the meal plan?”

    Cassandra didn’t say anything. She stepped off the scale. She was naked under the hospital gown, so she couldn’t weigh herself down artificially with rocks or water bottles. She started to slip on her jeans. She grabbed her socks.

    “You’ll have to speak to the doctor about this,” the counselor said. “We need you to hit your goal weight before you ever leave here. Do you want to leave?”

    “Yes.”

    “Then you need to gain weight. You need to, or you’ll die. You do know what the mortality rate is for someone with an eating disorder, right? It’s the highest among any mental illness.”

    Normally, Cassandra tuned out the guilt lectures on mortality and beauty image, but now she was interested. “Anyone ever die in this program?”

    “Of course.”

    “What did she look like?”

    “That’s the wrong focus.” The counselor sighed again before leaving the room. Cassandra dressed hurriedly, a chill creeping up the notches of her spine. Just before she shut the door, she remembered what the ghost had been wearing. A gown like she had, but there were stones sewed into the side. 

    *

    The ghost finally spoke to her on the following weekend. Throughout the week, Cassandra had thought she’d seen her again, but the phantom turned out to be a new girl in the program with translucent skin from a lack of vitamins, a malfunctioning air conditioner, or her own lack of body heat making her tense up. As Cassandra microwaved a TV dinner that the dietician had approved, as long as she added a glass of milk to it to fill out the nutrients, she finally heard the ghost speak.

    “You don’t have milk.”

    “Because milk is terrible,” she said, as if this was normal. The microwave beeped. Steam wafted up from her food and made the ghost seem mundane, rather than spooky. “What’s your name?”

    “Jenny.”

    Cassandra huffed. “Everyone’s named Jenny. Or Emily. We’ve had like six of them so far in the program. That’s so boring.”

    The ghost didn’t say anything. Cassandra sat at the table while Jenny floated in the kitchen. Her feet did not touch the ground. She was see-through. She was a real ghost, whatever that meant. Cassandra twirled her fork through the chicken dinner, not bringing it to her mouth. “What was your final weight?”

    “You don’t want to know that.”

    “Why do people keep telling me what I want?” She pushed the food away. “I don’t want anything.”

    “You do, but you think you can’t have it.”

    “Is that what happened to you?”

    The ghost didn’t say anything. Cassandra was worried she’d leave–she seemed to get more transparent, thinner by the second–and so she kicked out a chair at the table. “Come and sit.”

    The ghost didn’t move. “Where is your family?”

    “This is a boring conversation.” When the ghost still didn’t respond, Cassandra shrugged. “Maybe the casino? A friend’s house? I don’t know.”

    “But they take you to the hospital,” she said. “They care about you.”

    “I take the subway there. And I’m only there because I’m sixteen and can’t check myself out without their permission, and this seemed like a gold mine to them. Someone else is responsible for me now. Huzzah. Let’s party.”

    “You are responsible for you.”

    Cassandra huffed again. “Says a ghost. Were you that responsible if you’re dead now? Clearly not.”

    “I left,” the ghost said. “You assume I died there, but I left.”

    “The treatment wasn’t very effective then, was it. Knew it. Those docs don’t know how to treat us. After all, eating disorders do have the highest mortality rate. Why should I bother listening to you?”

    “I was hit by a car.”

    “Oh.”

    “Yeah. I wasn’t even sneaking exercise or anything like that. It was just an accident. Nothing malicious. So I don’t understand,” she added. “Why you’re there. Why any of them are there. You could be free but you’re not”

    Cassandra groaned. “Oh, please. Do not give me a lecture. I’m sick of them. We’re there because there’s nothing else better to do during the week. And we got caught. And we…” Cassandra thought of the other girls’ stories. Some were like her, bitter and obstinate against the rules for the sake of it, while others were simply scared. They wanted to go home again. They lost weight by mistake or had now learned that they no longer wanted to be bones upon bones, but had to wait their turn to reach their goal weight. 

    Cassandra didn’t know what she wanted. She didn’t say anything else. 

