An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

“The guards are hardly a compass by which to measure right and wrong,” said Aster.

“You can have my mittens if you want,” said Flick. They set down the starjar they’d been holding and showed off their wrapped hands. “They’ll warm you up good so you can cut, cut, cut me up, no problem. Slice into me like a festival ham if you want.”

“My mother killed herself the day I was born,” Aster said. “Though it’s possible she attempted to impart a distaste for should in me before passing, newborn infants lack the neurocapacity to process language or form memories, so if she did, I don’t recall.”

Tarlander bodies did not always present as clearly male and female as the Guard supposed they ought. This explained Aster’s hairiness and muscular build despite being born without the external organs that produced testosterone.)

Aster carried that knowledge inside her. These men had the means and opportunity to destroy evidence, to protect their legacy, but not one of them thought earnest discussion of reanimating a person’s limbs for the purpose of manual labor warranted deletion from their official record. Forget the horrifying cruelty—the incompetent science of it all.

“Materials are meaningless without knowledge, which is what you gave us.

“We got to help each other survive long enough to find out what the spirits have in store.

“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.”

I want to be like fire because fire is the only true thing. Or I want to be like one of them cast-iron spider pots you throw into the fire pit—in the morning, the iron remains, shiny like silver serving ware, and all the crust and bad parts is burned out of existence.” Giselle scratched an exposed knobby wrist, picking at an invisible scab. She’d withered to skin and bones this past year. “I want to burn up and be burned and explode.”

“The point is what you do when you don’t have the details. Do you interrogate? Do you examine? Or do you settle for the obvious answer?”

The whole point of occupying a position of power was that you got to do what you wanted with impunity. It seemed a waste of time to bother with rationalizations.

History wanted to be remembered. Evidence hated having to live in dark, hidden places and devoted itself to resurfacing. Truth was messy. The natural order of an entropic universe was to tend toward it.

That’s what ghosts really are, Aint Melusine had said, the past refusing to be forgot.

“Everything burns up some time or another, even God Herself. That’s how She made the Heavens. She a phoenix. Like me.”

“Perhaps you think it’s no small thing for you to burn away, but it would mean a great deal to me to lose you. I don’t like to see you chip away at your body, especially when you’re doing so at a rate faster than it can replenish itself. I don’t like watching you die.”

All birth is rebirth in disguise.

“If those are the vocalizations you two make while having sex, your partners must be very displeased and highly disturbed,”

“Finish him. Death ends a issue. A fight makes it fester on and on. I taught you better than to open doors you can’t close.”

What would Father think of my closely shaven face? My peculiar wardrobe? He would disown me, and that heartens me. I have done at least one good thing: become a person my father would hate.

Aster tells me she thinks I was hurt so badly that the only way I could go on was to pretend so hard that it didn’t exist until it was true, but what happened still lives in my body, like a witch’s curse. It is neither here nor there.

They were all such weak, soft things. Chalk.

Drops of goodness in a pool of fresh blood.

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.

“I hate nature,” she said. “And yet nature’s rather indifferent to you,”

Your husband looks like boiled cabbage smeared with cream cheese.

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.

“It’s not right to make fun of someone for the way the Heavens made them. Do the stars laugh at the planets?

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

There were worse things than being a motherless child. Without a past, Aster was boundless. She could metamorphose. She could be a shiny, magnificent version of herself.

“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?”

You are not unpleasant to look at when you sleep. Love, Aster.

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