Chapter 1 #2
Snatching my thrift store–carpetbag up from the hall, I storm across the house.
I might as well stomp across a tomb. Nothing rattles.
Nothing moves. There’s nothing to move; no pictures on the dead white walls, no souvenir shelves, barely any furniture and what there is of that still in its funerary shrouds.
Only my keys make a noise, jangling as I grab them from the hook beside the door, the little blue-glass spray bottle clanking bitterly against the only other key ring hanging on the rack.
That single key on its tattered Mothman key chain beckons me, tempting, singing a siren song about the old RV in the driveway and its full tank of gas.
What if I just… left? Snatched up that dented little scrap of plastic advertising Mothman Motel, Room 13 and left behind my house key and the rotating never-really-home it belongs to, drove off into anywhere but here?
What if I stared down the barrel of that bad decision and finally pulled the trigger?
“Persephone!” my mother bellows from the kitchen. “Now.”
“I’m going!” Only my own stupid keys carving lines in my palm, I wrench the door open. At the same time, my mother must open the back. The cold autumn breeze kites through our empty house, a hollow moan so loud I almost miss her icy accusation.
“What are you doing here?”
You know what? Screw the bus. I don’t care.
I prowl around the side of the house instead, bundled up against the cutting cold, following the stranger’s dimpled footsteps in the frost-capped grass.
Six houses, six schools, three years—I refuse to let her ignore me and lie anymore.
If she wants to treat me like a ghost so bad, I’d rather just be one.
Time for my party trick.
Not that I go to parties.
Slamming my thrifted carpetbag down on the lichen-stained lawn table left behind by the previous owner, I crumple into the nearest chair.
My vision shutters. My mind winks out, the gossamer exhale of a soap bubble popping.
Like The Wizard of Oz coming into Technicolor, I billow into the waking wind, coaxing my spiderweb sticky soul from reluctant flesh until I’m standing metaphysically naked on the garden path beside my own empty bean pod of a body.
Mom hates my party trick. The one time she caught me, she called my left-behind body “catatonic disassociation,” and before I could figure out how to stop digging myself a deeper hole with my fumbling, crazy-sounding attempts to reassure her, I was three months deep in painfully awkward Thursday-afternoon mother-daughter tea times.
Her homemade attempt at therapy, I guess, because God forbid she ever take me to a real doctor.
Anyway, I’m not doing that again. I diagnosed myself instead with a little help from Dr. Google.
I found out the internet calls it astral projection.
I way prefer that. It’s more accurate than “catatonic disassociation,” and less terrifying than my own theory—that the Ghost War bombs that went off when I was born blasted me with enough freaky radiation to cause my ghost to fall out.
So yeah, I’ll stick with calling it astral projection and just steadily keep on ignoring how…
dead my body looks without me in it. There’s something so unsettlingly wrong about the way my left-behind meat sits there, breathing slowed and eyes glassy, staring out into the quickly darkening middle distance of a storm blowing in.
With my weight left behind in my body, my army surplus boots make no sound on the broken brick of the overgrown garden path.
I circle the house, find the stranger and my mother bent toward each other like springs about to fire, almost nose to nose with the storm door, ready to bite through the thin pane of glass between them.
“This was never a permanent solution,” the stranger growls. “You were supposed to come up with a plan.”
My mother sneers. “And I’m working on it.”
“So, nothing? Seventeen years later and you’re still just running? Well, I can’t keep running anymore, Chloe.”
Funny how even though I’m twenty feet away from it, the bottom still drops out of my stomach.
Seventeen years. I’ve never seen this man before in my life, but if something started between him and my mother seventeen years ago exactly, the only thing it can possibly be is…
Me.
Something deep in my soul creaks and breaks.
The clouds follow right behind, adding their drumbeat to my internal discord.
The first salvo of yet another autumn deluge pattering unevenly through my intangible ghost, freckling the pavement.
Each drop strikes me harder than simple water on flesh, burning cold and raw, answering the distant echo of bone-chill spitting against my empty skin.
It matches the sick pressure building in my chest, too vast to contain and too angry to abandon.
For a moment, I close my eyes, just breathing, trying to get my bearings.
I’ve astral projected lots of times but I’ve never felt so… lost.
I don’t know what this feeling is, this pressure, this sensation of toes curling on the lip of a high ledge.
I’m not scared anymore. I’m not angry. I’m not even surprised.
I’m… boiling water, about to pour into a cracked glass.
I’m the moment before the explosive pop, the gushing loss, two burnt hands full of quickly cooling shards.
“What choice do you have?” my mother demands, grim and cutting. “What choice do either of us have? You can’t stay here, and you know it.”
A humorless smile gashes across the stranger’s stubbled jaw.
“See, that’s just it. I can. It’s the only choice I have left.”
“No!” Mom’s fist rattles the storm door. “Damn it, Cain—”