Page 82 of All Her Ghosts

(The high noon sun stripes his skin golden, dappled between shady olive leaves. He lifts the heavy hair off the back of my neck in greeting, blowsa tickling stream of air, hotter than the one I’m trying to escape in the shade.

Laughing, I catch his hands. I lead him backward, into the waiting mouth of cool and sleeping earth.)

“Hello, dead boy,” I whisper, half greeting, half the fragmented edge of memory. “Welcome home.”

Bas laughs and I still know every hitch and dip of that sound, even when I lost my own name. His monumental attention fixes on me for a second, blows a kiss and scatters into sparks. Outside, a body scratches its way standing. It snags a gun from the ground with clumsy fingers, shoves the barrel to the temple of the nearest man. Confusion erupts, shouting and screaming, crystals shattering andghosts—oh, my beautiful little lights—fill the air like floating lanterns, buoyed on blood and a delayed promise.

Eyes wide and terrified, my mother stares through the dent in the door. Outside, a body hits the doorframe, then another, a barricade of empty meat.

“What the hell is going on?” she whispers.

“That’s Bas,” I croak.

“That?”

“He’s buying us time.”

My mother swallows hard. Her shoulders straighten.

“Then we better use it.”

It takes an immense struggle to force myself even halfway back inside my seams, to swipe clumsy fingers through the spreading bloodstain of Bas’s vacant body and carefully, with childish strain, wet the carved divots of every rune and mark around the circle. Despite the gore—one teenager dead, the other probably dying, her soul half hanging out of her broken body—my mother crashes to her knees and followssuit. Her hands crimson to the wrist, she sketches every shape like she could do it in her sleep.

And hell, maybe she has been—maybe she’s spent the last seventeen years reliving this—because she draws with both hands at once, my hundred names a hungry ouroboros coiling around my frame.

Strength failing, dead heart woken and shuddering in my chest, I lay down over the hole in the world.

With one last gasp of effort, I kick off my wet combat boots. Barefoot seems like the way to go.

Grim and pale, my mother lifts the heavy contraption from her bag. It dangles from her hands, deflated as roadkill, bloated with crystals and wires and filigree fragments, a complicated battery pack swaying like a fat belly. She approaches me but stops short. Kneeling, she sets the device on the ground, shucks out of her coat, wads it up around the battery.

“It’ll get hot,” she chokes, throat too tight to force the words out. “I don’t want it to burn you.”

“A little late to worry about that.” I flick my head with a ghostly hand, lolling it her way. The smile is easier, one unseen finger tugging up my lips. “Not sure that matters in the scheme of things.”

“Don’t make jokes.”

“I wasn’t.”

Slowly, with heartbreaking care, my mother drapes the dissembled machine across me. It covers me from chin to knee, weighs both my blood-sticky arms down to stone. The battery pack wedges between my breasts, thudding against my cellphone with every breath, humped up over the jacket.

It smells like Mom’s perfume—flowery and antiseptic. It used to smell like disappointment, like yet another argument. Today, for some reason, it smells like a road trip. My eyes flutter shut, and I should probably think of what I’m about to do next—should probably come up with a plan or climb out of my body or look for Bas—but bizarrely, all I can think about is a roadside attraction.

Mom took my picture next to a metal statue of Mothman, his bronze butt cheeks shiny from the slaps of a thousand passing tourists.

And it’s so simple, so small and human andordinary, my eyes well up with tears.

I wasn’t done yet.

I never wanted to be here, but I wasn’tdoneyet.

In a small voice, I whisper, “Do you think it will hurt?”

“I don’t know,” Mom croaks. “I don’t think so. I guess… I guess it probably feels like euthanasia. Falling asleep between blinks.”

Rain drips against the back of my hand, smearing Bas’s blood. I crack one eye open to find my mother’s face soaked by the storm, beads of water trembling on her chin. Slowly, hand shaking, she presses the rewind button on the cassette player. After a moment’s hesitation, a grumbling electronic complaint, it hisses backward. She counts beneath her breath—an old habit resumed seventeen years later—and jams the button down.

Quietly, tinny from the old speakers and the tape a little worse for wear, someone sings he wishes I was here.