    “If you want,” Jenny said. “I can eat with you.”

    “You can’t eat.”

    “Okay.”

    Jenny disappeared. Cassandra felt the emptiness inside the room like a punch to her stomach. It rumbled. The sound was like a dog growling, like someone scratching against the backdoor. When she brought the fork to her mouth, the food was cold. 

    She threw it out.

    *

    She didn’t lose any weight come Monday. She didn’t gain any either, which should have been happening. A different counselor, one with dark skin and eyes, marked the number down without remark. Then she left Cassandra alone in the room. As she put on her clothing again, she realized the gown had been stitched with stones. It had weighted her down. She didn’t know, didn’t intend for that, but it had happened. 

    She debated going back to get the counselor. She wasn’t intentionally lying–but they would think she was. They always thought she was. It was so much easier to lie half the time than to be accused of it. When an icy chilled hand reached over her mouth, she understood that telling the truth as it stood right now was not worth that risk.

    And so, for once, she listened. 

    *

    On the Friday weigh-in, she’d gained weight. She’d not been eating as much during the week, and exercising when she was at home at night and her parents were gone, so it was another surprise. She checked out her stats at home that Friday, and realized the scales displayed two different numbers.

    In the hospital, she was gaining. But in reality, she was losing. 

    She said nothing to anyone. 

    This continued on for two more weeks. Cassandra realized she could do whatever she wanted. She needed to follow the rules during the day at the hospital, sure, but the counselors were no longer watching her as closely. Other problems emerged and took their attention. No one questioned her weekends, her evenings. She got to lose weight, still wearing her goal jeans, but also received all the praise from the doctors for gaining. It was as if everyone else had body dysmorphia, but they saw her as getting healthier, while she knew the reality. 

    “This is very promising,” Dr. Brown, the head physician in the program, told her four weeks into this sudden transition. “You should be able to go home next week. You’ll be at your goal weight.”

    “That’s great,” Cassandra said. There was a bitter taste in her mouth. Harsh, like dead air from her throat. 

    “Your parents will be happy, right? They’ve been good to follow the meal plan on the weekends?”

    Cassandra nodded. It was easier than lying. The rest of the meeting went well, right down to the weigh in, where the scale displayed the seemingly impossible number of a healthy BMI, while she could still feel her ribs and spine against the plastic chairs in the hospital classroom and group therapy. 

    “Fantastic,” the doctor said. “Just fantastic.”

    Come Friday, Cassandra was having her last dinner in the program. There was some fanfare–a goodbye speech from some of the worst counselors, the most aggressive in their proselytizing and guilt tripping–and then some shaky hugs from the other patients. Not even their bony arms seemed to be able to detect her bones anymore. 

    She left the program doors for the last time. While other girls were picked up by their parents in minivans, and driven to nice suburban homes, she was alone. She got on the subway, opened her apartment with a key that had lived around her neck since twelve, and stepped inside. 

    No one was home. 

    It felt like no one would ever be home again. 

    *

    On Sunday night, Jenny came back. Cassandra was relieved. She’d not eaten since Friday, just to see if anything would happen. Nothing ever did, not until she walked into the kitchen and flicked on the light. Jenny was at the table. 

    “Hi,” Cassandra said. She walked to the freezer and got one of those meals. She opened the fridge, before Jenny could say anything, and poured herself a glass of milk. 

    Jenny stayed quiet at the table. Cassandra ate two bites of the lasagna and felt a wave of hunger. Real hunger, true hunger, the kind that the hospital stifled with plans and with numbers. The kind that she felt now as a sudden quest for life beyond this dark apartment and the ghosts of a former hospital stay. 

    “I still don’t like milk,” Cassandra said when she’d finished the meal. “I might get almond or oat or something instead.”

    “Sure,” Jenny said. She smiled. “Sounds like a good plan.”

    END

  • 31 For 31: Crossroads by Eve Morton

    Happy Spirit Season!

    I’ll be at the Homer Watson Gallery today giving readings for the start of my spooky season markets–and since Homer Watson is a famous spiritualist (at least in Canada), I wanted to share one of my historical ghost stories.

