An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

They argued that every being in the Heavens’ creations deserved the dignity of death.

Even beasts of the field were made male and female, were they not? So they might multiply and spread the Heavens’ bounty. Tarlanders did not come male and female— everything but.

Tarlanders came from the Realm of Chaos—the world that existed before the Heavens overruled it, replacing nonsense with divine structure. Their demon forms could not conform to the Holy Order set forth by the Heavens.

These men had the means and opportunity to destroy evidence, to protect their legacy, but not one of them thought earnest discussion of reanimating a person’s limbs for the purpose of manual labor warranted deletion from their official record. Forget the horrifying cruelty—the incompetent science of it all.

“You’re one of those who has to tune the world out and focus on one thing at a time. We have a word for that down here, women like you. Insiwa. Inside one. It means you live inside your head and to step out of it hurts like a caning.”

Aster had been called worse: simple, dumb, defective, half-witted dog, get on all fours and spread. Not all there.

She felt herself ...

A part of each person lay in their past, in their parentage and grandparentage, and if that history was missi...

Rakkun eyes, they called it, after the scavenging animal; for they descended from a scavenging people.

This far from the past, no one could truly know their history.

Pockets got new life as homes for various and sundry collectibles—poppyserum, antibiotics, seeds, thread, screws, thimbles.

You can’t expect the dead to wear perfume,

It’s something in my blood they smell.”

She agreed that she wasn’t special, not in the colloquial sense that implied one’s difference was praiseworthy.

I will continue to do what I want to do without consideration for your opinion, said Aster.

dead as a thing that never lived could be,

I want to be like fire because fire is the only true thing.

Or I want to be like one of them cast-iron spider pots you throw into the fire pit—in the morning, the iron remains, shiny like silver serving ware, and all the crust and bad parts is burned out of existence.”

“Why not a rat?” But the real reason is because I aspire to be as they are. I like the idea of squeezing through cracks, traveling everywhere as they do, even the places Matilda doesn’t want me to go, no one ever able to catch me.

A Y deck woman, Lune was as much an enigma for her foreignness as she was for her unexplained suicide.

Lune wrote in a tongue Aster had never seen or heard before when she’d tried reading her meema’s journals for the first time at ten years old.

wasn’t ancestry all about what lived in the body?

Reading her journals is like reading a good detective novel, but better because it’s real.”

Extreme self-consciousness.

She’d thought she’d trained her mind out of its predisposition toward excessive literalism, but there it was, persistent as ever, making a fool of her.

The mama named the baby Aster for the genus of florae, and for the ancient word meaning star, and for the way you had to reach to the back of your throat to form that soft A sound.

Not a name for someone immaterial. Not a name you gave a baby you planned to leave in a closet to die.

Aster eschewed these ambiguous prefixal and suffixal phrases because they were an affront to the investigative process.

Do not assign meaning where there is none.

what you do when you don’t have the details. Do you interrogate? Do you examine? Or do you settle for the obvious answer?”

Any random assortment of dots could be connected into a picture, whether there was an actual picture there or not.

The whole point of occupying a position of power was that you got to do what you wanted with impunity. It seemed a waste of time to bother with rationalizations.

Laurel Wing is always about her blood cycle, sex, her pregnancy.

Leaf Wing is about her work—her actual work on Baby.”

Signs, however, didn’t rely on the existence of the supernatural. History wanted to be remembered. Evidence hated having to live in dark, hidden places and devoted itself to resurfacing. Truth was messy. The natural order of an entropic universe was to tend toward it.

That’s what ghosts really are, Aint Melusine had said, the past refusing to be forgot. She’d been helping Aster scrub down X deck with ammonia and bleach, a failed attempt to rub out the stink of what had happened there. Ghosts is smells, stains, scars. Everything is ruins. Everything is a clue. It wants you to know its story. Ancestors are everywhere if you are looking.

“Everything burns up some time or another, even God Herself.

Everything dies, so exert control by burning it away yourself. Everything will be born again anyway. There’s no such thing as creation, merely a shuffling of parts. All birth is rebirth in disguise.

One picture per generation, that was the rule, no more, because the device only had so much juju.

You got to document. That’s what our work is, as womenfolk, memorating any way we can. Do you count yourself among us?

You never know when a memory’s gonna save your life.

Not everything that’s important looks important, child, said Ainy, smacking Aster once more. You got to document.

An acquaintance this old that has never bloomed into friendship never will, and it’s hardly worth the upkeep and maintenance required.”

Memories couldn’t be intimidated into retreat while asleep.

I have done at least one good thing: become a person my father would hate. I glance at

have no memory of most of my childhood. Aster tells me she thinks I was hurt so badly that the only way I could go on was to pretend so hard that it didn’t exist until it was true, but what happened still lives in my body, like a witch’s curse. It is neither here nor there.

I like cycles and repetition. I like a good sense of rigor in my day. It helps me mark the passing of time. It helps me honor each moment. I have no personal sense of time, no real feel for what it means when sand passes through an hourglass.

I learned from him that sadness is the hardest thing to breed out of a bloodline.

Conform or die.

I’m always surprised by my body. The way it moves and occupies space. Its height. Its presence.