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, with Hades, a doomed winter bride.
The ocean crashes in my chest, shoving at my ribs until my bones rattle and itch.
“They’re wrong,” I say, just to scratch the wrongness. They’re wrong and 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 not true. 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’t finished—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 alive and dead 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 down to 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 feel almost right. Close, but imperfect, an old favorite candy whose company changed the formula. Something about the pattern, always repeating—not one god of death, but two; 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 know exactly what they taste like? Why do I keep un-remembering the vast black water and an endless sky of stars?
Why were the ghosts looking for me?
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 back very wrong.
What did you do seventeen years ago? I asked her.
I became a mother.
Cold in my hollow rib cage, ocean foaming, I type in “ghost war.”
I expect the usual propaganda. The tight-lipped government line about unnamed terrorist groups, a large bomb of unknown make and origin, the lasting effects of a new type of radiation still being studied.
I expect the empty reassurance that the fallout is no longer harmful to the living, the usual ghost-safety reminders and advertisements for ghost salts and spiritual saline sprays.
But the screen goes white with an error message, repeatedly. No matter which search engine I use or browser I download: This website has been blocked. Contact administrator.
Mom put on child locks.
I grind my teeth so hard they squeak. This absence is evidence; it has to be. I’m sure of it now. There’s a devastating truth hiding in the missing spaces, the places I’m not allowed to look, and the questions I never get answered.
I don’t know what to do. I could break into her office again—force my way inside, this time in my flesh—but would that even help? If I smashed open all her locks, what would I find but more questions? More experiments I can’t make sense of, more weapons built to hurt things like me?
I don’t see a solution here but to leave. If I can’t win, I can at least stop playing.
As if summoned, my phone vibrates. I flick open the message.
Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Bas texts.
I frown, type back, ???
Which window does the hair come out of?
Oh. Oh no.
Scrambling out from under the bed, I lurch to the window. The sunset stripes the grass in deep shadows and strips of flame, building monsters in the silhouette of a lone tree, a rusty swing set.
But only one of those monsters holds a tiny, glowing cellphone screen.
It’s barely 7, I scrabble out as fast as I can. Mom’s still up! She’ll see you from the kitchen!!
U promised, he texts back, sends me emojis of two autumn leaves and a red demon mask.
What?
Leaf devil? I mouth to myself. Fall demon?
Confused, I blink at the laughing little red face with tusks—not the usual purple smiley with horns—until I realize he picked the Japanese demon on purpose.
Japanese demons are called oni. He meant fall, oni.
Felony.
Despite the tightness in my chest, I laugh. I shake my head at his terrible joke, though I know he probably can’t see it from where he crouches behind the fronds of a massive ornamental grass, and in that moment I’m so, so blindingly grateful.
He came. I asked him for help with something terrible, something dangerous on a whim and a bad idea, and he came.
I type, My mom won’t go to bed until MAYBE 10. You’re too early.
Immediately, my phone rings, Big Mouth flashing on the screen. I answer it quick before my mom hears. “If she catches me talking to—”
“I don’t want to scare you,” Bas interrupts. “But, uh, we should go now. That RV in the driveway work?”
Every thought in my head scatters like startled birds, leaving me empty and echoing with a warning cry.
“What? Yeah, of course.” I try to laugh but it comes out dry and wheezing. Try to catch his eyes across the darkened yard but can’t make out more than the crescent moon of his cellphone screen pressed against his cheek. “How did you know I meant grand theft auto and flee across state lines?”
“I didn’t. We shouldn’t talk about this on the phone. Just—you trust me?”
I shouldn’t. I’ve known this boy for two days.
Day one, I found him under a library table, stole him from the school, and kissed him in the rain.
But on day two, we became gods of death in a supposedly ghost-proof room, opened the gates of the afterlife to let’s-call-it-seven lost souls and the hundreds watching from the woods.
We’re technically five hours away from the start of day three—who knows?
The trajectory we’re on, we could overthrow the government by the end of the week.
And listen, I know this is crazy. I know I should say no.
I should tell him we’re moving too fast, too irresponsibly, getting in too deep in ways we can’t come back from.
I should close my curtains and turn my back on whatever he’s offering, all strangeness and charm in the uneasy dark of my backyard. I’ve only known him for two days…
Yet somewhere deeper than my bones and meat, I’ve known him forever. He wouldn’t lie to me.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Give me five minutes.”
Hanging up the phone, I shove it back into my bra.
I rip open the garbage bag from moving day, grabbing whatever change of clothes I first lay hands on, loop my boots by their laces around the handle of my carpetbag.
The anxiety in Bas’s voice catches in my chest, lighting up every vein, but the flame it kindles is something wilder than fear.
It’s the cracked glass finally shattering, the boiling water spilling out. Not pain, not two palmsful of burning—
(seared skin and bone on a shattered, guttering star)
—but a geyser. I am the boiling water. Burning and determined, I press my forehead to the floor, suck in a deep breath, and shove my soul through.
Wiggling down with disembodied head and shoulders, I pop out above the kitchen alcove, dinner cooling on the table below and Mom sitting with an untouched plate, staring at her phone with one hand threaded in her hair.
How am I going to get past her? Smack in front of the back door, close enough to hear the front, she’ll be up my ass before I can get halfway across the driveway. Damn it.
Okay, deep breath, I gotta be smart about this.