Break The Bodies, Haunt The Bones: A Novel

by Micah Dean Hicks

Bethany looked hard, like a Greek goddess cut from marble or an android that had been built to humiliate humankind, some woman-shaped machine whose skin stretched over steel.

The living might forget everything, but the dead still sang their old songs.

In three hundred words, describe how it feels to not remember what you did, but to know it’s your fault. The ghost was silent inside him, utterly uninterested in matters of feeling or ethics.

If anyone had come close to her, they would have heard her threatening to kill herself in front of everybody. Her pain rooted her so firmly to the town that she didn’t remember that she’d made good on her threat years ago.

For Jane’s ghost, to be in pain was better than to be bored.

Her mother’s whole self was want. She wanted to feel loved. She wanted to be held and calm. She wanted not to hate herself so much. She had so much heat and need inside her, and pouring it onto someone else was her only relief.

It didn’t do any good to be angry with her ghost. There was no getting away from it, no storming out of the house and spending the night somewhere else, no blocking its calls, no locking the door. The ghost was wherever Jane was, and she could have no secrets from it.

They dared to hope that they could be what she needed, and like moths courting a candle, their hope killed them.

The police had left ghosts all over town.

“People think leaving will fix everything, but it doesn’t. Everywhere has problems.

“He’s already dead. You don’t have to feel guilty for being alive.”

“It doesn’t look dangerous.” That was the problem, Henry thought. The most dangerous things never did.

He didn’t want to be himself. He was nothing—a kid smarter than most, but not special enough to impress anyone who mattered.

It must be hard for her, Henry thought, to watch things fall apart and only be able to make it worse.

He was different, so people thought anything they did to him was okay.

If you only love things that love you back, do you really love anyone but yourself ?

His self-loathing was the skeleton the rest of him hung on.

“It’s hard losing someone,” his mother said. “They never really go away.”

It was hard to imagine that people here would ever let things change so much. They were as attached to memory as the ghosts who haunted them.

There were places much farther away than the other side of space.

Away from the DJ booth, Jane danced with Trigger. They looked like photographic negatives, Jane with her dark skin and white dress, Trigger with his pale skin and black suit, their arms holding tight to each other.

I’d have to stop being afraid of everything. It’s easy to want to be a different kind of person, but it’s a lot harder to actually change.”

It’s easy to want to be a different kind of person, but it’s a lot harder to actually change.”

But her ghost was already distracted again, finding a secret sitting loaded and ready to fall from someone’s lips, a bomb that would incinerate a decade-long friendship.

You won’t find anything better, her ghost said. Every other place is just like this, but without the people who love you.

Wasn’t the town itself an engine of pain, its people cylinders under pressure, moved by anger and hurt?

A cemetery curled around the sides of the church, the graves well maintained and marching away in gray rows. How strange, Henry thought, that here was a place full of the dead but empty of ghosts. No spirit had an attachment to the empty lot near the church. They were all haunting elsewhere.

but it was hopeless. How could you plan to leave when you didn’t even know where you were going?

I’ve always thought that I could do anything. Sooner or later, I had to find out that wasn’t true.”

The man chasing Henry spoke through his teeth, his strange words giving voice to the dead within him: “We still have hands to give. Our flesh was made for cutting. Where will our sons bleed now?”

The presence of the winter ghost was all around her, its rasp of wind and bone-aching cold, the sharp drops of ice that fell like knives from the trees above. Branches dragged across her face, and frozen weeds tangled around her legs. The forest made her feel small. She was in pieces, her body reduced to gasping breath, two pounding feet, the heavy punch of her heart.

“You want to be with my brother?” he asked. “Then dig. Make a hole and get inside.”

He’d come to wreak violence on her family, not because he thought it would make anything better for him, but because he wanted to take whatever he could from her.

There was every chance she could save him. But she wasn’t going to try. Whatever was inside of him he had invited in. Let it burrow down until it filled even his bones.

The robot’s new ghost forced out the fragments of spirits fouling up its servos and wiring. It stood, a haunted machine, powered by its own want. It wrapped its arms around itself and spoke for the first time. Its voice was hollow and sharp, a warping of metal. “I am love,” the robot said.

“This isn’t like a broken machine where you just switch out a part. Some things can’t be put back together.”

Henry pushed through the wall, boiling out of a Marilyn Manson print.

Soon she would break apart and he would curl inside her. A reptile sliding back into its egg. The opposite of birth, an ending.

It wanted to care about her, believed that it did, but its first love would always be itself.

On his desk, the bleeding man had a metal coffeepot sitting on a tiny camping stove. Beside it lay his gun. The only other item on the table was a plastic bag full of pale dust. The bleeding man stood with the desk between them, strangely fearful of her. Bright lines of blood ran from his ears, eyes, and the corners of his mouth, matting his collar to his neck.

His heart raced, and he was afraid. Not afraid that the man might be dangerous, but that he might be innocent. The officer feared he was mistaken, his chase an embarrassment.

He had no pity for anyone, not even himself.

“I did fail them. But I loved them too. They wouldn’t want me to suffer.” Jane felt the weight of responsibility that she’d been carrying, and she set it down. “I forgive myself.”

The officer put down his gun, heavy with phantoms who had willed that it would never fire again.

The bleeding man was suddenly honeycombed with ghosts, an entire city of the dead.

The spirits built a hell inside his heart.

Jane left Henry’s ashes on the desk. That wasn’t her brother any mor...

you.You need to believe that Trigger and Henry aren’t people. Otherwise, you’d hate yourself.

She wanted to believe that, given enough time, Trigger could forgive himself and feel some measure of peace. But he hadn’t been able to let his mistakes go when he was alive. She was afraid, now that he was dead, he’d cling to them forever, devouring himself until the end of time.

“I never wanted to hurt anyone,” she said. “But I don’t love you anymore. I hope you understand.” The words were like a hammer hitting Jane in the chest.