Alissa Nutting - Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

“Just you wait,” Grandmother warned the day we lugged Mother’s burlap-wrapped body out to the woods. I kept hitting up against rocks in the dark and collecting large bruises. “She’ll come back and give me my what-for. I won’t know a moment of peace until I die.”

I dug and dug until the sun began to appear, when Grandmother’s head finally peered over the hole’s rim. Her normally tight bun was loose and wild; wisps of hair floated around her face like thin smoke. “Come up,” she said, lowering down a rope for me to grab so I wouldn’t get her hands dirty. Once I filled the hole back in, Grandma’s composure returned.

It was not how I had pictured my mother’s funeral.

Afterwards Grandma handed me a large, glowing cigar and patted my thigh. She has a scar on her thigh from when Mother dared her to put a lit cigar there for a whole minute. I worried it was my time to receive a matching scar, but she said nothing more, so I sat by her and tried to puff until I got sick and vomited.

“Hello?” The ghost does not answer my hellos, so I try something personal. “Madre?” I take out a piece of bread and try to shape it like a ghost, then lay it in my lap like a type of sign. Ghosts Welcome. Ghost Spoken Here.

There is banging as Grandma hits the vent with a broom-handle. “I don’t hear anything,” she says. “You must wrestle the ghost and win.” There is more banging and then she goes to boil tea.

The ghost has been making rattle-noises that sound like music for people who have never heard music, or people who are very lonely for sound. Grandma suspected vermin — she has caught hundreds of raccoons in her lifetime — but then one night she saw a blue glow coming from the vent.

From the sounds of the television drifting into the vent from the living room below, I can tell that it is evening. When ghosts come.

There is a saying Grandma has, “Fit in or else you’ll be sorry.” All I really know about ghosts is “Boo.” I whisper it at first; I want to fit in but I’m also not sure what this word means to ghosts. Then I say it a little louder.

Suddenly a wind takes up all my different hairs. The hair on my head starts orbiting in whips that seem very much like snakes, so much like them that I grow afraid of my own hair. My eyebrows and the soft hairs on my cheeks begin to tickle. On my arms and legs, the hairs stand straight up and prick out into my clothing. The hairs bruise and balloon. One hair in the back of my head swells out too much and pops. Injured hair is a strange sensation.

As the wind grows stronger, I start to worry: what if saying “Boo” is like swimmers cutting themselves in a sea of sharks? Maybe ghosts smell sounds, and “Boo” is the strongest scent they know. Large dust bunnies fly past me, now and again a small roach, then just one very fearful old mouse that probably came up into the vent to die and did not count on this at all. He whirls past so quickly that I barely get to see his expression, his lint-covered whiskers, but he looks tired and terrified.

I close my eyes when tiny particles of dust in the fast wind begin to sting. I can no longer hear the television, just the wrapper-top on the loaf of bread buckled between my knees whipping back and forth. I try to think about my bed, which is soft and has a canopy that Grandmother makes fun of. Lying beneath it I feel like a doll who someone loves.

The wind stops suddenly. Afterwards, I squint for several minutes in case it starts up again. Whenever something bad happens in my life, it’s best if I don’t feel relieved when I think it’s over. Like how we buried my mother, and now the house is haunted.

Then I feel her breath on my eyelids.

Mother. She’s not as beautiful as I remember; her skin is gray and a tooth is missing. Mother’s stab wounds trickle blood continuously. They are the only part of her that appears to be alive.

I forget everything I’ve said to her in the quiet beneath my bed’s canopy since she’s been gone. Our hands try to come together but they are like the ends of magnets. I cry a little and Mother starts crying too, but this makes her blood fountain much swifter so we stop.

“Grandma did this to you.”

“We had a disagreement. Don’t hold it against her. When I think about it, she was right.”

I remember that night. They were fighting over tequila.

“It’s been you then? Haunting the house?”

“Of course. Did I scare you, my lamb? When you’re a ghost, not haunting is like trying not to laugh. It tickles and pushes until it hurts. Of course there are a lot of boring ghosts who find it easy not to haunt. In the afterlife, so much is boring.” She tilts her head and looks at my neck, my chin. “You’re getting beautiful. Hector would be proud.”

Hector is my father. I remember him running away from our home when I was very little, and Mother running after him, throwing knives. I wonder if knives exist where Mother lives now.

We stare at one another. It’s nice to have her in front of my eyes. It doesn’t make me hurt inside the way photographs of her do.

“Dear, how about we scare Grandmother together? That way you’ll be in on it, and you won’t get frightened.”

I shrug. Grandmother is already grumpy. “You’re not the one who has to live with her,” I say.

Mother smiles. “You always were very good.”

The running blood bothers me. I take a piece of bread and hold it against her belly like a sponge. There is no magnet-force this time; I can feel the warmth of Mother’s blood beneath the bread.

“I miss you,” I tell her. I hold up another piece of bread and she pushes her face into it like it’s a mask until her imprint appears. The bread begins to take on the smell of Mother’s perfume. We hold hands through the bread. I put a piece of bread over her chest and then put my face to it and listen for a heartbeat. Her chest sounds like the inside of a giant shell. We do this until all the bread grows thin and falls apart, then I mash its crumbs into a thick ball that smells like Mother and dough.

When Mother disappears, the vent goes very dark. I tuck the dough ball into my shirt pocket and feel for the vent. Its door must have blown open in the wind.

Grandmother is asleep in her chair next to a lit candle. “Hello,” I say, and Grandmother gives a frightened gasp and opens her eyes.

“Your hair.” She makes a big circle motion around her head. “It is ghost-blown.”

After I nod, she asks if it was Mother. “No telling,” I say. “I passed out from fear.” Motioning me off to bed, her eyes move towards the vent as she lights a cigar. I run up the stairs so the smoke won’t interfere with Mother’s smell on my hands or the bread in my pocket.

It has been a long day of intergalactic delivery, and I’m feeling a little boxed-in. Though I like the homey atmosphere of my ship’s small confines, about a week into a mission the air starts to smell like recycled sock.

When my Message Station Board lights up pink, I know it’s Brady, WordCalling. I’ve never met him, but he says he’s forty-three, and early on in our talks he sent a very promising five-second video of himself flexing his back muscles. Like me, Brady is an independent outer space cargo transporter. We are the truckers of the galaxy.

Yet our connection runs much deeper than this. The very first time he messaged me on SingleMingle (initially, it was a bit of a debate whether or not to look past his screen name of FluidTransfer69 and try to get to know the man within), I felt that Brady had to be a Sagittarius. That’s how well we clicked. And lo and behold, when I told him my suspicion, he admitted that while his birth month technically made him a Scorpio (my astrological enemy), he was born prematurely. His true sign is indeed the keeper of my star-charted soul.