Ash Eater
Just as an object takes fire and is consumed, so is the world of desires consumed and destroyed after death […] It might appear terrifying that a hope, for whose realization sense organs are necessary, must change into hopelessness after death; that a desire, which only the physical world can satisfy, must turn into consuming deprivation.
Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science
“Who is it you’ll be swallowing today?” I asked.
“This was the body of Gerald Farleigh.”
I had met Josette Plimons 3 weeks ago at our school’s lunchtime Silent Film club; now I was sitting with her in a stranger’s home, watching her dip a dainty grey spoon into a blue vase filled with an old man’s cremated remains. It was one of those times where there seemed to be no way to ask an unserious question, since any reality could pop up and present itself as the truth. “Do you ever take that with cream and sugar?”
“No,” Josette said. She tipped the spoonful of ash into a small glass bowl she had brought with her. Small, ornately illustrated leaves of ivy spooled around its rim. “That would be disrespectful.” She gently tapped the back of the spoon against the edge of the bowl in a rhythmic clink to jostle the last flakes of ash out.
That question didn’t seem like it needed a follow-up, so I took a moment to reflect. We were in old Gracie Farleigh’s house. She was one of the seniors Josette would visit and provide light care for every week, as part of a volunteer program that offered substantial college credit (“But that’s just a bonus,” Josette told me). The walls were festooned with a garish lilac print; portraits of the beaming dead cluttered old dark wooden shelves pushed against the walls like balustrades. There was no TV, only a window. This was a room that had been furnished and decorated before the invention of digital time. It was little wonder that Josette found this an appealing space for her ritual.
“And you’re, like…certain Mrs. Farleigh won’t come in and flip out.”
“Positive. I set her up with her little CRTV and a bowl of chili for her nap a half hour ago. She’s dead asleep.”
“Pun intended?” My voice quivered. She looked at me, aware of her own ability to generate discomfort, relishing it.
“No.”
We make up a big shape for our lives so that they’ll make sense when we think about them in the abstract, but when you stop and dig into the moments that are most important it’ll always feel like each one of them took place on a different planet. Some of those planets become moons: your memory is of what you were remembering at that time.
I sat on that weird pink couch and looked at Josette’s nails, lightly crusted with human remains. I remembered sitting in the art room with the rest of the Silent Film club at the end of lunch, five minutes before the bell was to ring. We had just wrapped up the scene in The Golem where the titular monster throws the Knight Florian off a tower and kills him. Miguel, the club founder, flicked the lights on.
“Any questions? Observations? Anything?” He must have felt like he had to present a façade that we were a “real” club by giving us half-hearted homework attempts after each viewing, even though our supervisor, Mr. Horton, was sitting off in the corner diddling with his iPad and clearly couldn’t have cared less. Miguel sighed. “Alright, see y’all here next Wednesday.” “Y’all” was somewhat generous: there were four total members of the club.
Amid the soft shuffling of backpacks being hoisted and zipped up I saw Josette peering at the now-blank TV screen, her eyes focused on it as though trying to make sense of a confounding scene.
“What’s up?” I asked her. She looked at me, startled; and in fact I was startled by my own question. No one knew each other at the Silent Film club and, being a gaggle of quiet weirdos for the most part, we didn’t go out of our ways to socialize with one another.
“Not…much?” she said. “What do you mean ‘what’s up?’”
“No, nothing! Just, you looked like you were really concentrating there, almost like you were still watching the movie even though it’s turned off.”
She looked away from me, past my temple. “Well, I found it interesting” she said. “It seemed like they were setting up Florian to be the big hero of the movie, and then they just went and smoked him like that. Bold move.”
“Yeah,” I murmured, thinking about it. “It’s funny, too, because it’s not like the stories in movies were real sophisticated back then. Like with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari—”
“Yes!” she replied, rolling her eyes and laughing. “I don’t care if it was the first plot twist in any movie ever, ‘it was all a dream’ is still dumb! It’s still cheating!”
“Thank you!” I said. The club had finished that movie a couple of weeks ago and, clearly, the betrayal of the ending was still a fresh wound for both of us. “It’s just like, trendy with internet weirdos to like that movie. Just because it has cool sets doesn’t mean it’s actually good.”
