A Head Full of Ghosts

by Paul Tremblay

So many Americans thought and continue to think they’re middle class even when they’re not, and they are desperate to believe in the middle class and the values of bourgeois capitalism.

Her hyperactive pitch was layered and schizophrenic, imploding down into a singularity, then going big bang, expanding and exploding all over everything. These dizzying changes in her voice were instantaneous and hallucinatory, as if she were somehow atonally harmonizing with herself.

There’s nothing wrong with me, Merry. Only my bones want to grow through my skin like the growing things and pierce the world.

It sounded like the saddest of sad songs with notes floating down the staircase and into the foyer like dead leaves; red, brown, and purple.

“I’ll keep your tongue and put it on a string, wear it like a necklace, keep it close against my chest, let it taste my skin until it turns black and shrivels up like all dead things do. What an amazing fucking thought that is: your never-ending tongue shrunken and finally stilled.”

Her skin was gray, the color of the mushrooms that grew around the snaking tangle of tree roots out back. The circles under her eyes were dark and deep. Her black hair was a dead octopus leaking and sliding off her scalp. Whiteheads dotted her chin and the sides of her nose.