We Sing It Anyway #3
“Oh, no, Priestess, please! It is I who should be Sorry, if I have made you feel in any way as if you have Failed us. The roof is Sound, there are no Predators, and if the Feasts have been Few in this Time of Grief, that is only as it Should Be. I have No Right to make you Regret.”
“Hey,” I said, trying to break the cycle of self-castigation before it could go much further.
“Don’t beat yourself up for having needs.
I’ve been neglecting my duty to the colony.
That’s a fact, not a feeling. And even if it were a feeling, my feelings get to be valid too.
I’m sorry I haven’t been doing my part. I know you’re all grieving too. ”
“Not me, so much,” squeaked the mouse. “I Belong to Your Clergy, and we have not Lost our Tie to the Divine. The Clergies of the Silent Priestess, the God of Chosen Isolation, and the God of Bright Things in Broken Places are far more Filled with Sorrows.”
“Wait. Did you change Artie’s title?”
“No, Priestess. We merely Named his Successor According to our Custom. Were we Wrong to do so?”
My knees felt suddenly weak, and I dropped to them on the trash-strewn floor, gripping the side of the bed with both hands. My eyes stung with tears. Blinking them back, hard, I said, “No. No, you weren’t wrong.”
That might seem like a bit of an overreaction to a casual comment by a hyper-religious rodent, but allow me to offer a counterpoint: when your brother gets erased from his own mind and replaced with a shallow simulacrum of himself, you can tell me I’m out of line for getting a little emotional about the way the people in his life mourn.
For me, it was days in bed, not washing my hair, and letting the laundry pile up until it blocked the windows.
For the mice, it was renaming his clergy to better suit the man who’d taken his place.
Oh, they were both my brother, Artie and Arthur.
It had taken me a long time to see that, denial standing between me and accepting Arthur as anything other than an unwanted replacement.
But it wasn’t his fault. He hadn’t asked to be made any more than the rest of us had asked to be born, and more importantly, he was the only brother I had left.
Hating him for not being Artie wasn’t going to bring Artie back.
It had helped that they were different enough that I could find things to hang my acceptance on.
Arthur liked coffee. Arthur voluntarily joined me to watch bad medical dramas in the living room, and Arthur liked Batman comics more than he liked the X-Men.
Arthur preferred to live life without a legion of little plastic people staring at him, and had boxed up all Artie’s action figures, tucking them away in the garage.
We’d been starting to discuss hosting a yard sale in the spring when he disappeared, maybe turn all those old collectables into a new transmission for his car.
Not that he knew how to drive. Artie knew how to drive, but Arthur needed lessons before he’d be able to combine mental programming and muscle memory in a way that wasn’t going to get somebody killed. I’d almost been looking forward to helping him out with that.
I stared at the mouse, who looked patiently back. Aeslin mice are endlessly patient when they’re dealing with their gods. We’re divine beings in their eyes, and any attention we choose to pay them is a gift. But that doesn’t mean we should take them for granted, the way I’d been doing.
“I’m so sorry I’ve been too busy feeling bad for myself to be there for you,” I said to the mouse, pushing myself back to my feet.
Dramatics aside, I owed it the reassurance.
“I’ll make sure the colony gets a whole cake tonight, I promise.
And Mary will be back soon. She’s going to tell me what’s really going on. ”
“And may we Listen In?” asked the mouse, whiskers quivering with excitement.
I hesitated. Mary had said both that Annie succeeded in finding my brother and that it wasn’t as simple as just bringing Arthur home.
He’d been in the custody of Johrlac, which was even worse than the custody of cuckoos.
If they’d deleted him again, I wasn’t sure I could handle starting over with a third iteration of the same-but-not brother.
And I definitely wasn’t sure I’d be able to hold myself together long enough to explain things to the mice.
“Sure,” I said. “Just keep quiet, and help me get all this junk off the floor, okay?”
The mouse cheered, and scurried to begin scooping up bits of wrapper.
There was something nice about tackling a seemingly never-ending mess.
If the room had been only a little messy, I would have needed to make decisions, to put things on shelves and organize them.
As it was, all I had to do was pile laundry in and then around the hamper, and make stacks out of everything else I came across.
