Fiction

Madison, standing arms folded by the linoleum counter, watched Kyle eat another grubby fistful of Cheetos and lick the dust off his palm. His round face, splattered with grease, peered up at the TV. Some sort of marathon was on- Power Rangers- and Kyle’s beady eyes hadn’t left the screen for hours. It seemed inconceivable that her son cared more about fictional superheroes than he did about the melodrama unfolding outside. Kyle loved Lassie, right? The dog, not the movie. Kyle hated that movie. Not enough explosions.

She turned and caught a glimpse of her husband through the cracked window of their trailer. He was holding Grandpa Turner’s gun, tears streaming down his face. Madison looked away. That’s how you do it, she thought. She glanced back at her child. There was something distorted about it, the way this scene was unfolding- the crying outside only contrasted the sickly glow of their cluttered living room. And there Kyle was, unmoving. Why wouldn’t he move?

She didn’t want him to be sad, she told herself. She just wanted to see him be sad. But what she wanted, the hysteria and the breakdowns and the screaming, that wasn’t going to happen. The television was on.

It wasn’t their fault. They just didn’t have the cash to go to the vet to do it. Blame the economy, blame the president. It was cheaper this way. Still, it made her want to vomit when she looked at their flat screen and saw all the money they could afford to waste on that piece of garbage. Deep in her gut, she had known that Rick’s promotion was a temporary respite. Nothing ever went well enough for them. Besides, all they ever watched on it was Family Feud and the goddamn Power Rangers. Her child loved it, and she hated it more.

The boy finished the Cheetos and sucked his plump fingers clean. Kyle’s eyes were small and beady and completely unmoving. She felt bile rise in her throat.

A bark came from the outside of the trailer. Rick’s muffled cries soaked through the cracked tile.

She just wanted Kyle to care. She wanted to grab that fat face and push it against the window until his snot ran down the glass and tears welled up in its eyes and Kyle could see her husband, its father, blowing the dog’s brains out. And she wanted that boy, that parasite, to cry, because that’d at least prove that it was human, and that it cared about anything or anyone. She thought about doing it, she really did. But Madison didn’t think she’d be able to forgive herself.

Sounds stopped trickling in from outside the trailer. She could picture her husband taking deep, even breaths, trying to swallow his emotions back into his stomach. Madison turned away. There was a yelp and a gunshot and then nothing but the birds, voices like wind chimes, nature correcting itself through music. With one misshapen finger, Kyle turned up the volume on the television.

Madison felt a tug at the corner of her mouth. Kyle didn’t look away from the screen, didn’t blink, because Lassie was just a movie and the dog was just a dog.

 

Henry Wahlenmayer is a Literary Arts student at LPPACS. He likes chickens.

The world was awash in grey, grey light, and only the rain was watching. It lightly dabbed at the gravelly scree on the wet tar road, shining everything into granite: the occasional buggy creeping by, the fractured sidewalk, and a man’s shoes which stood, undecided, beneath the cover of a bus stop. They were black cap-toed derbies, the cheap kind only a lower-middle income like the man’s own could afford. The glossed veneer was cracked and his toes were drawn together like shivering children.

Millie had bought them for him. Millie, Millie. Millie with limp, mousy hair and a drooping face. Millie with an apron around her waist and a baby boy in her arms. Millie, his unswerving wife. A woman of middle-age who couldn’t understand melancholy or the perverse pleasure that accompanies pain, who spoke in the lilting cadences of the content, and who had married Henry, six years and two frown lines earlier, for his grey, grey eyes.

Standing at an altar with him in a burial shroud-white dress, Millie didn’t know then that Henry’s heart didn’t beat with love, or really anything at all besides the bluish blood that crept along his veins. It was buried deep in a bitter sleep, pumping its liquid breath in and out and in and out until that fateful day when he met She.

She. To Henry, She was love and romance and recognition, a name and a place and a time gone too fast. She was beauty and wine-dark hair. She was like a tern, swaying with the sky and smelling of sea air.

