Amber Sparks: May We Shed These Human Bodies

That's why we are very, very lucky, says her father. She can't see him but she can tell his smile is pointed, rat-like; she hates him just now.

Yes, she says weakly, knowing how useless it is to argue. Her father is in love with the ghosts. She knows this now. This is why there have been no more girlfriends. He is farther away than ever. He is becoming like them, less often troubled but more volatile when shaken, waiting for something, always waiting. The ghosts have an eternity to wait, of course, while she does not. Their patience seduces her father, astounds him, turns the short line of life into a long horizon bending somewhere dim and hopeful. He likes the idea of waiting forever, with calm care and just a hint of being. Sometimes the daughter wonders if she actually died with her mother; if she is the real ghost after all. She is so clearly the intruder in her home.

The daughter gets the idea from a documentary about Thomas Edison. It shows how he electrocuted an elephant in the zoo to make sure his alternating current could kill something big. The zoo staff had to use a ship's hawser to restrain the elephant, whose name was Topsy. Her last meal was a sack of carrots laced with cyanide, just in case. They put wooden shoes on her feet, fixed with copper electrodes. Edison's people ran a wire cable from Topsy's new clogs straight to Edison's plant. When Edison gave the signal his technicians threw the switch and poured a 6,600 volt charge of alternating current into Topsy's huge frame. She died instantly and fell over sideways, kicking up so much dust as she hit the ground that she disappeared for a moment behind it.

The daughter stares at the documentary film of Topsy's dust-covered bulk, splayed out and still twitching slightly, smoke curling up from around her feet. The ghosts hate electricity. The daughter wonders how she would restrain the ghosts like Edison restrained the elephant. Could she use some sort of wireless signal to keep them in? Surround the house with cell phones somehow? She thinks she could destroy them with electricity, by touching wires to wires. That part is easy enough. The hard part would be keeping them there long enough to destroy them. Ghosts are more dangerous than a mad elephant.

Then, suddenly, she has it. A brilliant idea. She only has to call the television satellite company and sound adult enough. Apparently, she succeeds, because here is the white truck now, pulling up outside, and there is the ladder the workmen will climb to the roof to install the new dish. The ghosts are agitated, more solid than she has ever seen them. Even the workmen seem to notice. Windy out today, says one, as another looks around bewildered.

Doesn’t look windy, he says.

Yeah, says the first guy, but I can feel it. I can barely keep hold of my tools.

The ghosts know it is the daughter’s doing. They know. They break off their attack, seep into her bedroom through the walls, and swirl and swirl around her, faster and faster, until she starts to rise into the air. No! she says. Stop it! Put me down! The ghosts have never been able to lift her before. This is scary. This is serious.

Then the door slams and her father is there; he is furious and not at the ghosts, but then he sees her through the swarm of spirits holding her under the roof and he shouts, he sweeps them away, he catches her as she falls and sets her down gently on her own bed. He puts his face in his huge hands and starts to cry, something the daughter has never seen him do for real. He does it a different way on the stage. She watches with interest until he lifts his red-rimmed eyes to hers, says softly, you can’t chase out the ghosts. They came with you. They’re yours.

No, says the daughter. That’s not true. They’re your ghosts. I don’t want them.

You may not want them, says the father, but they’re yours just the same. They gave you to us. They brought you to us, your mom and me. And they stayed, to watch over you, I guess.

Outside the satellite company workers are loading the dish back into their van. The daughter watches them and knows she has lost. She knows she can’t kill the ghosts. Especially not now that she knows they belong to her. That doesn’t mean, though, that she has given up on ridding herself of them. She doesn’t care that they came with her. She has got to leave them behind, all of them, or they will soon swallow her up.

It is fourteen years ago. A man and a woman walk into a funeral. It sounds like a joke, but it is not a joke. A man and a woman walk into a funeral and before the funeral baked meats have a chance to cool, they’ve fallen dreadfully and stupidly in love and it is not a joke. Not with each other — they are already in love with each other — but with the baby they find, wrapped in thin cotton sheets and stowed away in the church coat closet. Should we take her? asks the woman, brushing her fingertips above the baby’s odd, light blue eyes, over the translucent lids and lashes.

We should shelter her, says the man, and he smiles at the baby, who is batting at something neither of the adults can see.

Isn’t she feisty? asks the mother, watching as the daughter shadowboxes away. The mother never could see the ghosts. The mother could never save her daughter, though she kept trying until the day she died.

When the world finally comes to save her, her father is away at rehearsal. The daughter waits with two women in the kitchen, makes them coffee and offers them Oreos. She is so excited she forgets to eat hers. She can feel the ghosts pushing angrily at the strangers, pulling at their clothing, blowing forgetting thoughts into their faces. The women blink and wave the dead away like gnats.

When her father walks in, he does his best imitation of a real father, but it is no good. The women can see he is acting. They talk to him in the living room for a long, long time. The daughter hears her father yelling. She can feel him upsetting the ghosts, their spirits growing thin and syrupy. They slink around her, ghost-blobs with question marks for faces, but she has no answers to give them. When they finally return to the kitchen, the women clear their throats and ask her if she believes there are ghosts in her home.

The daughter's eyes drop, and she cannot look at her father. She can hear him starting to cry, but she can also hear the ghosts applauding faintly and she knows this is just more acting; the way he cries on stage. No, of course not, she says, and the screams of the dead are high and heavy. The air goes grey. One of the women nods and tells the daughter to pack her things, that she's going to live somewhere else for a while. As she follows the women up the stairs, her father watches with a ghost at either shoulder; the ghosts smile with their almost-faces. He feels the terrible loss gathering in his throat, but the ghosts whisper to him, sing to him of how much room she took up, how much air the ghosts need after all. She is too much people now; she is no longer one of their own. She has to go.

He swallows the loss down hard, feels faint, and pretends to admire this new hazy view of the hallway, his vision ringed with black. There is nothing permanent here anyway, he thinks. There is nothing on Earth we should treasure. The silence after the door shuts is the mammoth silence between the cradle and the grave.

They practically fall out of bed when the dude starts yelling outside. He’s got a loud yell, a dangerous, scary yell, worse than angry because you can tell his rage is slipping into the space outside the brain where it pools and pushes against the skull and makes you do things, Things, THINGS.

It’s just one of the homeless guys trying to get in, she says. She moves closer to him, and they lie very still in the bed hoping someone has properly shut the back door.