An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

poisoned?” Aster asked, walking to her desk. She

I am not that sort of man. The sort to follow a woman into the brush and do with her whatever pleases him. I don’t think I’m a man at all.

His gaze runs from mine, and this is good. People do not know what to make of me, and this pleases me. I don’t want to be scrutable.

“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?

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.

Haven’t you heard you’re not supposed to kick a man while he’s down?” “Whoever said that?” Aster asked, because no, she’d never heard that. That was the best time to kick a man, that was what Melusine had taught her.

“Aye. You gender-malcontent. You otherling,” she said, the fog of anesthesia wearing off. She could see him clearly now. The curl of his lashes. The white flecks of skin over his dry lips. “Me too. I am a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body. Do you think my body couldn’t decide what it wanted to be?” “I think it doesn’t matter because we get to decide what our bodies are or are not,” he answered.

Aster, occasionally, through no will of her own, worried she wasn’t pretty enough, and why? 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. Still, she wanted it, and Theo made her feel like it was already so.