An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

her body a mess of flowering bruises: irises, peonies, pharynxia, sheep’s tongue blossoms, violets—rhododendron in some places. Beneath skin, blood seeped from inflamed vessels.

There was so much to which the body could become accustomed. Aster used to think, Never again—never again or I will would surely die, but she never did.

The cruelty of the guards only took a few forms. They were predictable in their violence.

“If you’re going to do something, you do it big,” she said. “Burn the house down.”

Drops of goodness in a pool of fresh blood.

me? Is this one of your tests of my loyalty? I have told you before, I find those upsetting and an inaccurate measure of my regard for you.”

They were sisters, in spirit if not in blood, and in blood if not in spirit. They did not share direct ancestry, but like all humankind, possessed a genetic link that went back, back, back for generations, all the way to the Great Lifehouse. Back to a time when house connoted a specific breed of domicile rather than loosely calling to mind some vague notion with no visual referent.

Aster liked to think of Giselle as her sister, her twin. She pretended they once inhabited the same womb. Hot and warm and pressed together inside their mother. A single zygote halved.

Different sorts of words belonged to different sorts of occasions, and Aster had not yet matched which went where.

When you saw the world sideways, you couldn’t always get a proper handle on things.

Aster sometimes liked to imagine her words were true, that all the bad things she’d ever done formed the fabric of the cosmos. The Gulf of Sin. Like the Sovereign said. Even though she knew science. Space was not sin. It was a vacuum. It was nothingness.

Fretting is for people who can afford to fret.

At the time, in those days, still an adolescent, Aster thought Giselle’s cowardice an expression of hypervigilance, a logical but inflated reaction to Matilda’s dangers.

Lawlessness suggested the laws forbade such violations. They did not.

She didn’t like religion because religion didn’t like her, often treating her cruelly.

Aster had not considered the legitimacy of Giselle’s concerns, knowing how prone she was to anxiety.

in actuality, Aster always thought thrice before talking, having said the wrong thing too many times.

When you are saying your lie, you must remember to not reveal your true actions.

People were so often mean that when they weren’t, there was a tendency to bestow sainthood upon them. Aster did not reward common decency with her affection.

He smiled, as she’d given the answer he wanted. This was always the case when people asked if you knew what something meant. They didn’t want you to know it. They wanted to be able to explain it themselves, to prove themselves bearers of esoteric knowledge. Of course, Aster knew that lieu meant place, as in, in lieu of, in place of, and tenant meant holds,

Lieutenant, then, meant placeholder. Usually referring to a leader. He held the place of the captain when the captain was incapacitated. Second in command. Next in line.

“You’re out past curfew, which is against the law, and Matilda’s laws are the Heavens’ laws. When I don’t enforce Matilda’s laws,” he said, “I’m not enforcing God’s laws, and that is a great sin.”

What she wanted to say was, I will kill you in your sleep. Would that be considered dallying? But it was a threat she knew very well she couldn’t follow up on, and saying it aloud would only get her beaten, regardless of the fleeting thrill it might bring.

Punishment is a gift from the Heavens. A chance for us to right our wrongs and narrow the Gulf of Sin.”

He laughed, and Aster shivered. She couldn’t imagine what he found worthy of laughter.

For years after, he watched her, and though he never laid a physical hand on her, he stood by and ordered others to do just that.

Aster said sister because she knew sisters could not choose to unsister themselves when their lives diverged dramatically. Friends who hated each other were no longer friends. Sisters who hated each other remained sisters, despite long silences, feuds, and deliberate misunderstandings.

it might not be such a bad thing to separate body from self—even though self was tied up in body, made of body, made of cells, hormones, chemicals.

“You think I would hurt you?” he asked. She thought about that question, working through the possibilities, and realized the answer was no; she did not believe he would hurt her. There was no one else she felt that way about. Not even Ainy.

She wanted to barrel headfirst into everyone, to cut them open with her parietal and frontal bones, and let them know there was only the slightest trace of skin and hair separating their soft bodies from her skull. The illusion of cotton was gone. They should be afraid. They would be split in two.

Wholes were foreign to her. Halves made more sense. A split nucleus could end Matilda’s tiny universe. She wanted to be the knife. She wanted to be knived.

Aster continued the exercise into adulthood, the boundaries of words ever-shifting, the need to understand their confines paramount.

their genes obsoleting themselves out of existence,

“Opulent means no lint. Opulent, no lint.”

ablaze, as Giselle had suggested Aster do, but as she left the amputated foot for Lieutenant, she had the distinct feeling she was committing an act of self-immolation.

Like any good woman, I’m a liar.

Honey, I don’t want to be here. Your husband looks like boiled cabbage smeared with cream cheese.

Children think because I can spin a good tale that I can be gentle. I can’t be.

Nothing is more sad than a person who believes in something that’s so clearly not true.

I’m not maternal but that doesn’t mean I don’t love. I love Aster. I love all the girls and women I look after. It is hard to be in somebody’s presence for so long and not develop something like love.

Aster, though, my love for her is—it’s malignant. And if I try to chop it off, all the bits of love will spread everywhere else and infect me worse.

He’s the son they took away from me. I can’t help but feel something strong for him.

I look at him so we eye to eye. So maybe he can know that he is my son, that I was more than just his nanny. For the better part of a harvest year I swathed him in my skin and muscle. He look just like me except for his pallor. I wish I could say I was the one who taught him his fine manners, but that’s all him. He was born the most loving, kindest soul, and stayed that way, the very opposite of me.

Poor, poor books. Lonely pages bound in lonely leather, their only company the occasional louse. They exist only to be read, and yet with no one there to read them, they might as well not have been bornt at all. I run my fingers along the spines of the books I can reach. I do it to affirm them. To let them know I’m a lover of stories, even stories about alchematics or biology and other true things.

Age discolored things. Left them too pale or alternatively too saturated.

The tirade had a practiced fury to it.

“It’s a kindness that there are few mirrors in the lowdecks—for your own sakes. You’d kill yourselves if you knew, if you were faced with your faces over and over again. As it is, I don’t know how you stand to walk through the corridors among yourselves, seeing what you see.”

Aster could not answer his question because she did not accept his initial premise.

Lieutenant was not a merciful man. Any leniency he gave was so he would have something to take away later. She didn’t know what her punishment would be, but it was certainly coming.

“Under the previous regime you lived in a fantasy of wickedness and sin. Today you will learn this is what it takes to appease the Heavens.”