An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

Lieutenant’s reputation as the hard ruler that would get Matilda back in shape. Tough on immorality. Unshakable. Wrathful as God Himself. God’s second. God’s lieutenant. If the Surgeon is our ship’s mother, Lieutenant is its father.

“Quarry is not my home. I am homeless. We are all homeless. We are the very definition of homeless.

Pretty was a strange thing to concern oneself over. Pretty was subjective and fallacious. Pretty couldn’t be replicated in a lab. She, as much as anyone, enjoyed the prismatic sweep of amaranth in bloom and the geography of animalian bodies. Yet when applied to people, it didn’t jive with her that pretty was meant for some and not others. More pressingly, it didn’t jive with Aster that some days she wanted to be one of those folks who was prettier than the other folks. It was like wanting to be more vanadium-based, or wanting to have orange-pigmented skin—arbitrary, bizarre, pointless.

“I will haunt you,”

Giselle, forever defiant. She’d not let them take her, not when she could so easily take herself. Gasps dominoed their way through the Clearing. Devil slumped backward on the platform, limp-limbed.

She howled, and if souls were real, that was the moment Giselle’s abandoned ship.

What a small thing she had asked for, to be left alone, to be allowed the solace of her own atoms. The only cocks she wanted inside her were the ones she requested, the only hands on her body the ones she begged to have touching her, the only knife in her gut the one she lodged there herself.

“Then promise me you won’t remember me fondly. Promise me you’ll blame yourself,”

“I want to be the chip on your shoulder. Fifty years from now, you’ll think of me with a sodden heart. Promise me, promise me I’ll be the mean wench ghost who drives you mad. Don’t be happy. When people say, She’d want you to be happy, know better.”

Theo, like Aster, was a man of rules. Order offered him solemnity. A disruption to the system was a disruption to his sense of calm.

Aster realized his power never came from his sternness, but from his knowing calm. Theo’s sneak attack had stolen that from him.