She was sitting on a bench in the local park, a sanctuary of trees, when Henry met her. Her wine-dark locks were dancing with the cypresses. She wasn’t doing anything in particular, just sitting. She did that often. Sit. Henry had walked over to her, his feet undecided even then, and sat down, too. She looked up at him with her grey, grey eyes and whispered, “Do you know, I think you are wearing somebody else’s shoes. Those are the shoes of a confident man.”

And he had looked down at his shoes, brown boots, and saw through them to the young man’s hesitant feet inside, the same feet that She had guessed to be there. “I think you’re right,” he had whispered back. And that was that. That was how it had started, the gilded romance with She.

And then the bus crash. And that was that. That was how it had ended with She.

Now he would never wake up in the morning and see Love looking back at him. Now he would never wake up in the morning and be sure he had ever seen Love looking back at him.

For years after She, Henry had wandered about his small city, charting its margins with his footsteps, but never venturing beyond them. He had often flipped through travel guides at the public library, his eyes devouring Paris, his tongue tasting Rome, his fingers caressing London. He walked out of the library after these trips abroad, as he liked to think them, in an eager daze, hungrily slinking to the drugstore to buy lottery tickets that would pay for his exotic travel whims, someday. Someday. His lucky number was 1117, or November 17^th, the day he met She.

Soon, Henry found himself on the cusp of middle-age, alone, fourteen pounds heavier with burden, and completely unaware of how he had ended up where he was. He worked as an accountant, hunched over his computer, nameless to his colleagues, and just another paycheck to his boss. The only reason he had survived all the personnel and budget cuts at his company was that once he had sent his boss’s secretary a get-well-soon card when she came down with the flu.

That was about the same time he had met Millie. Millie was also an accountant at the same firm. Their meeting wasn’t quite so quaint as when he met She, but comparing these two women would be like putting an ant next to a butterfly: they weren’t even the same species. And he happened to be the man these two women loved. Anyhow.

Millie had said hello to him one morning, her brown, brown eyes shy, eight years after November 17^th, and two years later they were married. Henry never loved Millie like he loved She; in fact, he had never loved her at all. Instead, he loved the idea of Millie. He had loved the comfort and stability marriage had offered. He imagined their life together would be like the nicely made bed they had slept in their first night as husband and wife. Clean and sturdy.

Only when his son came, wailing and screaming like reality, did Henry realize the illusion that was his married life with Millie. He had fooled himself into thinking that his new wife, his newly repainted kitchen, and the doting jealousy his wife’s friends wore in his house were happiness. His lottery ticket sprees and travel plans had flickered out with his bachelor days, just as swiftly as youth had passed him by.

Frustrated, Henry wished sometimes that he could jump back on that train, back on to Life, that great thing everyone else sighed about with a film of nostalgia painted over their eyes. Instead, one day he was lost and alone, the next, he was lost, alone, and married. The greyness in his grey, grey eyes was now the grey of a rainy day, no longer the silver fire he used to see reflected in She’s brazen smiles.

But life went on, apathetic to Henry’s existential crises and indifferent to his pathetic thoughts of wishes unfulfilled. For a while, Henry had tried medications to jolt him from his confused stupor, but the thought that he needed help depressed him even more. So Henry stopped. And Henry attached blinders to his head so he would never catch a lethal glimpse of the stooping man who mirrored him on glass windows and in clear puddles.

And here he was. At the bus stop. Henry, Henry. With grey, grey eyes in a grey, grey world. It was Monday, a skeleton of a day: all that’s leftover from the carnage of the weekend. It was 7 am, like always, and Henry was waiting for Bus 43, headed westward to his grey, grey office. Like unwilling slugs, he shuffled his shoes tiredly. He wanted somebody to stop him. To march right up to him and yell his name, to recognize him, Henry. He wanted somebody to shake some color into his grey, grey world like She had.

But nobody stopped him. Nobody marched up to him and yelled his name and recognized him, Henry, or shook any color at all into his grey, grey world. Instead, the rain fell and the cars slid by and his watched ticked from 7:01 to 7:02 and on and on and on… When would time stop? Henry thought about this for a while, tumbling it around in his washing machine of a mind: insert a thought and watch it spin in circles.

