An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

Such a thing as this is beyond even God’s brutality,”

“It’s not right to make fun of someone for the way the Heavens made them. Do the stars laugh at the planets? The bee at the sunflower? And so forth? Huh, child? No. So stop taking joy in the plights of others.

Giselle is only doing what we all should. Giving up.”

“The mourning of a child’s murder is not one of my moods, so please do not dismiss it thus.”

Ainy was empathetic but emotionally incompetent.

“I am the only one who gets to decide what is in my best interest.

The fact that you have been given arbitrary power over me does not mean that you should exert that power when it suits you.”

It was no way to live, constantly on the edge of existential crisis, prostrating himself at the throne of ideological purity.

Again, Aster was confused as she was as a child, unable to interpret the people around her. Their bodies, their behaviors, their actions spoke in a tongue with too many tenses, moods, and declensions, all the verbs irregular.

In stories, girls were brave and played tricks, and won. Aster wanted to be one of those girls.

This sadness ringing through her, resonant and unending like the repeated clang of two cymbals, tired her.

She didn’t know why people were so indirect.

“You are mean because inside you’re tiny. So tiny you cannot hold up the weight of your own body. You must inflate your ego just to fill the skin. You float around like a helium balloon. Blown up and bloated and gassy and empty.”

It wasn’t necessary, but she liked to do it, to pretend she was a man. It wasn’t the boy part that attracted her. It was the lying part. It was becoming someone else. Her old mistakes were gone because that person didn’t exist. She could learn how to be brave again in a foreign skin.

Aster knew these insults weren’t meant for her. She was playing a part. They hurt anyway. They hurt because of the people they were meant to target, and they hurt for all the ways she’d been targeted in the past. With everyone insisting it was true, it was hard to believe she was any good at all. She felt Lieutenant was right about her. She didn’t understand, but when she thought about herself, she was repulsed. Aster was a vile fiend, a dyke, uglier than a dog. She was other things too, more dreadful things, things that were not so easy to say or admit. A bevy of parts cast off secondhand, to be used up by whomever had need.

Memories could not be unmemoried, only shuffled so as not to be in the forefront of things.

She was someone else here. She had to remember that. They didn’t know all the ways she’d been made into to a trembling mess. They didn’t know she wasn’t strong.

She channeled old games of house. She channeled theater. Listen, then repeat. Listen, then repeat. That was all it took to pretend well. What was a person’s self but carefully articulated mimicry?

she didn’t know what to expect of herself at the moment. She wasn’t stable. She felt her emotions were as wobbly as Giselle’s.

Her old life had possessed her, strengthening her, but like everything, used her up and then was done.

It would be foolish to say that the mutiny that led to the massacre of hundreds, their limp bodies lying across Matilda’s corridors, began with Aster, who after all was only a woman, a small and largely unliked woman, whose heart was no more prone to thoughts of violence than any other who’d endured the decades of trauma that characterize all who lived in the lowdecks.

Like any tidal matter, a mutiny only had a middle.

“Aye. You gender-malcontent. You otherling,”

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. Still, she wanted it, and Theo made her feel like it was already so.

She talks a lot, and when I’m not ignoring her, I pick up this and that.

I’m not destroyed. It’s not possible to be destroyed.

Every nice thing that anyone could ever think to do to me leaves me feeling enraged. It’s like, too little too late, buddy.

She’s glass. I’m glass. We’re all glass, busted up, unrecognizable from our original selves. We walk around in fragments.

People like this guard tried so hard to make Aster feel lesser, but some days, like today, it didn’t work, because she saw clearly how superior she was.

Whenever Aster turned to get a better glimpse, they were gone, perpetual inhabitants of the margins. That was how she understood hope, nothing to get too invested in.

“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.”

Sadness twisted up inside her, like a rope or maybe like a snake or maybe like a rosary.