7 #2
I’d seen moth-eaten fabric before. I’d pulled shirts out from my grandma’s piles and wiggled my fingers through the holes to show her. Google said they didn’t eat cotton, but experience told me they weren’t that fussy. If it wasn’t synthetic, it was on the menu.
That included me.
I heard the sickening wet rustle as it plucked at my stuffing, feet scrabbling to push itself in deeper, and deeper, wings battering at my face.
That was when I got angry.
I’d been through so much bullshit.
I’d worked my arse off to be an adequately competent business administrator.
I’d survived Ginger’s weird Stepford-wives tea party.
I’d tried to phone a friend.
And then I’d been murdered.
Murdered by someone I thought was safe.
Murdered by a guy named Kyle.
And there wasn’t a chalk outline, or police tape, or any of the other things there should’ve been in this room, which meant the cops probably never identified the crime scene, which meant they probably never identified Kyle either.
He probably got away with it, dumped my body who-even-knew-where, and left my grandma to cry herself to sleep, wondering what happened to me.
And now a moth was eating me.
A moth.
I didn’t want to scream anymore. I wanted to snarl and spit. I wanted to claw and curse and kill. I wanted to rip the moth to pieces and pound those pieces into the ground.
That desire pulsed inside me, cold and quick, rushing out like water through a broken dam.
I jerked, my porcelain head twisting to the side, smashing into the moth, crushing it between my face and shoulder. Its abdomen popped; its legs clawed at my cheek, frantically at first, then slower, weaker. I released it and watched it ooze into my lap, body broken, wings twitching as it died.
My anger was electric, coursing through me, from the depths of my stuffing to the ends of my ringlets to the tips of my porcelain toes. Cold, sharp, pure. No, not just pure. Purifying.
Slowly, shakily, I twisted my head around and wiped the moth goo off my cheek onto my puffy white sleeve.
I was moving.
I was moving.
For the first time since all this happened, I was moving.
Hope tangled with my rage, feeding it, feeding me. It felt like a promise. It felt like power.
Ghost Lore Fact #2: Ghosts can’t make sound, but they can manipulate the real world.
Contrary to what I’d assumed, I wasn’t one of those sad, intangible sorts of spirits. I was a motherfucking poltergeist.
Ghost Lore Fact #3: The secret ingredient is anger.
Which . . . duh.
I’d been murdered. Whoever heard of a peaceful murdered spirit?
Of course anger was the thing that energized my ectoplasm.
I figured that classified me as a vengeful spirit.
Which, if the corny old movies were right, meant I had a choice: Either I forgive Kyle and try to move on—no fucking way—or I lean in hard on the whole wronged-dead-girl-possessing-a-porcelain-doll thing and embrace my rage.
I’d heard all the metaphors.
Anger is a poison, they said. A knife with no handle.
But that was bullshit. I knew then that anger wasn’t a knife; it was a filter.
Just like those old, scratched-up carnival mirrors, anger changed the way you saw the world.
Twisted it, warped it, crushed it up, and stretched it out. But that didn’t mean anger was wrong.
There are, I reasoned, a lot of filters in the world.
A lot of things warping and shifting our perspectives.
Fear is a filter. It comes closely stuck to our weird cultural obsession with order.
The desire not to make a fuss. The importance of sitting down and shutting up so you don’t upset the status quo.
Anger can negate.
Anger can wipe clean.
Anger can help you see clearly.
It was with anger that I remembered Kyle, standing behind the security door, smiling as he held out the vodka. It was with anger that I really, truly saw him for the first time.
His regular, easygoing smile was grotesque, his simple, default wardrobe hideous, his flushed cheeks and beating heart obscene.
Every square centimeter of him was revolting.
Every tiny piece of skin, still warm with life: wrong.
I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t seen it when I was alive.
How I’d sat beside him, looked him in the eye, and thought he was a person.
He wasn’t a person; he was a cancer, the kind that kills. The kind that needed to be cut out.
I let myself imagine it, daydreaming giddily about all the things I could do to him.
I could strangle him with my freaky little doll hands, I could burn his house down with him locked inside, I could stab out his eyes with a kitchen knife.
What would I say to him as I did it? What would be a good ghostly catchphrase?
It’s me? What goes around comes around? Die, bitch, die?
I needed to workshop that.
The anger inside me was already unfurling, sinking back down into the darkness.
But that didn’t matter. I knew what I had to do now.
I just needed some practice. After all, if I was going to pull off this whole home-brand Chucky shtick, a quick jerk here or a little twitch there wasn’t going to cut it.
But I could do it. I knew now that I could.
Perhaps the five stages of grief weren’t quite as bullshit as I’d first assumed. I didn’t have any time for denial, or patience for acceptance, and bargaining and depression weren’t really my vibe. But anger . . . anger felt right.