Page 43 of All Her Ghosts

Mom squeezes my hand, an apology in her face she’ll never admit out loud.

“If you don’t want to go, say so. But it’ll be fun. Isn’t it always fun?” She smiles, hopeful, but her voice sounds too close to pleading. “We could head East this time, hit Hershey before it gets too cold. It’s Halloween themed—you love that, and the roller coasters.”

I love the corners, the stomach-dropping sensation of a body left behind as the roller car snaps around, that breathtaking moment of weightless inertia, the growing assurance thatthistime the car will slip the track, this time, this time. I never feel so close to alive than when I’m anticipating mechanical failure, flight, and an endless blue sky.

Fighting not to cry, I squeeze my eyes shut, inhale hard through my nose.

Maybe I should have connected the dots sooner. I’ve spent my entire teenage life flirting with the void, trading pickup lines with razor blades and batting my eyelashes at car accidents. Maybe that’s a clue too—evidence or absence; my head’s such a mess, I can’t tell which. I thoughtI was damaged but maybe nothing’s wrong with me. Maybe I’m just a feral dead kid, homesick and not house-trained.

Staring past my mother at the RV in the driveway, I turn the day over in my head.

Ferryman, they called Bas. Pet Sematarybullshit, Cain called me.

I need to google something. This argument has no answers the internet can’t give me.

“Fine,” I mutter.

“Fine? Yeah?” Mom’s eyebrows arch. The tension eases from her shoulders. Given what she wanted, she lets go of my hand. “To Hershey, then? I hear the gift shop sells Hershey’s Kisses as big as your head.”

I don’t bother telling her I prefer sour straws, blue-stained lips laughing in the rain.

I say, “Sounds great.”

CHAPTER 14

Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting

“The World at Large” by Modest Mouse

On my belly beneath the bed, I convene a war council with my childhood monsters. Blue-lit in our wooden undercroft, I google “ferryman.” The search engine spits out a book, a bunch of old heavy metal albums, and a dictionary definition.

I try again—“ferryman for ghosts”—and score a better haul. Transfixed, I comb through article after article, reading everything I can find about Charon, the Greek ferryman of the dead, carting ghosts across the still waters of the River Styx for the price of an obol each.

I read about Hades and my namesake, Persephone, their myths inextricably linked but tangled by time. In one, he steals her, traps and tricks her, and she starves herself rather than remaining his prisoner. But just before her mother saves her, she caves and eats six pomegranate seeds. Only six little gem-shards of a fruit, but they damn her for half of every year, trapped in Hades,withHades, a doomed winter bride.

The ocean crashes in my chest, shoving at my ribs until my bones rattle and itch.

“They’rewrong,” I say, just to scratch the wrongness. They’re wrongand I know it—know it like I knew the ghosts that reached for me by names that evaporated from my tongue the moment I kissed their forehead—even though I can’t say how. Even though thinking it at all is crazy.

It’s just a story. It’s nottrue. But it hooks a fishing line in my gut, demanding my attention, and I can’t help digging for a different version.

I find one: Hades smitten and Persephone kidnapping herself, eating the seeds on purpose so her mom can’t steal her back. I find a museum page about Greeks worshiping her as death’s equal partner, the god of harvest. A dense scholarly article sketches the temples they erected in her name. A black-and-white scan from an old book illustrates three spell tablets etched with prayers, beseeching her to intercede with her husband on behalf of the living, the soon-to-be-dead.

A little of the wrongness recedes, but not all of it. The story still isn’t right—isn’tfinished—and I’m left with the sensation of staring at a massive puzzle missing too many pieces.

I change tactics. Search wider. I read about Hel, the Norse goddess of death, a woman half alive and half dead, daughter of a trickster who killed an unkillable harvest deity and sent him down to her. And when the world asked for their harvest god back, she stole a page from her daddy’s book and promised that she would—just so long as everything alive and dead wept for his passing—knowing all the while, dry-eyed, that the only creature in this world aliveanddead was her.

Again, I pivot. I read about the death god Ereshkigal, locked in antagonistic orbit with her harvest sister Inanna, angry at each other but forever drawn together. I read about the Morrigan, the death-omen witch who led golden King Arthur across the waters to Avalon, to a land of endless stars. I read about a lost goddess, the original source worn downto scraps of shattered clay tablets, who hung those stars. I read about her other half, mischievous and grinning, who plucked them down again.

They all feel wrong. They all feelalmostright. Close, but imperfect, an old favorite candy whose company changed the formula. Something about the pattern, always repeating—not one god of death, buttwo; a god for the harvest and a god for the grave.

And I’ve never seen a pomegranate in real life so why do I knowexactlywhat they taste like? Why do I keep un-remembering the vast black water and an endless sky of stars?

Why were the ghosts looking forme?

Pressing my overheated head to the fake wood floor, I close my throbbing eyes. My seams strain, struggling to close my soul in this too-small flesh. I want to escape. I want to run and never turn back. Downstairs, distantly, Mom calls me to dinner. I text her I’m not hungry and swipe back to Google. Typing in “Pet Sematary,” I find a Stephen King novel about a cursed graveyard that brings anything buried in it back to life, only brings it backvery wrong.

What did you do seventeen years ago?I asked her.