Of course, Henry already knew the answer to this question. He knew the answer to all these types of questions. It was She, even if it didn’t make sense. She was like that; the ribbon he could always turn to, to tie things up. But since her grisly desertion of him and all things living, since the day he saw her limbs cracked by Fate’s hands, She made him writhe in a suffocating guilt. How like her to haunt him even now.

It was the guilt of knowing he had settled for Millie and resigned the both of them to a dull life of mornings and nights passing unnoticed and insignificant beneath the great, big sky. The shame that Millie loved him, but he loved She. The guilt that he had married Millie anyway. The shame that he wrapped himself in pity and hid behind his guilt like prison bars, trapped, but safe. Safe and hidden in his shame.

Henry carried this rotten tumble of agony around every day, to the bus stop every morning, just like this morning. He’d always thought that maybe he’d be end up a somebody. But now he was just him. Henry, Henry. A plain man with a grimace plastered permanently across his sagging face.

He wasn’t the man people whispered about in malice or adoration. He wasn’t the man people whispered about at all. He wasn’t bad. He just wasn’t good, either. And this nagged at Henry every morning like the rain on his neck as he surveyed the bleak road and the minivans slithering by…

Reminiscing, he counted the red cars. That was She’s favorite color. “Scarlet!” She would cry, pointing to a red Volkswagen whizzing past. “Crimson!” at a red pick-up truck. He saw three red cars this morning. And what was this?

A glimmer of wine-dark flame caught his eye. It was a lustrous braid attached to a lithe tern of woman bending over to pick up a grey, grey pebble on the sidewalk. She was only a yard away from him, waiting for the bus, too, he presumed. She stayed squatting, examining the slate pebble with grey, grey eyes, the grey of a silver forest fire.

Henry couldn’t help but stare, the woman so resembled She, almost to perfection. He wondered if her voice could also out-sing the birds and if her words could also outshine the lamenting of the sea. Her nimble fingers turned the pebble over and over. Her business attire was tailored perfectly, and Henry pondered briefly if calloused hands corrupted by time like his own had ever run over her fragile body, through her wine-dark hair.

She.

Henry tore his eyes away from this woman, this mirage, thirsty to take in her consuming temptation, her consuming fright, but more tortured that he could forget about Millie at the sight of a burnished braid. He ripped his head to the side. In a blur, from afar, he watched his bus, Bus 43, pull swiftly up to the stop where he was standing and skid out of control on the slippery road.

He watched the ghost, She, rear back in fright and drop that perfectly grey, grey pebble. He watched her fall into the road. Funny that she should do so, so gracefully.

Amid the confusion, he watched himself fling his worn body onto the road and push the woman, She, whoever’s pernicious Fury she was, to the side, hoping to catch the brunt of the bus’s force on himself.

This time, he wouldn’t let the bus get She.

His body crumpled beneath gravity’s weight as he landed in front of the veering bus. He hoped wildly he had pushed She far enough into safety’s grasp, but he couldn’t be sure. He would never be sure.

He never was sure either if it was the weight of the bus that crushed the life out of him or the weight of the guilt that now his wife and son were alone and he had left them and the world for a phantom of the love he didn’t deserve. Was she ever there? Or if it was the crushing melancholy that killed him, the dissatisfaction with the ugly plainness of his life. But either which way, he died.

The world was awash with grey, grey light when Henry left it, and only the rain was watching.

 

Nathalie M is a ninth grader from Seattle and dark chocolate enthusiast. She loves to read, watch old movies, and play with her dogs.

As I’m getting ready for bed, my phone vibrates with a text from my cousin.

Malinda: YOUR GHOST BOY IS IN MY ROOM. GET HIM OUT BEFORE I KILL HIM A SECOND TIME.

It’s midnight and I have school tomorrow, but the dead don’t care. They’ll pop up anywhere from midnight to the bleak hours of the early morning. The planet can only handle one world at a time; the dead wake when the living sleep, and sleep when the living wake. Yin and yang.

