An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

“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.”

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.

Friends who hated each other were no longer friends. Sisters who hated each other remained sisters, despite long silences, feuds, and deliberate misunderstandings.

When I look after upperdeck children and they call me nanny, I nip their ears, right there in front of their fathers, and say, “Do I call you little beast brat? No. I call you your name.” The fathers don’t mind it because they remember their mean nannies fondly.

Honey, I don’t want to be here. Your husband looks like boiled cabbage smeared with cream cheese. If I could be in my room smoking a pipe by my lonesome, I would be much happier. But no, I am here cleaning your infant’s nasty, nasty spit-up. Luring your husband away is the last thing on my mind.

All that was left of a person’s life was recorded on paper, in annals, in almanacs, in the physical items they produced. To end that was to end their history, their present, their future.