“You know, I was just about to—” she began as the shriek of the bell cut her off. It was likely for the best: Miguel had been eyeing the two of us peevishly, not only because he was feeling left out but also because we were trashing one of his favorite movies. It must have been killing him to feel like he couldn’t jump in and defend its honor.
“We’ll talk more about it later,” she said as we walked out of the classroom. “It’s so cool you think that too, though! I was afraid to say anything.”
“Yeah,” I said, laughing. She smiled in affirmation and then waved as she went down the hall. We didn’t share any classes together and didn’t have much in the way of common friend groups, but I didn’t want to wait until next Wednesday to talk to her again.
Fortunately, both of us turned out to be the type of people who, once dragged out of our shells, yearned to be charmed, to stumble into unique and intricate friendships. Josette bumped into me in the hall the next day and we picked up right where we left off: talking about the storytelling quirks of weird old movies, how Miguel never seemed to want to play anything but German Expressionism (“It’s good stuff and all, but like, is he aware that there were a bunch of other countries that also made movies in the ‘20s?” she quipped). We may not have shared any class periods but we did have a couple of teachers in common, which made it easy to find ways to do homework with each other after school. She was a fun person to be catty with; we shared many objects of disdain.
I learned a lot from her, too. Once she cracked a quiet moment of AP Chem study by asking me if I knew what a Sin-Eater was.
“You mean ‘death eaters?’ The things from Harry Potter?”
She looked at me like I’d just farted on her wedding cake. “No,” she dripped, “not the things from Harry Potter.”
“I guess I don’t then,” I said, smiling. I liked getting a rise out of her every so often.
She grimaced, then continued. “Sin-Eaters were Celtic wanderers who traveled the Irish countryside and absorbed the sins of the soon-to-be-deceased in exchange for a small fee, or for food and shelter. They were pretty much outcast from society because they were thought to be so bloated with the sins of the dead that it was spiritually dangerous even to be in their presence.”
“That’s pretty metal. Sounds like a good idea for a movie.”
She paused. “Why do you think a person would do that? Damn themselves irrevocably in exchange for a little bread and water?”
“Maybe they didn’t believe in Heaven and Hell; they could have been the first atheists. Or maybe it’s not really a choice?”
This piqued her curiosity. “How do you mean?”
“Well…people drive cars at crazy speeds even though part of them knows they might die; and they do die, all the time! And that’s a really direct and immediate physical thing, being in a speeding car, knowing you can’t totally control it. If so many modern people can’t even parse out the risk-reward of something like that, then how’s it so farfetched that there was once a whole class of society way back when that made their living by sending themselves to Hell, and they didn’t have any better reason for it than ‘I’ll deal with it later?’”
She still looked puzzled. I went on, floundering: “Look, I don’t know, why do people commit suicide, or eat at Taco Bell? Those aren’t choices either, exactly.” I couldn’t think of anything else to add; I wasn’t even sure if I believed myself. “You know?”
To my amazement she nodded reverently. “Yes,” Josette said, “I think I know exactly what you mean. Do you remember when the paper is due for Mr. Chetney’s class?” And that was the last we spoke of the Sin Eaters for at least a couple of weeks.
Still, the conversation lingered with me. She kept saying things that would remind me of it. Josette was fascinated with religion and spirituality. We’d be talking about The Legend of Zelda and she’d bring up something from Hebridean mythology that it reminded her of, or she’d quote some wisdom from the Upanishads when I was pissed at my dad and rambling about what a dick he had been. I asked her once where she found the time to learn all this shit. “My mom has a degree in religious studies from Naropa; a lot of these books are lying around the house. And anything I can’t find on the bookshelves is easy to look up online. I just read a chapter of the Bhagvad Gita or Gods and Fighting Men or what have you before I go to bed. But ancient wisdom is everywhere, truly.”
She was always serene when she talked about these things, but I could sense a desperation underneath it all. It seemed almost stream-of-consciousness the way she talked about them; none of her ideas fit together. They were free-floating and contradictory, dropped in and out of her life depending on the situation at hand and her present mood. It was almost like all these spiritual aphorisms and principles were photographs she had ripped out of a scrapbook, and she felt like if she grabbed enough of them then eventually every frayed corner, every stranger’s smiling face would form a bigger picture that would make sense of it all. I never asked if she believed in Hell or something like it, but it never felt like I had to.