I grab the sweater draped over my wooden desk chair, then shove my feet into socks and boots. I snatch my keys from the corner of the bulletin board hanging above my desk, then quietly make my way out the house. Mom and Dad are already sleeping, and they didn’t appreciate me leaving in the middle of the night to do ghost business on my own. They prefer to tag along, like chaperones on a field trip. I’m sixteen. I know how to free ghosts, and I’m better than the fakers on TV.

This is the third time this week I’ve walked down the street at midnight. I whistle as I walk down the middle of the road. Nobody drives in this small town this late on weeknights. My neighbors are already buried in their blanket cocoons, asleep and oblivious that a teen ghost is haunting the corner house on my street, where Malinda lives with my two aunts.

Her front door is unlocked; as it was the other times I came here this week. I enter without knocking, assuming her moms are also asleep. I leave my boots at the porch and quietly close the door. There’s no need to lock up. This should be a short visit.

Malinda is in her bedroom, furiously brushing knots out of her thick hair in front of her mahogany dressing table. She glares into her oval mirror, her plucked eyebrows scrunched together. If she could convert the fury in her eyes to holy rays, she could burn away the ghost who has been drawn to her room for the past few nights.

The ghost, a sixteen-year-old boy known as Hiroshi Ochi in his past life, sleeps on Malinda’s bed. Malinda’s puffy body pillow is tucked between his long arms and legs. Every time he comes, he gravitates to Malinda’s bed and pillow. The previous nights, I got him out by suggesting he tour the town. His unfinished business might not be in this house. But now that he’s here a third time, on Malinda’s bed third time, I’m starting to think his business is related to something in her room.

The dead usually sleep during the day, vanishing into thin air as if they never existed. Hiroshi has recently transitioned from the living to the dead. His soul still clings to the routine of the living. In time, if he isn’t freed, he will spend the nights wandering the planet until his business is complete.

I touch Hiroshi’s arm. A healthy chill crawls up my arm.

“Hiroshi,” I say softly. “Can you wake up for me?”

Hiroshi murmurs and turns his sleeping face into the pillow.

“He better not be drooling all over it,” Malinda says.

“It’ll go away in a few minutes,” I say. Spectral fluids don’t remain for long.

Hiroshi rolls to his other side, his face still buried in the pillow. He wears the same clothes he wore when he died: a pressed, white elbow-length shirt; blue-black slacks; and a thin, black leather belt. I’ve never seen him in shoes or socks before.

I tickle the undersides of his chilly bare feet, startling him awake. I pull the long pillow from his lax grip and toss it at the headboard. Hiroshi looks up at me with droopy eyes, too tired to be angry, then flops onto the bed and grabs the pillow.

“I’m certain now,” he says. “My business is connected to this pillow.”

“Your business is to leave me alone,” Malinda says.

“Give me the pillow and I’ll be gone sooner.”

“It’s my pillow.”

“I can bring it back tomorrow,” I say. “It shouldn’t take long.”

Malinda opens her mouth to argue.

“Don’t you want to help him rest?” I say.

She clicks her teeth together. She looks at Hiroshi, whose eyes are turned down to his lap. He looks like a kicked puppy.

Malinda pushes the pillow into my chest until I clutch it with both hands. “Just hurry up,” she says.

“Thank you,” Hiroshi says. “Can I have the honor of opening it?”

“Go ahead.” Malinda twists her wrist in the air. “But rip along the seams. I still want the case.”

I give Hiroshi the pillow. Malinda gives him a pair of scissors. He carefully cuts the pillow open and reaches inside, his lip caught between his teeth. He pulls clumps of stuffing out for Malinda and me to sift. Halfway through destuffing the pillow, he pauses with his hand inside. His eyes widen and he slowly pulls a rusty locket out.

Malinda recognizes it and holds out a hand. “Can I see that? I’ll give it back.”

Hiroshi pools the necklace in her palm.

“I was wondering where this went.” She opens the locket and shows me the two faces staring out. “I used it for an ancestry presentation in my Spanish class. It must’ve fallen in when I was stuffing. Weird.” She chuckles. “These are my great-grandparents.”