    Please note: this story deals directly with suicide. Nothing on the page, but the entire premise–about spirits at a crossroad–is related to people who have passed on via suicide, and how the church handles (or doesn’t handle) their spirits in the afterlife.

    This story was written as a prompt for a friend who wanted something “Ambrose Bierce-y” to read. Bierce is one of America’s most heavily anthologized authors, an early supernatural writer, and his stories influenced the later works of HP Lovecraft. My friend said I delivered with my request–and so did the horror publication Scare Street. They accepted this story for one of their many anthologies, and it was so nice to give this story a second life via them. Now, hopefully, there is a third life this Spirit Season.

    Enjoy!

    ***

    Crossroads

    By Eve Morton

    Father Brown awoke to the sound of terrible scraping. The church was drafty. Surely, the strained shrieks were nothing more than the wind against the brick church. 

    Yet, as he awoke, he grew certain that the deathly scraping was something unearthly, something that required more attention than a prayer in the dead of night. 

    Father Brown rose and dressed hastily. The sound of scraping had continued, along with the sickening thud of something heavy. 

    Footsteps? Thunder? Perhaps. 

    The wind was still strong, and the trees were still lashing the windows, but Father Brown could feel something else deep inside—a presence. He’d only felt something like this once before, on the eve of Easter inside the rectory, and then, he’d hidden away in his room and prayed until he had fallen asleep. 

    As he glimpsed out the window with his oil lamp, he saw a shadow on the horizon. Where the main road crossed with the dirt road to St. Paul’s Church, a man stood hunched over. He seemed to sway with the wind, a stick of a willow tree or something else in his hands, which he plunged deep into the dirt. 

    “He is digging,” Father Brown said aloud. His voice echoed off his sparse room. He donned a jacket over his clothing and set out for the crossroads. 

    The man was still digging when he arrived. His silhouette was clearer, no more than a youth of eighteen, someone who should have been drafted into the army, surely. As Father Brown approached, he noticed the man’s loping gait and the slight tremor in how he held the shovel, beyond what would have been simple fatigue from the digging in the middle of the night. Perhaps he was a cripple, stricken with palsy. 

    Or, perhaps, he was just a drunk one.

    “Evening,” Father Brown said. The wind cut through and shrieked at the moment he spoke. He cleared his throat, pulled his coat around him tighter, and spoke again. “What are you doing, young man?”

    The youth jumped. He had not noticed Father Brown approaching, and he almost raised the shovel in his hand to strike a blow. 

    Father Brown stepped back, his shoes becoming caked in the mud that had formed from the boy’s shoveling efforts. 

    “What are you doing, young man?” Father Brown repeated. “There is no need for violence. This is St. Paul Church’s property. However, I, the father of this parish, would like to know what it is you seek.”

    “I’m sorry, Father,” the boy said. He truly was a boy. Father Brown could hear it in his soft voice, hardly broken by the chains of puberty. “I don’t mean you or anyone else any harm.”

    “I find it hard to be convinced of this fact. It is the middle of the night, and you bear your shovel like a weapon. Please, tell me. What is it you seek?”

    The boy leaned against the shovel, both hands over it like a thinking post, as his face became ashen with sadness. “I… my uncle, you see, he is here.”

    “Buried here? Or over there?” Father Brown gestured over his shoulder to the cemetery gates on the other side of the church, directly opposite his personal study and bedroom. “That is where our congregation meets their end on the other side. Even if you were in search of your uncle’s grave, you should not be digging it up. You should show respect to the dead.” 

    Father Brown’s voice boomed, each syllable causing his cadence to rise and fall as if he was at the pulpit. 

    The horror of the boy’s words—digging up his uncle!—struck fear into him in a way no specter or vision of the afterlife ever could. This boy was a grave robber, a ghoul, nothing but the deepest darkest sinner he’d ever faced.