It was a Tuesday in April when Josette first told me about her ritual. She seemed worried and bleary-eyed; April was the busiest time of the year for big class projects and papers, and she always looked a little bedraggled in any case, but something seemed off when we met up at lunch.
“You look like shit.”
“Thank you,” she growled.
“Is anything the matter?”
“Yes. I don’t know what specifically, but yes, something’s the matter.”
This was a cryptic answer even for Josette. “Help me out, girl, is it fever, is it trouble at home, cramps? Anything at all, even a ballpark. Even Google directions to get to the ballpark.”
She took a timid bite of her tuna fish sandwich and looked at me sheepishly, almost guiltily. “It’s over something weird that I don’t want you to know about.”
“It can’t be that much weirder than anything else about you,” I laughed. She still looked troubled. I straightened up: “Is it…illegal, that kind of thing?” I whispered.
“Not as far as I know.”
“Good?”
She sighed and pulled a sliver of crust off her sandwich. “You know when you were a little kid and you had ideas about life that didn’t seem to come from anywhere, they just slid out from under a rock in your head, and that made them seem all the more real? And then you’d fall into weird habits or say things that didn’t make sense to anyone else, because they corresponded to this thing you felt you knew about life, and you only stopped doing or saying those things because at some point someone corrected you?”
“I think so, yeah.”
She looked at me with great intention. “Could you give me an example?”
Put on the spot, I sputtered. Then something started coming back to me. “When I was really young I used to think fireflies were dead Christmas lightbulbs.”
Her eyes widened. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I saw a bunch of them flittering around outside our house once, the day after my dad took all the decorations down. I think it was just unseasonably warm that year but at the time it didn’t occur to me to not think that they were the ghosts of our Christmas lights. I thought dad took them down too soon and they wanted to come back in the house. I started crying, thinking how lonely they must have felt. Felt that horrible little kid guilt that weighs down your whole torso.” I ruminated; I hadn’t thought about this in a long time. “Actually, it’s even a little wilder than what you were talking about, because I remember telling my dad we needed to let the lights back in and when he tried to explain that they were just glowing bugs I didn’t believe him. I think I even got in trouble for calling him a liar.”
She nodded. “When I was little I ate some of my grandmother’s ashes.”
“On purpose?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow. Why?”
“I thought I’d be able to hear her soul or that she might come back to life.”
I looked down at the garish ketchup-colored cafeteria tiling. “Did it work?”
“Not really. Not the way I wanted it to.”
She took a big bite of her sandwich, the first real bite she’d taken since we started talking. “I still eat people’s ashes.”
I looked at her. “What?” I didn’t mishear her and I didn’t doubt for a second that she was telling the truth, but it was the only word that would come out.
“I think it’s making me sick.”
“Of course it’s making you sick, isn’t there like formaldehyde and stuff like that in people’s ashes?”
She shook her head urgently. “Not like that.” Then she looked at me. “Would you mind coming with me to Mrs. Farleigh’s house tomorrow?”
The memory moon passed over right at that point; I was back on that pink couch, body and mind. I remember my chest tightening, I remember that for some reason the tops of my cheeks were in pain.
“I thought about what you said about the Sin Eaters, how what they did wasn’t a choice,” she mused. “I don’t think you were right.”
“No?”
“I think you can be chosen by God but I think you also have to accept the call. Just like any other job.”
She slipped another spoonful of ash between her lips. She coughed and her eyes bulged ever so slightly. Then she wiped her mouth and continued.
“I think the older you get the quieter the call becomes. Whether you’re raised in a secular way or a religious way you’re only ever taught to do what other people say. You aren’t told how to listen to the spirits.”
Mrs. Farleigh gave a concerned yawp from upstairs. “Dear?!”
This startled Josette; to her own visible horror she almost knocked the ashes on the ground when she jumped up. She covered the bowl with her shaking palm as she stood.
“I’ll be right back,” she told me. She stuffed the bowl into my hands and jogged up the stairs. “Coming, Mrs. Farleigh!”