“It’s my family!” Hiroshi shoves his face in front of mine to get a look. “Those are my great-grandparents too!”

Malinda looks at him. “You’re related to them? You don’t look it.”

“Malinda,” I warn.

“Yes!” Hiroshi says. “That is why I was drawn here. You have a picture of them.”

“That’s your unfinished business? Finding pictures of your great-grandparents?” Malinda narrows her eyes at him.

“My family. Finding my family. You’re my family.” His eyes water. “I lost my parents and grandparents in an accident. You’re all I have left.”

Hiroshi grabs the locket and holds it to his chest. His black eyes fog over and his breaths become shallow. His body becomes transparent. He drops the pillow and wraps his arms around Malinda and me, then kisses our heads. His touch becomes soft, like a pillow I can sink my hands in.

“Thank you. Thank you so much.” He takes Malinda’s hand and pushes the necklace into it. He curls her fingers around it. His body fades until it’s barely there.

“Hiroshi!” I grab his wrist. It feels like thick vapor. “Do you see anything?”

“Huh?” he says.

I speak fast with the fear he will vanish before he can answer. “Ghosts see different things before they go. What do you see? I want to know.”

“Everything’s fading into white and I see a woman. She…looks like me.” The first tear slips down his cheek and then he’s gone.

I close my fist on air.

Malinda gets her laptop while I collect my thoughts. “What’s his last name?” she asks.

“Ochi.”

I hate the aftermath of a ghost’s departure. I always develop a bond with them, and though we rarely get to know each other, it always hurts to watch them fade. Hiroshi, unlike the other young ghosts, never told me how he died.

“Tomoko, you should see this,” Malinda says.

I scoot next to her and glance over the month-old news article. Hiroshi Ochi was a sophomore student at a private high school in New York. He had died on his way home from school after a drunk driver jumped the curb.

That explains his bare feet; sometimes people lose their shoes when they get hit.

“I don’t get his unfinished business,” Malinda says. “Finding a locket of his great-grandparents seems a bit…boring.”

“He was looking for relatives,” I say. “For us.”

Malinda picks up the fallen pillow. She puts it on her dressing table. Her mouth stretches into a long yawn. I expect her to tell me to leave so she can sleep. Instead, she says, “I hope he’s in a better place.”

“They all are,” I say.

I don’t know what awaits all the ghosts I’ve helped free, but I have a feeling it’s beautiful. Hiroshi seemed to think so, smiling at the woman he saw right before he faded.

 

Rachel lives and writes in California. Her debut novel, The Bridge, was published with Harmony Ink Press under the penname Rachel Lou, and her short stories, creative nonfiction, and fan writing have appeared in student literary magazines and fandom zines. She was an author panelist at SLJ Teen Live 2016, where she discussed cross-genre writing. When she’s not writing, she’s scrolling through her Tumblr dash, playing video games, training at her kung fu school, or working toward her bachelor’s degree in Business Administration.

When we drive, I feel dizzy.

He’s turning corners at breakneck speed, rushing past stop signs and traffic lights until suburbia melts into the rural area outside our town. We cruise past endless stretches of abandoned farmer’s land, all beige wheat and liquor bottles left over from bush parties.

His hand hangs out lazily from the window of his father’s car, moving along to the beat from the radio. Sometimes we listen to my music, but you can only tolerate shitty pop for so long, so he’s playing his mixed CD with the word ‘indie’ smeared across it in black Sharpie.

He’s a focused driver for the most part, but sometimes he sneaks a glance over at me and laughs as though something’s funny. The noise he makes is the giggle of a schoolboy, dreamy and dizzying. The radio is on full blast, this track he’d sent me a million times.

Sometimes I wish I could turn it down.

“Let’s drive to the city,” he says, and I nod.

He stares through the rear-view and I stare through the side mirror. Everything behind me is dry, even the wind pushing my hair in every direction can’t hide the hundred-degree heat.