    “Are you not fearful for your own soul, my lad?” Father Brown asked, some of his theatrical cadence descending into the personal. “Are you not fearful of the task you take on? Digging up a grave! And in the wrong spot. Who are you? Have we met before?”

    The youth had been staring at his hands and the overturned earth for the majority of the priest’s speech. Now, he met his gaze, his blue eyes suddenly bright orbs in the darkened night. 

    Father Brown stepped back. A demon? He wondered, yet he felt the gaze as he would an angel, bright and feverish with hope. 

    The boy began to cry, wetness like the fresh spattering rain staining his cheeks. “I saw my uncle here, Father, forgive me, three weeks ago. My sister goes to your church. I came to visit her. I attended the afternoon service. You surely do not remember me, but maybe you remember Rebeccah. She was large with child.”

    Father Brown had several women as part of his congregation who were large with child, but there was no need to hunt through those names in his mind. He knew Rebeccah Northrop. He knew of the entire Northrop family and the tragedy after tragedy that had befallen each member. 

    If Father Brown had any notion to believe in curses, the Northrop family would be the basis of such belief. Rebeccah’s father had died in the Boar War from a gangrenous wound he should have survived. He’d left a wife with five children, one with a crippled leg, to raise and no money to do it on. Her brother, Peter, this child’s uncle surely, had moved to their small New England village to help. That winter, three of the children had died of rheumatic fever. 

    During the worst of the illnesses, the mother had found out she was with child once again, her husband’s last brood. But the boy had been born still, a stone in the hand of the midwife. The mother had gone mad with grief and ended her life in the local sanitarium. Then, the uncle had lost his own life, stricken by heartbreak and madness at the terrible hand his family had been given.

    “Your uncle was Peter; am I correct?”

    “Yes,” he said and nodded. “I am also Peter. Named after him. I saw him a few days ago. Right here.” The youth tapped his shovel into the muddy dirt. “I saw him here, and he was lost.”

    Father Brown could not help but feel a chill, even as his words came out with a cool precision. “Son, there is no such thing as specters and spirits.”

    “Then, what was Mary visited by? Then, what was Job stricken with? I must believe in what I see with my eyes and touch with my hands during the day. There must be more to the physical world. There must—”

    “Yes, dear Peter. There is more than what we see. There simply must be, or I shall be a fool spending my life as I am.” Father Brown took in a deep breath, feeling far too vulnerable—and too cold, much too cold as if this boy was dead in front of him—at that moment. “But we must face the living. We must go on with our daily waking worlds. The dead have been buried. Your uncle included, and—”

    “That is the thing,” Peter interrupted. His hand was shaking, but Father Brown noted it was not with palsy but fear. “I know my uncle is dead and buried, so why did I see him here? It must be because his death is not truly his death. I am missing a piece.”

    “What sort of piece could there be?” Father Brown asked. He thought of the cursed family and wanted to truly be there for the boy. “So much tragedy can happen, and it can feel as if the Lord is testing us, like Job indeed. We must let it go and endure those trials. You have done all you can for your uncle. You have—”

    “He died in an unsanctioned way,” Peter cut him off yet again. His young face became older at that moment, his lips hard and firm. “We covered it up, Rebeccah and I. He wanted to die, not being able to face the terrible consequences of his own life, his own struggle. That baby…”

    “Your mother’s child, your lost sibling. It is sad—”

    “The child was his too.”

    Father Brown gasped. This was not the first accusation of evil within a family that he had witnessed, and he’d read many tales within the Bible of men and women within the same bloodline lying together. But those were stories, necessary parables for something greater at their core. Seeing the consequence in the flesh maddened him on the youth’s behalf. 

    “He killed himself,” Peter confessed. “He died at his own hand. And we could not bear the shame of that. So, we covered it up. We shouldn’t have because he does not deserve those lies. He made our mother crazy and then took her only solace. He is the sinner, not us. And now he has come back to prove it. He will not rest.”

    “What do you mean he has come back?”

    Peter stood a long time, hands on his shovel, and gazed into the dirt. A twig snapped in the distance, seemingly impossible given the mud and wet air all around the two of them, yet both men heard it. Their gazes followed the sound. 

