Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones

by Micah Dean Hicks

“Other people have left and been fine. What about Meghan? Didn’t she get a scholarship to some big school in Texas? I think she wanted to be an engineer.”

  The counselor shrugged. “You’re not Meghan, are you?”

  Henry looked down at the desk, feeling embarrassed for coming, as if he’d done something wrong by even asking about schools. No, he wasn’t Meghan. He didn’t need Jane’s telepathy to understand why.

  “Of course, you’re only in tenth grade,” Bradford said. “There’s still plenty of time. You might think about community college once you’re ready for it, but honestly, I think your best bet would be to do maintenance work for Pig City. After this internship, I’m sure they’d hire you.”

  Henry glanced at a university brochure on the desk, photos of machines wrought in silicone, aluminum, and industrial plastics. The glasses-covered eyes of kids like him, slender-armed and heavy-headed, bending together over a computer terminal. This was where he wanted to be, away from his claustrophobic house, the family he couldn’t fix with electricity or metal.

  “Thanks.” Henry left the brochure where it lay and stood up. “I’ll think about that.”

  All four grades of the high school were sent to lunch at the same time. When all the students were in one place, the school didn’t seem so small. But everyone knew that enrollment was down each year, that they were laying off teachers, moving some students ahead and holding others back just to have full classrooms. The principal had said there would be no need for a school in twenty years, because only the old would be left in the town, and only because they had nowhere else to go.

  The cafeteria tile was blotted with inky stains on the grout. Many seats at the long tables were broken, so students shared or ate standing by the windows. Henry was swept up in the spiraling line, his classmates’ voices mixing into a roar that sounded more like wind or water than speech.

  Bethany came out of the lunch line balancing a tray on each hand. In a tank-top, the curved swell of her shoulders and biceps fit together like articulated plates of medieval armor. Her long braid swung like a flail. She was all quiet power, something like a bolt of lightning slowed down in midstrike.

  Henry had been in love with her at first, pathetically so, a problem his ghost couldn’t help him with. But he’d soon learned that Bethany had no interest in him or any other boy. Her focus was singular. Where Henry wanted to make amazing machines, Bethany’s sole work was herself. But in a school filled with the strange, they were the strangest two of all. Apart from his sister, Bethany was the only friend he had.

  “You were gone a long time,” she said. “Were you working on that thing we talked about?”

  Bethany hadn’t been able to leave town in the last three years. Her hundreds of ghosts wrapped her wrist and ankle, twining their dead fingers around her limbs, keeping her from leaving Swine Hill. They needed her to win. Unless she found a way to break loose from them, she’d spend the rest of her life in the ruins of the town, running and shooting baskets for the spirits living through her.

  It wasn’t a hard problem to solve. Henry had told her what she needed to do. She had to start throwing games. Lose on purpose. It might take years, but with every defeat, more of the ghosts would bleed away. That was the only way she could make it out. Bethany had told him to come up with something else.

  “Nothing new on that,” he said. “Sorry. I was working on a project for Pig City.”

  The students near Henry turned to stare when he mentioned the pig plant. Those who weren’t leaving were hoping for a job there. No matter how brutal it was, it paid better than anything around. They’d pinned their every hope on it. Henry hunched his shoulders, sank into his baggy shirt, and lowered his voice. Being noticed too much was dangerous. It was one of the hard things about being friends with Bethany. She couldn’t help but draw attention to herself, wasn’t afraid to claim things that other people thought were rightfully theirs.

  “I’m going to the weight room,” Bethany said. “See you at the game later?”

  Henry nodded.

  After making it through the line, he found an empty seat near a group of towering senior boys. They all had after-school or weekend jobs at the plant. They were talking about the pig man.

  One of the boys had been hoping his father would be promoted to plant manager. They needed the extra money so he and his sisters could move out of state. Now he might be stuck here.

  Another said that the pig man asked strange questions. One day he’d walked onto the butchering floor, waved his scarred hand at the pig carcasses and the men carving them up, and asked, “Why are we doing all this?” He didn’t seem upset, just confused.

  If pigs could work, would the plant lay people off? they wondered. It hadn’t happened in a long time, but now anything seemed possible.

  “How does a pig turn into a person?” one of them asked.

  Henry kept his eyes on his food, but he could feel them staring at him. Finally, he got up and dumped his tray, keeping his sandwich and walking out of the cafeteria with it.

  Clumps of students lounged on picnic tables and derelict staircases. It was loud here too, people making petty drama and arguing about love, doing anything but thinking of work or family, the ghosts and problems that began at the border of three o’clock.

  The counselor had said that Henry was fixing a worker satisfaction problem. Surely he had only been trying to make people happy. The whole town was small-minded, quick to worry. The pig man couldn’t be that bad.

  Henry walked toward the weight room to find Bethany. He passed behind the cafeteria, alongside the fence that divided the school from the surrounding abandoned streets. There was a line of dumpsters here, overflowing with trash.

  A man perched on the edge of a dumpster. He wore a tattered jacket, the ends of it shredded from catching on fence wire. His face was an overlapping pattern of scars. Imprinted on the man’s skin, as if he were made of clay, were handprints, the impression of lips and teeth, caresses mapped onto him in bright burn scars. It was his father.

