An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

“We’ve all spent our whole lives believing this ship is it. If you knew it wasn’t, wouldn’t you give up everything too? I would cut out my own heart and throw it into the beyond for the split second it would beat somewhere other than this cursed fucking cage.”

“I was never angry with her for committing suicide. I felt only thankful that she had sacrificed her own well-being for so long in order to bring me into this world.”

Aster welcomed these straightforward, detailed explanations after dealing so long with Lune. She craved clarity, transparency, and answers. She was tired of wondering. She wanted to get to the knowing part.

Light was rebellious and escaped. God froze them with the might of his words to punish them, and those became the stars. But some Light made itself so small in order that God would not see, and flitted and flew around at will, prodigal luminescence.

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.

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

You are the hands of God. You do His work. But I am His head. It’s your nature as a doctor to coddle, but I must be the disciplinarian. In other words, I am the husband, you are the wife.”

He made headlines one year ago when he single-handedly ended the W deck polio epidemic, creating a vaccine out of the virus itself, putting himself in harm’s way and becoming ill in the process.

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.

Aster was obsessed with bifurcation. 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.

There were some words that meant everything and others that meant nothing: love baby god dark.

That’s not true. Like any good woman, I’m a liar.

The fathers don’t mind it because they remember their mean nannies fondly.

I am like a gramophone and the volume’s too loud, and you can’t find the off button, and all you can do is cover your ears until the end of the record.

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

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

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 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.

their wails so loud that at that moment Aster knew gods weren’t real, because if they were, they’d end this now. All of humankind. A snap of the fingers.

Aint Melusine was as bad as Aster, perhaps worse, at knowing how to talk to people when they were hurting. People’s unhappiness unnerved her.

“Maybe all the ghosts were doing was telling me to join them.”

“Short of suicidal ideation, it is my right to be a danger to myself.”

“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.

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.

She felt Lieutenant was right about her. She didn’t understand, but when she thought about herself, she was repulsed.

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

She was not going mad. She’d already gone mad and had remained that way ever after.

The ship is moving constantly forward, and when the system detects an obstruction, it diverts itself. That diversion is what causes the blackouts.

The siluminium underwent a special reaction to allow Matilda to travel at velocities approaching light-speed, and that reaction stopped when the ship had to come to a halt. Whatever the change, it had been disastrous for Nicolaeus, making the siluminium unstable in his body.

“I have learned how to hide my weaknesses well.” That was the secret to surviving.

Theo giveth. Theo taketh way.

Her right mind was somewhere else, in its place a bitter, angry, lashing mass.

It is really that simple. I should have killed those men who came for you before. I didn’t because I lacked faith. I have prayed on the matter and am feeling resolved.”

“You are an anomaly of a man,” she said. “Perhaps because I’m not a man at all.”

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

“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?”

“Please do not tell me to look at you.” She still hated to look people in the eye, and she did not wish this moment between them ruined by that anxiety.

There are those who feel shame for what’s been done to them, who call themselves bad for that reason, but I feel no shame. I feel no shame for what’s been done to me, and I feel no shame for what I’ve done.

Stuff was done to me, and I’m all right, so it stands to reason the girl would be all right. I’m not destroyed. It’s not possible to be destroyed.

In my language, there is no word for I. To even come close, you must say, E’tesh’lem vereme pri’lus, which means, This one here who is apart from all. It’s the way we say lonely and alone. It’s the way we say outsider. It’s the way we say weak.

Maybe she was, and maybe I’m a little devil, but that’s all right too. It’s just that I’m so angry, for all these reasons, for all these reasons I can’t help.

I don’t know why, but I’m not thankful. I’m never thankful. I want to be, I do, but all I feel is this annoyance that won’t stop.

I like making her mad. I like making her feel embarrassed and humiliated. I get pleasure from it, even if I know later I will feel so bad it makes me nauseous. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I have this compulsion to hurt, and I try and try to stop it, but I never do.

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

Maps, so many maps, of the stars and the galaxy and of places Aster would never understand, the last in the universe, gone.

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.

“I will haunt you,” she said, then took the blade and stabbed it into her own stomach.

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.”

she knew that he prayed not for forgiveness for what he’d done, but for ruthlessness, so that he might do it again to another.