Issue Seven

Corn-maze dust does the Devil’s jig around two pairs of feet. Meena’s toes are brown and slim, probing the earth like curious pitchfork tines. Salome’s feet are pale and sturdy, thumping the ground with her solid heel. Corn pokes the sky. Way up above their heads, there could be astronauts watching the waving stalks from the outermost edges of space. Salome wants to reach up so high that they see her too. She’ll wave to the astronaut lady with the very red hair: her ginger astronaut looks like a superhero and has a laugh like galaxies of light.

Meena would make a fair explorer, Salome knows. High fashion is her game, even in overalls with crusty knees and denim hiding her scraped-up shins. Questions are all the rage these days. So is art. Meena has bushels of both. She has no distain for Salome’s soiled polka-dot dress with the high collar.

 

“Salome, let’s run away! We could thrive here!” the sprinter shouts and spins in dizzy face-up spirals. Words like ‘thrive’ come out so spontaneous that nobody gives her lip. “You’re so clever, Salome,” she continues, after flopping on the ground. “Make us a cornhusk fire. I’ll roast corn on the coals. We can catch crows and tame them! Can you imagine having your own battalion of crows? And then we could stay here, and sleep with the stars all watching!”

“What about the smoke? They’ll find us. We’d get sick of corn after a few days. And then it’ll frost. This whole field will be bleached and creepy. All the stalks will turn into zombie fingers.” But fearless Meena is up and away, flirting with straw men. If there were zombies, she would make friends with them and lobby for equal rights regardless of race, gender, age, social status, or speed of pulse. It’s all about the content of character, and Meena is contented.

All these years later, she uses her long dark braid to swat flies away down by the swimming pool. Nobody has ever seen a lifeguard so likely to drown a man with just a look. Once a month or so, she thinks of her childhood friend who burned easily in the sun. She wonders where that girl is now.

Salome is not as far away as Meena thinks. The girl repented. Devil dust got her young, so she went to Christ to beg forgiveness. The sins were yet to come, but sins there might be.

Behind convent hedges, she wears white and brown. Black is for women fully fledged.

Salome bends over her evening soup but doesn’t eat. Eating is an earthly pleasure. Pleasure is weakness, and she wants God to see her strong. Strangely, though, this doesn’t make her strong. Bones push up against her skin, becoming a collar around her neck and bars across her chest. Visions come, of fire and of blood. Salome kneels to these sweaty illusions.

Today is a Thursday afternoon in snow. Down at the swimming pool, Meena is a sleek red seal. Between her breasts she has a white plus sign where Salome carries a dead man on a chain. The water is so electric blue that it looks like summer sky over a cornfield. Someone is screaming, and it isn’t in pleasure. A man cradles a dripping infant with pink eyelids and drenched eyelashes. He’s shouting for help.

“Does anyone here know CPR?” yells a woman. All eyes turn to Meena and her glistening brown thighs. She’s already halfway there.

Salome kneels in her husky skin. All her sisters are baking bread this afternoon. She told Ms. Superior that she couldn’t partake, which isn’t a lie, really, is it? Now she worries that a lie by the omission of truth might be a sin. Forgive me, father. Forgive your Salome. She got a bottle of bleach from the cleaning cabinet yesterday. Is that stealing? Tears run down her cheeks. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Cradling the wet duck-fuzz head, Meena uses two fingers to compress that little chest. One, two, three, she counts quickly to thirty and then seals her lips over the little mouth and nose. Two breaths, just enough to move that tiny chest. The father of the child is sobbing uncontrollably. Meena ignores him.

The bleach is Mr. Clean. Salome takes a swallow to scrub out her guts. She drinks Mr. Clean without a moment to appreciate irony. It burns her like the visions do. She chokes and splutters.

 

When butterfly lungs flutter, eighty-five birthday cakes practically bake themselves. The little body convulses, and Meena flips it over to drain away milky sputum. Plum lipstick is smeary on puff-pastry cheeks. Those baby-blue eyes are the color of the sky over a corn maze. A wail starts up as the baby squirms, and Meena reunites father and child. She feels like she’s just run a marathon. And won.

 

Pain curdles Salome’s stomach. She pukes white nothingness on the floor and cleans it up with the rest of the bleach. Nothing truly colorful is allowed in the convent, but the bleach bottle is blue. Salome remembers a wild brown heathen that flew on curious feet. She wonders where that girl is now, and pities her- not one of God’s chosen. There was a day in a maze on the death rattles of summer. That girl was running so sure, and she had followed. Meena must have had a map in her head. When the parents were just on the cusp of calling the cops, the girls emerged victorious. Meena’s father scooped up his little girl, swung her around and held her tight. Salome’s mother didn’t say a word until she was safe in the car.

“We were worried sick,” she said, “You ought to be ashamed. What do you have to say?” Salome looked out the window, then down at her hands.

“I’m sorry,” she said. And meant it.

 

 

Willow DeLyon has loved telling stories, as long as she can remember. She grew up in the hills of Massachusetts telling stories to whoever would listen. At seventeen, she left home to travel, and met many people who shared their own stories, and in doing so, helped her along the bumpy road towards adulthood. One thing she learned was the importance of listening to strangers and learning from their joys and sorrows, good choices and regrets. Although she’s not been collecting stories for very long, she hopes to share the right stories with the right people at the right times.