I stacked dishes on the bed. My sheets needed to be changed anyway.
What more damage could a couple of dirty plates do?
As I worked, the mouse who had answered my call for a priest ran back and forth across the floor, grabbing the tiny bits of foil and colorful trash until they were rolled into balls and ready for the wastebasket.
It was surprisingly quick and efficient, especially with me removing the laundry that had been covering the mess.
We were still working when Mary cleared her throat behind me. “We’re back,” she said. “You’ve made a lot of progress.”
“Not really,” I said, turning. “I’d need about three days to get it clean enough to vacuum in here.”
“No, but it’s a start,” she said.
She was dressed in more old-fashioned clothing than she’d been before, a white shirt with a starched collar and a knee-length red skirt held up by suspenders.
The woman next to her looked even more like she’d just escaped from the 1950s, in blue jeans cuffed at mid-calf, a white shirt, and short, slicked-back brown hair bleached blonde by sunlight and lemon juice.
Not that either of them could really be called “women,” since they were no more than sixteen: the age they’d both been when they died.
Rose smiled at me, the lopsided come-on grin she’d been wearing since I was a little kid and really thought I could grow up to marry a dead girl. “Hey, Els-bells, long time no see,” she said.
“Not my fault you don’t hitchhike in Portland very often,” I said.
“I don’t hitchhike anywhere anymore if I can help it,” she said.
I snapped my fingers. “Oh, right,” I said, trying to cover the fact that I’d honestly forgotten her change in status.
Rose Marshall used to be a hitchhiking ghost, a type of spirit that was bound to walk the earth looking for someone who could drive her home. She could appear solid and alive only under very specific circumstances, while wearing clothing borrowed from the living.
She was my family’s second honorary dead aunt, and since she was the one who had never been responsible for bedtime or telling me to brush my teeth, she got to be the “fun dead aunt,” which was an unnecessary distinction in most households.
She spread her arms and I threw myself into them, hugging her close.
As always, she smelled of rosemary and gasoline, and she was as solid as any living human. Mary smiled at the pair of us, then turned to my overflowing laundry hamper, wrinkling her nose.
“I’m taking this to the compound,” she said. “You’ll have to pick it up when it’s all clean and folded, but if I leave it here, you’re never going to finish cleaning this room.”
She grabbed the hamper and was gone, taking it with her. Rose gave me another squeeze, then let me go, pushing me out to arm’s length. “Elsie, please don’t take this the wrong way, but when was the last time you took a shower? I’m dead, but you smell dead.”
“I don’t know,” I said, resisting the urge to sniff myself. I’d long since stopped noticing the way I, or my surroundings, smelled. “Sometime in the last month, I think.”
“You don’t sound all that sure about that.”
“I’m not. But I have to say something.”
“Fuck, kiddo, I had no idea things were this bad. I would have swung by sooner if I’d known.”
“You would?” I asked. “I didn’t know you had that much freedom of movement these days.”
Her expression darkened, storm clouds rolling in. “If I tell them one of my nieces needs me, I get the freedom of movement,” she said.
I didn’t argue.
Like I said, Rose used to be a hitchhiking ghost. Ghosts don’t normally change what kind of haunting they are; they get assigned a type of dead person to be when they die, and that’s how they stay until they move on to the great beyond.
Rose, though … well, my Aunt Rose never met an authority figure she wouldn’t thumb her nose at, and she’d managed to attract the attention of not one, not two, but three of the greater spirits that control the afterlife. The ghosts call them gods.
The mice call us gods. I’m not sure I believe in gods.
I sort of think that anyone who goes looking for the divine will just find something bigger than themselves, and assign godhood to that discovery.
But gods or no, the spirits who’d noticed Rose had the power to make themselves her problem, and they’d done exactly that, rewriting the limitations of her haunting until she fit the purpose they had planned for her.
She was a Fury now, a spirit of vengeance, in direct service to those three greater powers.
One of them was the anima mundi, which tied her even closer to Mary than she’d been before the change.
They were haunting the same house, Mary and Rose, and they were never going to be free of one another. Not really.
Although I guess that’s what family means.