Holding onto those ashes was bizarre, to say the least. I looked into the bowl and tried to glean some spiritual significance from it, feel the gravity of what used to be a human body in my own hands, but nothing would come. It just looked like dirt, like the stuff that piles up in an unswept corner. I spent a few minutes alone in that hideous room, too nervous to poke around and too unfocused even to waste time on my phone, before she sauntered back down. “Mrs. Farleigh heard me cough and wanted to know if I was alright.” She smiled.
“Could you take this, please?” I held the bowl out to her, annoyed. She grabbed it from me nonchalantly and sat down again; I hadn’t noticed when she’d gotten up but she’d put the spoon behind her ear like a pencil and daintily retrieved it to continue eating.
“Anyway,” she went on, “if you hear the true call at all you usually hear it when you’re young, and it’s your own responsibility to have an epiphany that you need to follow it when you’re older, because when you’re a kid you don’t really have the resources to follow up on your instincts. But you know, and a part of you always knows. That’s why I say you’re beholden to your own epiphany, even though that seems like the wrong way around.
“That story you told me about the fireflies, about how you used to think they were the ghosts of Christmas lights? I think you were right, or at least I think you were onto something. I think God was talking to you but you didn’t have the spiritual vocabulary to understand what He was saying.”
Her eyes were glued to mine, terrifying in their intensity. Her jaw was rigid. She put her free hand on my wrist and lightly gripped it. “If you could see what I see now. If you could just hear the call, the way I hear it.”
This had officially become Too Much. I yanked my hand away from her as gently as I could and started rustling up my backpack. “Jo, look.” I could already tell I was going to make her feel bad and I was already feeling guilty. “I think you’re super smart and probably the coolest and most interesting person I’ve ever met but like…this is fucked up. This isn’t normal. I don’t know if you’ve told this stuff to anyone else but I think anyone would say you need to go to a doctor of some kind. You already told me it’s making you sick so I think a part of you has to know that you need help.”
She scowled down at the rug in a raincloud of misery. I stood up; I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t know if this old woman would be safe with her but I didn’t want to be there a second longer. “I really care about you,” I mumbled. “Please do what’s best for yourself, and…I don’t know if maybe you hate me now but text me any time, I’m always down to talk.”
I left the house, waiting for a reply from her that wouldn’t present itself. The closest I’d get to a response would be the tinkle of silverware as I opened the door to the sidewalk.
I was home sick with the flu on a crisp Wednesday morning in May when I got a text from my friend Eli that Mr. Umbria had been stabbed in the side of the head with a compass during 3rd period AP Geometry and that classes were cancelled for the rest of the day and maybe the rest of the week. Immediately I felt responsible because immediately I knew Josette had done it and I felt as though I hadn’t tried hard enough to help her.
I cried for a little bit, my guts roiling with sickness and guilt, and then I fell asleep. When I woke up I was feeling less nauseous and needed something to distract myself with, if only superficially, so I opened my laptop. I had a new email; it was sent via a file sharing service, although when I clicked the link to the download page I saw that the file wasn’t particularly large. It was sent from an email address composed of a gibberish sequence of letters and numbers; normally I would have written it off as a clumsy spyware trap sent by some Ukrainian grifter but today I knew it was from Josette. She’d likely made a proxy address of some kind just so whatever she’d sent me would be harder to trace back to her.
I opened the download; she had written me a letter. I couldn’t find a date on it but I figured it had to be from last night.
hey friend!!!
so i know i freaked you out a little last time we really talked and i also know you’ve been mad at me for not eating with you at lunch or hanging out with you after school or really seeing you or talking to you at all and i’m super sorry about that. i’ve been in a bad place. so i just wanted to send you this and let you know whats up and hopefully make a little more sense of how i’ve been acting? plese forgive the lack of capitalization and Tumbr-y use of punctuation, im writing this as fast as i can bc im not sure how much longer ill have the faculties to put this stuff into words (it’ll make sense later)
idk u will probably still think i am fuckin crazy after you read this but i did see that little glimmer of belief in your eyes even when you were telling me i shoulda gotten help. fear’s the best path to belief imo
anyway
when i first heard the Call i was really young, like i think 5 or 6 years old. it was like a week or 2 after my grandmas funeral and my mom had come home with her ashes in this nice little blue china urn. she left it on the end table for a minute to go do something and my dog from back then, a big boxer mutt named Swooper, knocked it all over the floor bc his tail was waggin too hard. so her ashes were sunk real thick in the carpet and Swooper started lappin it up with his tongue and trying to pull it out of the fabric with his teeth bc dogs are fuckin dumb and theyll eat anything.