  Henry resisted the urge to run. He felt an unexpected grief. He wanted to help, to do something selfless, to prove that he wasn’t so different from his sister. He extended his hand, holding out the half-eaten sandwich, and forced himself to take a step forward.

  The burned man dropped onto the pavement and vaulted the fence, loping off into the quiet streets. He was gone at once, like a deer slipping between trees.

  Henry pulled out his phone and texted Jane. I just saw Dad.

  How was he?

  He sat down and ate his sandwich, typing and deleting the message several times, not sure what to say. Better than usual.

  * * *

  The bell rang, but Henry didn’t feel like facing his classmates. Word would have spread that he’d been at the pig plant all spring, that he was connected somehow to the pig man. They would want to know why he had done it. He wanted to know himself.

  He found a set of double doors chained shut and, pulling them wide, was able to slip between. They opened into a stairwell, which Henry climbed to the third floor.

  The sunlight coming in from the sooty windows had a gray cast. The floor was spongy with rotten carpet, fallen insulation, and shredded paper. Panels of drywall had been ripped away from the walls, exposing wires and pipes.

  He passed a closed classroom door and looked inside. The room was full of students, as pale and insubstantial as smoke. A knot of them surrounded a girl in the middle of the room, holding her down. The ghost girl yelled with an airless, soundless voice. Something horrible had happened here, was still happening. One of the students turned and met eyes with Henry through the glass. She gestured for him to open the door, to come in. She opened her lips and mouthed, Help.

  Henry hurried away, his steps the only sound on the floor. Down the hall, he leaned against the window to catch his breath. The glass was broken here, giving him a clear view of the Pig City meatpacking plant sitting turret-like on its plateau.

  He found
an old drama room and went inside, hoping to find somewhere to sit. He froze in midstride. There was a girl on stage.

  She was tall and long-limbed, with an explosion of curly hair hanging over her face. The girl moved through a dance routine, watching her feet and silently counting out the steps. Her bare feet hit the old stage with a quiet slap. The bright trickling of a piano played, from where Henry wasn’t sure.

  He didn’t know her, but he didn’t pay much attention to people. She might be an upperclassman.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t think anyone was up here.”

  She focused on her dance, brows knit in irritation. “Why are you here?”

  Henry sat down in a stray chair, coating his back in dust. “Cutting class. Trying to remember what my ghost made me do.”

  She kept going through the patterns of her steps, drawing lines in the air with her hands and feet. “Do you always blame your ghost when you do something?”

  “It’s not like that. I give my ghost a problem, and it takes control of me to solve it. We’re a team. Usually, it’s great. But I think it might have made a mistake this time.”

  “If you’re a team, why did you say that it made a mistake?”

  “I guess that’s fair,” he said.

  Why did she seem upset that he’d called the ghost an it? They were always called it, never he or she. He’d been told that ever since he was a boy, ever since he’d become old enough to tell the difference between the living and the unquiet dead. Every child in Swine Hill was taught that. Ghosts were not people; they were things. Selfish and unchanging. Refusing to leave when their time had run out. To think of them as people was to owe them love and loyalty, to doom yourself to staying in Swine Hill forever, living out someone else’s past.

  The room was uncomfortably warm, stuffy and close. She extended a hand toward him. “Come here. I need a partner for this next bit. I can show you the steps.”

  Henry had never danced before. Jane had tried to teach him once. He’d seen people do it on TV, and it always seemed like a foreign language, something that neither he nor his ghost could decode. But there was no one here to see him but the girl. And her hand was out, waiting. He went to her.

  Climbing onto the stage, Henry noticed a wooden cabinet lying against the wall. It was black with mold and rotten through. Yellowed chips spilled out of it, piling on the old carpet. Piano keys. The bones of a piano. The music came from it.

  The girl spun toward him over the stage. The heavy dust lying on the wood was smooth and undisturbed under her feet. Henry was inches away from taking her hand, his fingers almost in hers, when he dropped from the stage and backed away.

  “You’re dead.”

  She stared fire at him, her hands balled into fists. “Am I an it, too? Come here. You said you and your ghost were a team. Be on my team for a while. I can’t finish my dance alone.”

  He could feel it now, an aura of violence and frustration coming off the stage like wind. Whatever this girl wanted, she wanted badly. It would probably hurt. He might not survive it.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t.” He went to the door, feeling like an idiot. It was his headache, his exhaustion. He wouldn’t have been so stupid if he’d been more awake.

  “You’re useless,” she said. “No wonder your ghost picked you. He never helped anyone either.”

  Henry stopped at the edge of the room. He knew next to nothing about the spirit that haunted him, but he’d always been curious. “You knew my ghost?”

  She was back to dancing now, the piano playing fast and loud. She beckoned to him as she twirled. “Come up here and take my hand. I’ll tell you all about him.”

  Henry left the room and shut the door on the ghost girl. Why should he care what kind of person his ghost had been when it was alive? It helped him. That was all that mattered now.

