Amber Sparks - May We Shed These Human Bodies

I’m sorry, she says, because really there’s never anything else to say about life. Then she slips sideways past Randy and gets into her car. She shuts the door and watches as the wind blows rain around his outline, smudges and then blots it out.

The City longed to travel. He hadn't been anywhere in ages, and wanted to see what things looked liked outside of himself. So the City asked his best friend Tammie if she would mind giving him a lift. Tammie took her gum out of her mouth and twirled it around and around her index finger, pink on peach on pink, while she thought about it.

Okay, she said, popping the gum back into her mouth. The City thought that was kind of gross, but he didn't say anything since she had agreed to give him a lift. He barely had time to wince before Tammie was hoisting him up onto her shoulders, where he rested like the set of a complicated play.

Where are we going? Tammie asked. The City hadn't thought this part through. He asked Tammie to give him some time, so she tried on dresses at Topshop while the City read through his guidebooks. Hurry up, she said through a layer of fuchsia organza. I'm just about done here. While she was ringing up her stuff, the City decided on Mexico. Airfare was dirt cheap. Plus he'd never been there before, even though it wasn't that far away. He could get back pretty quickly if he needed to.

Tammie thanked the clerk and took her bag. The City was super excited; he was scribbling notes about all the places they would go, like the ruins, and the beaches, and then maybe to visit his cousin, Mexico City. That would be sweet. The City told Tammie he'd decided, but she shook her head.

I changed my mind, she said. You're getting really heavy, and anyway, I have to go to work tomorrow. And she lifted the City from her shoulders and settled him gently back into the spot where he belonged, the spot that he'd worn into the general shape of him from all the years of being there.

The streets of the City were flooded with sadness for a long while after that.

There are no clocks in the land of the dead. There are no wristwatches, no calendars, no way to keep track of time. The spirits do not make appointments; they will get around to everything eventually. The dead need not keep time. Time keeps them. They are prisoners trapped in it as surely as flies in honey, and nothing really moves, nothing changes — though everything slowly, gradually shifts, oozes, evolves, dries up, blows away. The dead are as dead as doornails. Their world is a flat place of pooling ink and vapor, of streets stacked one over another, since no one minds sharing space after life.

As a consequence of all this stacking, the land of the dead is no bigger than a small cottage. And since it is so small, and since nothing ever really happens there, when something momentous finally occurs the dead are instantly stirred. Souls dry as dust and dormant for centuries flip over in their beds and groan a little. Newer souls, still shaky and vibrant as wet paint, flutter about like moths and chatter to one another.

Here is what happens: a living child is born. No one can say how it happens; in the long memories of the dead it has certainly never happened before. The news drifts like fog through the land of the dead until every single spirit is soaked through, shivering in their almost-bodies, afraid of what this birth might portend. The seriousness of the situation propels the dead into hushed, halting conversation. A vote of sorts is taken. The child, it is decided, will be cast out to dwell with the living, where she can be cared for. But her kin will not abandon her completely. She will be followed, watched over; all her life she will be divided, with her feet in the Styx and her head in the stars.

It's the opposite of being with people, which is maybe why the father likes it so much. The arms of the ghosts swirl twirl round him like spaghetti, brush past his face, comfort him without grabbing, holding, pushing, or pulling. Without the sweat and sour rot all people seem to leak. Death erases that. The ghosts smell like nothing, feel like breezes, whisper on their way to wherever they're bound. There is no regret in them. They separate him from humans, help him observe and inquire. They help him understand how small people are.

He has forbidden TV, forbidden radio, forbidden wireless of any kind in his home. The signals would interfere with those the ghosts give off, with the live trails they leave looping through the air. His daughter begs for TV, for an email account or a cell phone, and traipses over to the neighbor kids' houses on weeknights to watch her shows and surf the web. She tells the neighbor kids her father is crazy. She rolls her eyes and tells the neighbor kids that the ghosts are more important than she is. It has been this way since she was very small. Since her mother died, really. Before that, the ghosts were more like mice. After that, they invaded, rolling through the plaster and carpet and wood-paneling like waves of black mold.

Her father says he draws inspiration from the ghosts. He says it is important to be good at what you do, and living with the dead has made him very good. But the daughter hates the dead. They scare her more now than when she was a child. She didn't notice, before, how they keep on saying the same things, over and over in breathless buzzes. She didn't notice how they cling to her like lichen to a rock, how they smile in the dark when they think no one is watching, how they have no faces but smile in the dark just the same. She notices now and has begun to feel afraid.

The father is an actor and the mother is dead. These are the two most important facts in the daughter's life. Third most important: the ghosts themselves, the fact of them, the presence they create in nearly every space she occupies. They cluster around her sometimes in a way that is just shy of alarming. But they seem mostly to stick to the house. They seem to love her father most.

She doesn't look for her mother in the herd of the dead. That is not the point of the ghosts. No one would recognize these creatures as anything like people; they are so far removed from the world that they have no memory of who they were. She is not sure they were ever human at all. All she knows is that they are as dead as death can make you.

Still, their milky eyes follow her everywhere, faintly curious, a dull kind of play still lit within them. She swears they sprinkle little secrets where she walks, like sugar in her path. She doesn't want their secrets. She wouldn't want anything the dead could give her, unless it is her mother back again.

Before she got sick, her mother had been strong and hard as bullets. She was the one who got things done. Her father had always been less present, even before the ghosts. Onstage, he took up so much space — the expansive, entitled space of a king — but at home he did the dishes slowly, humming old songs out of tune until he seemed more like background than family. When she was small, the daughter thought everyone's life was like this. Your mother was the center of everything, the sun; your father was the faraway planet who opened into something wonderful only under the lights, while you sat in the dark, a spectator, and listened to words that only sounded like the words you knew. The ghosts were your soft and small friends, almost imaginary, skittering through the walls and along the ceiling. Clustering round your soul at night for warmth.

Then the ghosts changed. It is her father’s fault that they changed. It was after her mother died that her father's heart caved in on itself, became a vast black hole. And the ghosts began drifting in.

Her father thinks the dead help him understand what people are really like, from all directions and angles, inside out and close up. He thinks the dead elevate his art. His daughter thinks she would like to place hundreds of TVs, cell phones, wireless cards, radios and laptops all over their house, until the shapes of the ghosts are burned clean away in the electromagnetic chorus. I need to be online to do this project, she tells her father. Can we please get wireless?