He reaches for his plastic water bottle, spilling some down his chin and onto his Buddy Holly shirt. When the clouds open up across our stretch of highway I can see the constellation of freckles across his cheekbones, I remember looking forward to them every summer.

Our speed is disorienting, he insists after one-twenty it all feels the same.

Forty minutes past the large green sign with our town and population written across it he asks me what I’m thinking. I don’t tell him about the two of us staring up to the tops of skyscrapers or unpacking coffee mugs in studio apartments or getting lost together or that rush of air in the subway station as a train departs.

“I’m just glad we got out today.”

He rubs his hand against my arm; his skin is cool against the rural heat.

 

To our amazing luck, we pass city limits right as the last song on his mixtape ends.

The flat and favourless landscape of wheat fields has been replaced by a horizon line of skyscrapers and power lines. We’re in no-man’s-land, not yet the city but ripe with the promise of it.

He finally slows as he prepares to take the next exit, but I’d adjusted to his speeding ages ago, the dizziness is gone.

 

We arrive downtown in good time, everything is steely and tinted blue. We’re wedged between a couple grainy yellow cabs for a bit- interestingly, there’s something unnerving about the stillness.

He finds cheap parking and I have to help him figure out the metre. He giggles in a kind of effeminate embarrassment. There’s a breeze by the lakeshore, the pavement is wet as though it’s just rained.

We walk around aimlessly, sifting through shops that are too expensive for our budgets and checking the menus of diners too dodgy for our taste.

We find ourselves waiting in line for something- a concert or a gallery of some sort. Whatever it is, the line is long and packed with kids with interesting piercings and purple in their hair so we assume it’s cool. We sit on the curb, staring up at skyscrapers. Their height feels disorienting, dizzying, like they feel ready to tip at any time. The buildings themselves are dull and grey, the sunlight bouncing off all the many windows makes my eyes hurt.

We decide the line isn’t worth waiting for.

We find an entrance to the subway station, and as we head down the stairs he tells me we’re gonna buy day passes and ride the trains along every route, stopping and exploring the first and last stop of each.

It sounds like a wonderfully calculated adventure to me.

When we get up to the window, he realizes he has no change on him, the guy at the window says he doesn’t accept debit. With a distraught look on his face he says he’s going to look for an ATM, I tell him not to bother. The day’s disappeared before our eyes; I say that my mom had just texted a minute ago to tell me I needed to be home for dinner. He doesn’t question how I got cell service underground.

He suggests we at least take a subway back to the parking lot, I tell him there’s no point, we’ve already gotten ourselves lost. I can tell by the look in his eyes that he’s taken this to mean something else entirely.

He kisses me then, in the subway station, where we’re lost together but not lost together. His lips taste exactly like the charcoal they made me drink that night I’d ended up in the ER because I’d taken too many pills: nothing at all.

I can hear the rush of air from a train leaving the station; I’m just a few feet too far to feel it.

I don’t think he even knows who Buddy Holly is.

We ask an old man how to get to the street where we’d parked, he glared at us through suspicious, steely blue eyes and gave us delightfully detailed instructions. It turned out in all our wandering we’d made it just minutes from our starting point.

When we’re back in the car I ask if we can listen to my radio station and he crinkles his nose and giggles annoyingly. You can only listen to that stuff for so long, he tells me, and we play his mixtape from the top.

 

We approach city limits, the grey scale horizon behind us and the towering power lines in front of us. We don’t talk and his hand swings carelessly from the window of his borrowed car, gesturing to his music. Once he hits one-twenty it all feels the same. I avoid catching the city’s reflection from the side mirror, and instead stare outwards until I see the stretch of golden wheat fields, stop signs, home.

 

Megan Hunt is a Canadian writer, editor and undergraduate student at Concordia University in Montreal. Her non-fiction work has been published in a number of small publications, including Affinity Magazine, where she has served as a contributing editor since the summer of 2016. When she isn’t writing somewhere in downtown Montreal, she spends her summers in her hometown outside Toronto, working in the non-profit sector and hanging out with Alfie, the greatest dog in the world.