grandma smelled horrible but i thought maybe Swooper knew something i didnt so i got on my hands and knees and started eatin too. the taste was wretched. my mom came back in the room and flipped a shit. she smacked me hard across the face and sent me to my room and put Swooper outside for the rest of the day (that was the one time in my life that my mom ever hit me jsyk).
im not sure abt you but when i was little my dreams and nightmares were way way more vivid than they are now. even with that in mind, even having had a relatively comprehensive grasp on the difference between dream and reality (for a little kid), this was something different. that night i heard my grandma talking. and it was this really spooky non-language i was hearing. like if u can imagine a language thats spoken only in tone, made from little inflections and interruptions that sound like words but aren’t comprehensible as words, thats what this was. the voice would bounce in and out of my range of hearing like the words were little rubber balls. and the tone itself was the scariest part bc it didnt sound like grandma, it didnt talk how she talked. it was like the sound of her voice but it sounded disappointed and mocking in a way grandma never did. and it was so, so quiet. i started crying and when i cried i heard the voice make a formless laugh, like a laugh without consonants. i had nightmares abt that voice for years afterwords but that wasn’t a nightmare. that was a ghost. its hard to explain the difference between a real supernatural experience and a nightmare or a hallucination but theyre as different from each other as hearing the voice coming from the person sitting next to you and hearing a voice on a podcast. you just know.
nothing like that really happened again for a long time, probably bc i didn’t eat anyones ashes again for a long time lmao. then when i was 10 me and my family went to Yosemite for a big reunion type thing. the place was this big estate that was kinda next to a lake but it was one of those estates where the rich butthole that owns it wants to seem like they have taste so they make it a bunch of boring rectangles and rhombuses and weird grey glass cubes instead of a normal Richie Rich mansion like everyone actually wants.
the reunion itself sucked, it was one of those things where all these adults you dont know are trying to talk to you like youve known each other since Way Back When and havent spoken in years when really you just don’t fuckin care bc why would you? and all the kids are dressed kinda formal and have bad personalities and no one will share their DS with you. everyone under 15 seemed real put upon and i didnt want to talk to any of em.
so obvs i got bored and while everyone was getting shitfaced at the lake of the beach i started poking around the house. whoever owned the place (it was an aunt or something i dont remember) had a doberman named Max and he was like the nicest dog ever. i would just race him down the weird angular halls and since there was no one else in the place we could just crash into each other and bump into walls and no one told us to slow down or knock it off. it was easily the most fun i had at that whole place.
i bring Max up bc i think dogs have something to do with the paranormal stuff i get into. they always seem to lead me towards it some way or another. during one of our more rambunctious races i tripped and fell over him in the living room. i looked up and found myself in front of the fireplace. there was a ledge above it with a framed black-and-white photo of a woman, probably taken in the ‘30s judging from the coif of her hair (altho what do i know lol) and next to it, RIGHT FUCKIN NEXT TO IT there was a blue china urn. im not sure if it was exactly the same as the kind my grandma was held in but to my 10 year old eyes it looked totally identical.
i stood up and i picked it off the shelf. Max started jumping at my hands bc he was still in a playing mood but i held the urn tight. i opened the lid and looked into it. the ashes looked the same as my grandmas bc all ashes look the same but i wondered if maybe it would taste the same too?? so i looked around to see if anyone was coming in and when i saw i was still alone i stuck my finger in and tasted it, and then i gave it to Max so he could have a lick too. i never learned who that woman was but i had a few more laps and then i put her back on the shelf.
something occurred to me. i went back to where the party was happening down by the lake. everyone was dead drunk at this point. i found my mom and told her i was going to go explore the woods for a little while. she slurred that she didn’t want me to go too far. it was dark bc the sun was going down but i could tell from the glint of her eyes that they were barely in focus. maybe it wasn’t fair of me, its not like she drank all the time or anything, but i was disgusted. i felt this big black ball-and-chain of contempt for the ways of man wrap around my heart and i’ve never been able to shake it all the way loose ever since.
