You'd Look Better as a Ghost

by Joanna Wallace

How do I escape my mind?

Wearing a shapeless tweed skirt that probably doubles up as a picnic blanket

Is casual anti-fatness a requirement for adult fiction? Jesus fuck.

She’ll probably be thin by the time Jemma stops speaking. Maybe that’s the plan.

🙄

Hundreds of years of instinct challenged in that one moment by the persuasions of greed.

They see the kilt, wellies and tears and their minds reliably fill in the gaps. Because that’s what minds do—forever telling us stories we feel compelled to believe.

“Lucas never could resist a skinny brunette with long legs.”

Except he thought she was blonde.

so I drove down, arriving just in time to see him leaving with you.

If that’s true you’d know she was in a blonde wig.

At least that shouldn’t be a problem for Derek and his navigational skills.

organized, high-functioning

Middle class, you mean.

“Unless Jemma is suffocating you with a pillow,” says Welshman, without sarcasm.

Okay, that was funny.

What the police don’t know is that Jemma was abusing Lucas’s mother and that Lucas knew about it.

More fucked-up microcosms of society must surely exist but there can’t be too many.

people listen carefully to rhetoric but are rarely persuaded to change their minds.

I wonder whether madness encroaches into her dreams or whether sleep remains her last refuge.

“They should all be shot,” he declares determinedly. “They should all be rounded up in their white coats and shot.” Star opens her mouth to speak but Will forms his words faster. “I don’t think it’s fair to tar all doctors with the same brush,” he says in his peculiar little voice, taking a break from writing everything down. “And I certainly don’t think they should all be shot.” “Maybe not shot dead,” concedes Welshman, “but they should all be wounded. At least then there would be some accountability for their actions, and they’d properly understand the meaning of pain.”

this dog is all talk and no trousers.

What?

You don’t know the true meaning of love until you give birth.”

Ew.

I walk past houses and imagine the people inside. Cooking meals, watching television, talking about the rain—all so certain about what tomorrow will bring. So certain they’re probably not even thinking about tomorrow.

Six years. I wonder whether he’ll spend one moment of that time feeling anything other than self-pity and indignation. I wonder how his victims feel today. As their sentences enter year forty.

That’s one of the two things I’ll never understand about my dad. His love for my mother, and why he never said that he knew about me.

“What do they look like?” he asks, and I can picture the sulky expression.

The only children’s shoes in the building, you absolute disgrace.

“No great mystery,” she says after a few moments’ silence. “We couldn’t have a baby of our own.”

My least favorite trope.

I close my eyes. What Kathleen said, is that right? Is money the reason most people do most of the things they do? Are ordinary people that shallow? That predictable? That disappointing?

I’m just doing what any ordinary person in my position would do.