    On the main dirt road, a man’s shadow was present. He walked back and forth, a terribly maddening pacing ritual, before he simply disappeared into the ether. 

    Father Brown met Peter’s blue eyes. He pleaded with the man without words. 

    “I refuse,” Father Brown said, turning away. “That was not real.”

    “Yet you saw it. I saw it. That is my uncle, trapped between worlds. I heard a legend long ago that all suicides remain at crossroads. They cannot go to heaven. They cannot go to hell. Something draws them here.” Peter began to dig again. “If I find whatever has brought him here, I can then place his spirit underground again where he will stay. I can bury what I have lost.”

    “No,” Father Brown proclaimed in fear, trembling from the night’s events. He did not want to believe anything that had occurred, yet his shivers told him that even if his mind refused to label it in language, it had happened. He shuddered beyond the cold as if an invisible hand of the otherworld was reaching for him from that pitiable hole. “No, my dear child. I will not allow you to dig here.”

    “You cannot do anything.” Peter continued to toss dirt over his shoulder. 

    The hole was deep, up to his knees. Water from the rain and spring runoff cascaded into the hole, covering his shoes and surely setting the boy up for a fever. Perhaps he didn’t care. Yes, Father Brown could clearly see now that this boy didn’t care about a thing. His blue eyes had become affixed, almost possessed, with his mission of finding his uncle at the crossroads and putting his spirit back to rest. 

    “What are you hoping to find in the dirt?” Father Brown asked. “He was not buried here.”

    “But I see him here. There must be something.”

    “No,” Father Brown said once again. “You are a simple boy, and this is far beyond your capabilities. I forbid it. You must leave now, or I will call the authorities.”

    The youth continued to dig. Even as Father Brown repeated the threat—arrest, imprisonment, insults at his mental ability—Peter continued on his mission. Father Brown understood the boy was motivated by a higher calling, as he’d once been. 

    So, Father Brown evoked the only thing he could. “Peter, this will damn you. This act is barbaric and against the Lord. I will not stand for it. I will not allow you to dig at the crossroads because it will put your soul in mortal jeopardy.”

    “It already is, Father. You don’t understand that. I’m already damned.”

    “I do understand. I have ministered to your family. And if you continue on in this way, you will only pass the curse on to the next generation. Your sister’s child, Rebeccah’s brood. Surely, you do not want that child to meet the same fate as your lost sibling? Do not damn someone already so innocent.”

    Peter halted. His shovel was in the dirt, but his face was now crestfallen. Father Brown knew that he had struck a note. He had saved the boy. He extended his hand for him to take, to help lift him out of the hole, which he grasped with a chill. 

    Under the oil lamp, Peter was filthy and covered in mud. The only thing clean on him were his blue eyes. Peter opened his mouth to say something, but every time, he seemed to fold in on himself and not utter a word.

    “It is all right,” Father Brown said. “You have done your very best. Go home now. Stay warm. I will see you and Rebeccah on Sunday.”

    Peter nodded. He regarded the shovel as if it was a foreign object and then handed it to the priest. His actions and facial expressions said, I won’t need this any longer, but no words came from his mouth. He slumped up the main road, past where his uncle’s specter had emerged, and then kept going. 

    Father Brown waited at the crossroads until the youth disappeared into the night. Then, he waited for another five minutes to be sure that the ghost did not return as well. When the night seemed empty of spirits and hauntings, he returned to his room, washed as much of the mud and dirt from himself, and then lay under the covers. 

    The terrible feeling persisted until the morning, and he knew he could no longer fool himself that it was the chill. 

    ***

    Father Brown did not see Peter or Rebeccah on Sunday. He’d prepared a sermon on the nature of the afterlife and the sins men have inherited from their fathers, but the homily fell flat on his tongue. Those he needed to administer to the most were not present. What was the point? Though he went through his sermon and the congregation was respectful and kind, he could tell they were not listening. They did not need to hear about breaking family curses and respecting the dead, God-fearing as they were already. 