anyway, i went into the woods, not terribly far but aways enough so that i couldnt hear the party. i found a smooth boulder on a slight incline and i sat down on it. the trees blocked what little remained of the sun. the pattering and flickering of animal feet and insect wings at varying distances had a symphonic effect and where normally they would have spooked me tonight they put me at ease. i let my body relax and i waited.
when the dark fell completely i looked straight up. a faded silver cloak began to drift downward as if let go from the tops of the trees. it stayed fuzzy, like waves of vapor on a hot day, and no matter how far it fell past the trees it stayed small; i could see it passing branches as it came towards me but it never took up increasing space in my line of sight like something is supposed to do when its coming closer to you. i reached up to touch it and let it fold over my fingers and a cool breeze slipped across my palm and the cloak vanished. satisfied, i went back to the party with this little initiation into the true cosmogony of things skittering in secret around my heart. it was better than a first kiss.
i realized i was in possession of a special gift that no one else had (or if they did they were keeping pretty quiet about it). there was still so much i didnt know and as i got older these questions began to articulate themselves in more precise ways: was i inviting communication with spirits or simply observing behaviors without playing a meaningful part in them? is there an ethical line between the living and dead that shouldnt be crossed not out of some doofy fear of Black Magic or w/e but out of respect for the privacy of the souls themselves? is real communication even possible when language (like everything) is constrained by time and time has no meaning once a person stops having a body beholden to its whims? i started thinking about all this later. at that time all i knew was i needed to see more of this stuff to even know what exactly i was doing.
opportunities were few and far between when i was very young and so for a while the visions left me. i went to the graveyard and swallowed some of the dirt around the tombstones every so often but it didn’t have any effect. i tried to will myself into lucid dreaming and sometimes that worked as far as it went but like i said the difference between a vivid dream and seeing an actual ghost is like the difference between a vase of flowers and a still life painting. i even applied for an internship at the local mortuary but they didnt take me (tbh i dont think any mortuary worth its salt would trust any 12 year old who wanted to be around dead bodies all day lmao). this was about the time i started getting really into my moms religion books out of sheer desperation. if i couldnt go straight to the source of the universe i felt i had to at least scour for clues as to its true nature.
finally in 8th grade i had the idea of volunteering to be a caregiver. i saw a lil flyer in the office advertising some service for the elderly in exchange for college credit and i signed up on the spot. most of the people i helped were really happy to have a young woman around to give the house a lil youthful energy. meanwhile all i was concerned with was death. ironic!!! i think. anyhow the idea worked. it turns out elders keep pots full of their spouses and pets around almost uniformly. most of my cases were widows and widowers but sometimes when i got a married couple that needed help they’d still have an urn on display for one of their brothers or sisters.
the work itself was quietly unenjoyable. old people suck. even the ones who seemed nice and cute at first all ended up being racist or fucked up in some way. ive had to wipe a vile disgusting putrid concave human ass free of its shit on more than one occasion. one man would discharge ~mystery fluids~ down his pants leg as he walked without noticing. i had to trail behind him and clean it up like i was holding the train of a grotesque wedding dress. i started to think that maybe the reason so many of them kept the urns in plain sight was something beyond commemorative sentiment. maybe they were proud of their dead kin. perhaps subconsciously envious.
the upside to this revolting job was that their withered malfunctioning bodies, once minimally provided for, were easy to keep out of my way while i did my research. it was as easy as feeding them chowder and turning the tv on most of the time. and i never felt i was being disrespectful to the dead that i consumed; if anything i was putting them to better use than their guardians ever would. i mentioned to you that i never “seasoned” the ashes at all because to me that would be disrespectful and anyway that might interfere with something in the communication process.
at first it was like the two times i’d done it before: i would have a little scoop of ash and then i’d have to wait a few hours and be in a dark quiet area for anything to happen. but after about a year the effects were more vivid and immediate. i remember being in a house and just smelling the ashes of a man’s sister and i heard the sound of a turquoise bell (don’t ask me how i know what color the bell was). it popped a tiny bit in the left ear and then shortened into itself, then it sort of spread to the rest of my cranium and exited through the right ear. i was excited. for the first time it felt like they were talkng to me, not the other way around!! they trusted me! i downed a scoop and turned around and there was this blissful strong silhouette of a soldier sitting in the recliner. his face was an eyeless mouthless mass of light but i could tell he was smiling at me. i think he appreciated that he had a visitor after what maybe felt to him like eons of the silence of death. he vanished quickly but it was an incredibly joyful experience for me. it also proved to be the turning point.