 

She called you and said she was tired, that she couldn’t sleep the night before because of con ma, a ghost. You weren’t listening; you didn’t ask. But she answered anyway. He’d come for her at the Devil’s hour, dressed in all white. His smile a crescent moon at dawn, he’d knelt at the foot of her bed, eyes like two black bubbles. She’d laid awake, frozen. Come morning, she’d looked and saw that her husband had gone, as if he’d fizzled out into nothing but dust and slow, amber-tinted light.

You didn’t believe her.

Lifting your glasses, you rubbed the side of your nose with two fingers. The voice of your grandmother, your bà ngoại, was small, soft. Swiveling between the textbook and the solutions manual, you scowled in frustration. You breathed in: black coffee and cheap erasers. And you breathed out, swearing under your breath that next semester, you’d start studying sooner, much sooner. You turned off speakerphone, clamping the iPhone between your shoulder and ear. You were busy, and you said so—twice. Loudly and firmly, as if she was a slow-learning dog. She spoke in broken, faltering English.

She said, “My grandson is a hard worker.”

She said, “I’m proud of you.”

She said, “I love you.”

You hung up. In that moment, you had no way of knowing what your face looked like (blank, with eyes like iced-over rocks). You had no way of knowing that the following night, while you wrote your organic chemistry midterm, grandma would take grandpa’s hand, the two of them disintegrating into nothing but dust and moonlight.

#

In the summers between grades four, five, and six, your grandmother cooked you lunch every day. When you saw her at the door in the morning, snug in a dotted cardigan, you struggled not to smile. A white plastic bag, stuffed with sweet buns and coloured sticky rice, always hung from one wrist.

The day before grade four started, she’d held your hand and the both of you ran—giggling—through a thunderstorm, from No Frills to your house across the street, white plastic bags stretched over the tops of your heads. The world was a dark and soggy place, an anonymous jungle of dripping power lines and shiny rooftops. A world without any framework or handholds. But as long as bà ngoại held your hand, you thought, you would know where to run.

The summer between grades five and six, you grew almost a foot taller. You were eating bánh xèo on a quiet August afternoon when you heard them outside your front door—those boys from school who would kick the back of your chair and flick elastic bands at your bare arms and legs. Boys who would yank the skin around their blue and green eyes, spitting the word chink in your face.

Your fingers sticky with fish sauce, you scrambled out the door to see them wheeling away your bike. Before you could take off running with clenched fists, bà ngoại yanked you back by the elbow. Tottering onto your front lawn, she screamed at the boys in Vietnamese, her little, wrinkled face turning red. Furious, she flapped a dirty rag at them until they dropped the bike on the sidewalk and sprinted away, wide-eyed.

The next summer, you told your mom you were old enough to stay home alone, that you could eat whatever was in the fridge. You were embarrassed by bà ngoại—by her broken English and blackened teeth. By then, you were more than two heads taller than her. Having stumbled upon new friendships and new, mesmerizing ambitions, the world had unfolded into someplace effervescent and white—someplace comfortable, where you no longer needed to hold anybody’s hand.

#

In front of the apartment building were huge, old willow trees, their leaves drooping, almost touching the ground, as if they were people lost in thought.

Inside the apartment, the smell was nothing you could’ve imagined: a sickly sweet, like cantaloupe rotting under the afternoon sun. Even with her body gone, the smell still sank into your hair, your clothes. Your throat was plugged. Outside, though the chintz curtains, you saw a flock of pigeons nosedive behind the willows. The engine of a motorcycle in the parking lot out front filled the small apartment with the moaning of a torture machine. Behind you, your mom was folding the one, tattered winter jacket your grandma had ever owned, the jacket she bought at a Sears outlet mall when she’d first immigrated to Canada.

You stacked her books into a cardboard box. Thumbing through the pages of a notebook, you saw that she’d written the days of the week in English, over and over again, in stiff, slanted letters. She’d penned the names of furniture, of animals and countries. You ran your fingers over the popped-out curlicues on the backs of the lined pages. You bit your lip until you tasted pennies, squeezing your eyes shut.

In another, slimmer notebook, you skimmed through the phone numbers and addresses of her family doctor, dentist, hairstylist, and a few names you didn’t recognize. An unopened pack of gel pens, with Dollarama’s green and yellow sticker still on it, was hidden beneath a thick Vietnamese-to-English dictionary.

Next to the phone on the kitchen table was a spiral-bound notepad with a holographic kitten on the cover. You took it and sat down on a chair she’d lined with a sheet of plastic. Each page in the notebook had a tiny paw in the upper right corner, with a page number in its center.

Bà ngoại had written on the front page, “My name is Linh. How are you? I am well.”

Your mom was taking silverware out of the kitchen drawers. The clink of forks and knives sounded like faraway, heavenly bells. You flipped to the last page with words on it.

She’d written, “My grandson is a hard worker.”

She’d written, “I’m proud of him.”

She’d written, “I love him.”

 

Carolyn Chung is a nineteen-year-old living in Toronto. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in FreeFall and tenderness, yea.

 

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.