    After the service, Father Brown shook hands, spoke to people about their small issues, and shared some food with others, and his faith was restored in little gestures. 

    Once he retired to his room, however, the noises returned. A subtle scraping of metal against rock, the sound of earth over his shoulder, a digging chorus of more than just Peter, but a line of gravediggers at their post, as if unearthing the entire Northrop line. 

    Father Brown had been hearing the noises since that night with Peter. And he’d been ignoring them, calling them bad dreams and lingering guilt at his harsh treatment of the youth. But until this Sunday, these spectral noises had only ever visited him at night.

    Now, it was daylight, and he heard the ghost. He’d once been surrounded by the power of his congregation, the living souls of those he could save, and yet he heard the distinct sounds of a man who had not been buried in the proper place, a man who had lain with the wrong woman, and a man who had continued to curse his own brood when he should have been protecting them.

    “Peter Shunn,” Father Brown whispered inside his bedroom. “I see you and hear you. What do you want?”

    There was no answer. Only more noises of scraping, of pacing against soft earth. Father Brown left his room and walked across the stone floors until he was on the other side, at one of the windows facing the cemetery. The grave markers were a hodgepodge of design and prominence. Some of the wealthier families had large stones, while others opted to be modest in death though they could afford angels and carvings like the biggest pieces. 

    Father Brown gathered the birth and death records he kept on the shelf in this room. He located Peter Shunn in his roster,; his death listed as a heart attack at age fifty-five, and struck it out. He didn’t add anything in, but he’d hoped that correcting the register would make the sounds disappear. 

    I am telling the truth now, his actions spoke. Please leave us alone.

    The sounds continued. He sighed and returned to the window. A man was there—spectral, not literal—and he paced the gravestones. He wore a gray outfit, the working-class gear of those who owned a shop but still did all their own repairs, and it was barely visible in the gray mist. He hunched over some of the stones, touching them like they were a child. 

    His child. 

    Father Brown found the listing for the stillborn baby. He had no name, but there was a gender listed. Baby Boy Northrop. He was buried in the cemetery right next to his father, who was not listed on the birth certificate but would join him months later. 

    Father Brown left the registry books on the desk in the room. He gathered a thick coat as he stepped outside. The shovel that the younger Peter had left behind leaned against the back door of the church. He took it now, merely to use it as a walking stick. Or as a weapon, in case these ghosts were violent like the demons in the Bible.

    He walked through the gate of the cemetery, his heart hammering. I have been here any number of times, administering a number of different but no less sacred rites. Yet now I am afraid. “God help us all,” he said as his shoes became caked in mud. 

    The specter turned. The face of the elder Peter was evident, even through the mist and distance. He locked eyes with the priest, his face caught in a rictus grin, and then disappeared. He did not run or hide; he was simply gone. 

    Father Brown regarded the earth where the specter had stood. Footprints, deep into the earth, were present in front of the flat stone where his child was buried. He’d been buried next to the stillborn and next to his mother and father after that. A nice little family plot, usually bought all at once when the head of the household passed, so the family could be together in death. 

    Father Brown stood there for some time, considering his options. His soul, the soul of Peter, and the likelihood of eternal damnation. Then, with another prayer for forgiveness on his lips, he began to dig. 

    ***

    Hours later, as the sun set on the New England horizon, Father Brown walked to Rebeccah’s house and knocked three times. A woman he did not recognize came to the door, her hair gray at the temples and her dress simple yet professional. 

    “Yes, Father?” she asked, but before either one could say anything, a scream came from inside the house. The woman blinked, though she did not falter. “Rebeccah is having her baby tonight.”

    “Oh.”

    “Yes. It is not the best time to come and bless, but I assure you we may need you in the morning.”

    “Is everything all right? I know—”

    The midwife gathered his hands with hers. She smiled warmly, so much like the smiles he gave newlyweds and those who brought their babies into St. Paul’s for the baptismal waters. She was like him; he saw that so clearly at that moment. She dealt with life and death at the beginning, while he seemed to be playing eternal catch-up at the end. “Things are going as they should go,” the midwife said as she let his hands go. “Do not worry about her.”