ghosts would come to me stronger and faster and not always right before or after i had their ashes. i was down by our little town lake once and i saw a velvet gossamer shape that reached from shore to shore ripple underneath the waves. i saw the smoke form of an infant boy dancing between geese in a flock as they flew south for the winter. once when i was lying awake in my room a pair of white hands drifted through my door, each one holding an apple. i ate the one from the left hand and refused the one from the right. it was unthinkably sweet, like marshmallow foam.
these were all pleasant if not downright beautiful instances but they soon became the exception to the rule and in fact the reason i write this to you now is that i am still experiencing the death world but in a way that is now as rhythmic and constant as my beating heart and in a way which has become distressing to me and which i no longer welcome.
one night i woke up facing my bedroom wall and there was a set of teeth embedded in it. they were dull cracked smoker’s teeth that glowed with the slime of mistreatment. breath came from behind them, from inside the wall. i turned away and turned back and they were still there. i touched them. they were porous. night turned to day and they didnt disappear. i sleep next to them still. i feel the wall’s breath on my neck every night. the teeth dont talk but i wish they would. they would scare me less if theyd just say something.
at some juncture that i failed to spot or prepare for the entire living world cracked in my vision. now i see veins on the outside of my mother’s cheeks. there’s a scalpless hunchback at the side of our school. he claws at the ground like a dog trying to bury a bone and screams all day long. i dont think anything told him he doesnt have a body anymore. every car smells like a corpse. i am privy to open wounds in the fabric of nothing that bleed pure night and i dont dare go near them or look at them for too long. i would tell you where they are but you may be safer not knowing.
ive trained myself to cope but i can dislocate my senses from only so much of this. nor would i ever wish to separate myself from these spirit materials entirely. i have gained valuable insights from many of them. for instance: mr umbria has the skin and tongue of a komodo dragon. he sends mosquitoes to drain sleeping girls’ souls when the stars go down. he is not who he says he is and you should not trust him or in fact be near him at all if you can help it.
but do you want to know what i have observed about you? you talk in the frequency of mist. sometimes your eyes switch places when you have a big idea. you are beautiful. this is why for my own selfish reasons i wanted to initiate you into this world of mine, so i could have a friend who i knew would understand. but as you can probably guess i dont think you would have liked it very much. i ask your forgiveness but i dont feel entitled to it.
im not at a point where i feel as though i can just stop eating the ashes and see what happens, as much as that might seem like the obvious and reasonable thing to do right now. it seems as though im at a point where i can sense the truth but it isnt coming in strong enough to be coherent; its like that ugly sound the radio makes when the signals strong enough to be more than static but too weak for you to really hear the music. i cant stay like this much longer and i have to believe im on the verge of a sensory breakthrough. and even if i stopped now i would never want the ghosts to leave completely. i can’t go back to the way it was. as painful as this all can be i’d rather see in the most violent shade of red than go colorblind.
i hear a sound like nails hitting a wood floor with each keystroke and the corner of the screen is starting to curdle. someones peering up at me from under my shoes. i cant write too much more. i dont know if we’ll ever really talk again. think of this as an apology and also as kind of a last will and testament for my normal existence in this world. i hope you have a good life. the secret of the call is now your inheritance if you should choose to claim it.
bye
I deleted the email and the file, but not before I printed the letter out, stapled it together and put it in a shoebox in my closet. I wondered if maybe I’d learned nothing from her story, keeping things around like this.
I’d take the specifics of what she told me to my grave, but everyone knew me and Josette were close, and the kids at school, probably the cops too, would want to know if she had been acting strange before she attacked Mr. Umbria. I’d have to lie and tell them yes, she had, and as I did so I would have to dream of a perfect world where knowledge didn’t turn you insane, where the senses didn’t become dangerous when acted upon. The truth that I could never tell any of them would be that there was nothing strange at all about trying to live in a world like that.