    “I’m here for Peter,” Father Brown said, remembering his mission with stark clarity. 

    Though he’d dressed again and done his best to wash the dirt off of his face before making the house call, he could see that his nails were ringed with half-moons of dirt. He had not been eating and was thinner in his vestments. He did not look well, not even for the midwife’s typical standards.

    “Is everything all right?” the midwife asked cautiously. “Peter has been a big help to his sister thus far, though I’m sure some of the older children could take his place.”

    “I’d like that. I need to speak with him. It is a private matter.”

    The midwife nodded. She did not invite him inside—not as another scream erupted through the small house—but she bid him wait on the doorstep as she fetched Peter. 

    He came out moments later, his dark hair askew and dark rings under his eyes. He regarded the priest with a polite smile reserved for guests, though it quickly fell away as memories of their last meeting clouded his blue eyes. “What would you like, Father Brown?”

    The midwife closed the door, leaving Peter on the porch. He had grown stronger from her presence, and the boy now crossed his arms over his chest and repeated his question. 

    “I’m afraid I am here to ask for your forgiveness on the matter of your uncle,” Father Brown began. “I believe that you were right. He has been haunting the rectory ever since you left.”

    Peter stood up straighter. “He has? You have seen him?”

    Father Brown nodded and rehashed many of the details that had kept him up at night. The scraping, the terrible howls, and his uncle’s forlorn pacing. “I’m afraid that you were right. Suicides haunt the crossroads, and the church is at a crossroads. This means that there is only one way to rid your uncle’s spirit. We must move him from consecrated ground back to the hole you were digging for him. I am… very sorry it is coming to this. I am also very sorry to your family.”

    Peter held up his hands, silencing the priest. Then, he grew ashamed, having spoken so out of turn. “I am sorry myself. I should have sought council first. I should have—”

    “Hold the apologies. We will need them for God after we get through tonight.” Father Brown drew a deep breath. He plunged his hands into his pockets, only to realize that some of the dirt and silt that he thought he’d rid himself of by changing was now back. He took out a small stone, only to find that it was a finger bone. He held it between the two of them, Peter’s gaze affixed there.

    “May God forgive us,” Peter said.

    Father Brown nodded. He could not have said it better himself. 

    ***

    They left the house of birth and walked into the night towards the house of death. Once his home, St. Paul’s Church had begun to feel unreal as Father Brown dug up the corpse of Peter Northrop and brought it inside piece by piece. 

    The man’s clothing hung off of him in tatters, having been disintegrated by the worms and other bugs after being in the ground for the past year and a half. His skin had mummified in some parts but decayed away to the bone in others. It was a horrible sight truly, one that Father Brown knew he would not rid from himself for years and years if his soul ever recovered. 

    The groundskeeper had filled in the hole by the crossroads the morning after Father Brown had discovered it. No grass grew on the patch, and Father Brown knew that no grass ever would grow there again. It was a worthy sacrifice as long as it meant that they could rid the rectory and the roads of this spirit.

    “I need you to dig again,” Father Brown said. “My back aches after retrieving your uncle.”

    Peter nodded and went to work right away. He grasped the shovel as if it was an extension of his own arm. He dug without relenting, without stopping for a break, and without his leg smarting in pain. Meanwhile, Father Brown transferred the body piece by piece from the rectory hallway to the darkened night. Each time he lay down a new part, Peter regarded it with muted horror. He nodded sometimes as if saying hello to his uncle, while other times, he turned away as if he could hide from what they were doing. 

    Or what his uncle has done, Father Brown reminded himself. They were not the bad men, the true sinners in this equation. They were doing the Lord’s work, rather dirty work, but they would be setting the scales of justice right again. 

    And there would be no more ghosts. Father Brown kept reminding him of that fact, over and over again, until the last piece of the body was brought out. He rested the skull, devoid of skin and possessing only a few wisps of hair, on top of the rest of the body. A beetle, black as the night, crawled out of the mouth and scampered away.

    Both Father Brown and Peter shuddered. 

    “Well,” Father said, “shall we lay him to rest?”

    Now, it was Peter’s job to transfer the body, piece by piece, into the grave that he had dug. He worked slowly, carefully, but soon his hands became a blur of white bone and mud, desperate to get it all underground and behind them both. 

    A driving wind shot up out of nowhere, and the clouds that had been hovering in the sky all day, turning the afternoon gray, now parted in the night sky and showered them with rain. The hole for the body was not as deep as six feet, only three or four at most. 

    But as the rain came, the dirt around them became a mudslide. Peter slipped as he transferred the legs of the corpse, and the rest of his uncle’s body cascaded into the hole, along with Peter.

    “Help!” he cried out, his voice half under the muddy water. He slipped onto the floor of the grave with his face next to his uncle’s skull, which had fallen in during the short mudslide. He screamed for help again. The bones crunched under his feet and added to the horror. Another beetle came out of the mouth of the skull and ran between Peter’s lips as he yelled for help again.

    Peter shot up, spitting, spluttering. His fingers crawled and scraped against the mouth of the grave, pulling more and more dirt over himself as he tried to escape. “Help! Father, help!” 

    Father Brown was silent as stone, watching it all in a lunatic’s trance. The wind and rain had frozen him and made his limbs stiff with fear. Peter reached out for him, desperate to grab onto life again. Father Brown wanted to grasp for him, longed to do so, but he held his position on the side. 

    “Father!” Peter called out, his gasps becoming gurgles. “Please help me! He has me!”

    “The Devil,” Father Brown said, whispering. He drew in a deep breath against the harsh wind and crossed himself awkwardly as if the action was foreign. 

    He tried to get onto his knees, bracing himself against the pain that had never been there before in his joints, and offered a hand to Peter. He grabbed him. He slipped. The sequence was repeated threefold. It seemed they could not hold one another, their fingers transparent as ghosts.

    “We have done the Devil’s work,” Father Brown said. He repeated the words like a chant. He could feel his own soul leaving his body, down into the hole with Peter and the boy’s eternal soul. 

    Father Brown had been forsaken the moment he’d woken up and heard the terrible noise. The moment he’d let the Northrop family into his congregation. The moment he had become a priest. It had all led to this moment, this fearful ruin of a life ended in suicide and two lives, two souls who were desperate enough to end a family line of pain and hurt with the sacrifice of their own souls. 

    “We are dying,” Father Brown said. He held onto Peter’s hand tighter and brought him out of the grave, though he knew Peter was damned along with him, had been damned the moment he was born a cripple, a Northrop. “We are dying, dear Peter. We are already dead.”

    Peter let out a low, almost animal scream as he scrambled up the rest of the grave. He grasped onto Father Brown’s leg, tearing his pants as he finally emerged from the slippery mouth. Peter stood, gasping for air and spitting out dirt. The rest of the grave filled in suddenly, the rain and mud and wind completing the rest of their horrid task. 

    Peter held onto Father Brown’s thin body in a tight embrace. He hugged him tight, tighter than the father had ever been held by family or friend alike. When he finally drew enough strength to hold the youth in return, he felt something slide into place. Not the soul that he lost—he was sure that his eternal life was now in the grave with Peter’s uncle and would remain there until the end of time—but something more primal and freeing. He and Peter had completed a deadly task together. The Devil’s task.

    But they had done it in the right name.

    “Thank you, dear Father,” Peter said as he ended the hug and grasped the priest’s hands in his own. “Thank you. You do not know what this has meant for me.”

    “I do. I do,” Father Brown said. 

    Over the youth’s shoulder, he spotted the place where the main road crested a hill, leaving the rest of it invisible from their position in front of St. Paul’s Church. A man was there, dressed like Peter’s uncle had been dressed in the grave. He paced from side to side, and then he walked down the road. 

    Then, he was gone.

    END