  He sighed. If Jane was here, she would say, That’s what you want to believe.

  * * *

  He got some headache medicine from the office and slept through his last few classes. The school didn’t have a dedicated computer lab, but the yearbook room had several computers. At the end of the day, he picked the lock on the door and let himself in.

  Once, the yearbook teacher had found him here, Henry in the midst of cleaning up and repairing the old desktops just to have something to do. She told him that he wasn’t supposed to be there, but she hadn’t turned him in or asked him to leave.

  The yearbook teacher, Ms. Miller, had the unpopular idea that the pig plant was the source of all the town’s problems. Instead of producing a yearbook, she sent her students to photograph polluted streams and pig bones dredged from the river, did interviews with workers who’d lost limbs working there, made updated maps of the growing downtown and its army of furious ghosts. She told her students that one day she would have proof that something was wrong.

  Henry didn’t know why she bothered. It was clear that things weren’t okay here. Just telling people wouldn’t fix anything. Something big would have to change, not just in Swine Hill, but in the world. Henry wanted to be that change.

  Jane texted that she had to work all afternoon, so Henry would have to stay at school until the basketball game later. Unless he wanted to walk home, and he didn’t. There were too many angry people around the town, resentful and bored. Cars loaded full with older kids. Bitter men and women sitting out on their porches. Cops roving in their aging cruisers. And there were always the ghosts, so desperate to find someone they could see themselves in. Henry stuck out too much. It was best not to be caught alone.

  He defragged and ran virus scanners on the desktops. One wouldn’t boot until he reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled the OS. Some ghost had probably found its way onto the drive, wandering through old .jpegs and .mp3s, looking for the life it had lost.

  He laid his head on his arms, listening to the whine of the computers getting hot with use. His phone buzzed, clattering over the desk and dropping into his lap. The screen read WALTER HOGBOSS. The number was already in his contacts. He hadn’t thought to check. He answered the phone and raised it to his ear, afraid of whatever was coming next.

  “Hello?”

  “Henry.” The voice was cavern deep. “Your modified pig project is right on schedule. If things go well, Corporate would like to send you to some of their plants in Kentucky and Iowa.”

  “I don’t remember you. Can you tell me what happened?”

  There was a moment of silence on the line, then breath searing into the receiver. “You sound sad, Henry. How can I help?”

  “People are nervous about you. Did anyone see us together?”

  “Workers at the plant saw you come and go for months, working alone in one of the labs. One day, you stopped coming, and I put on my uniform and walked out. I haven’t said anything, but people have suspicions, as you can imagine.”

  This wasn’t helping him. He paced, the hardwood floor creaking softly under his feet. “When my ghost takes control, there’s always a specific problem I’m working on. I need to know why I did this.”

  “You didn’t say much while you were working on me. At first I didn’t understand what you were doing. Sedating me, cutting into my muscles and bones, stitching me back together. Operating on my brain and feeding me hormones. It hurt, Henry. I’m grateful for it now. But it hurt so much.”

  He thought again of his sheets, blood-soaked. The dark stains crusted under his fingernails. He groped through the fog of memory, trying again to latch on to the last moment, the last few days before his ghost took him, body and mind. Frustrated, he spoke directly to the silent ghost lying cold at the bottom of him, putting the problem into terms it would understand. How are memories stored?

  The ghost barely moved at so simple a question, but it gave him something. A whirlwind of images. Henry in the kitchen while his sister washed dishes and listened to the radio. The lot behind the cafeteria where his father balanced on the edge of the dumpster. Henry in the attic, watching an old man fix a VCR, not k
nowing until much later that the man was a ghost. Memory was spatial, strongly activated by place.

  “Is everything okay, Henry?”

  “I need to visit the plant.”

  “That can be arranged.” The pig man rumbled in his throat, sounding pained. “Henry, there was another reason I called you. Everything is so confusing and different now. I have questions.”

  “Okay.”

  In the quiet of the yearbook room, with all the teachers and students gone for the day, Hogboss began to ask, “What are chocolate Swiss rolls? How are they butchered? Are there pigs everywhere, or only here? Can I get inside the television? Can people in the television get out? Where do ghosts come from?”

  “Cake is made, not butchered,” Henry said.

  “Like I was made? Does that mean I can’t be butchered?”

  “I don’t know. Pigs are different from cake.”

  “Do butchered pigs have ghosts?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m not sure.”

  “Does it hurt the pigs when they’re butchered? Is it okay for a pig to eat another pig? Are only pigs for butchering, or other things as well? What about people? Are they ever butchered?”

  Henry did his best to answer, his head heavy and throbbing. They talked this way for almost an hour, at the end Henry just repeating, “Sorry. I don’t know.”

  * * *

  The game was poorly attended. The home side of the bleachers was so full of ghosts that it was unusable. They weren’t strong spirits, their attachment tenuous, the sort that would vanish during the day. But this late in the evening, they rose in the stands, a forest of overlapping bodies and waving arms. Voicelessly, they called out the names of family and friends who had left Swine Hill long ago.

  On the visiting team side, there was only one ghost. The specter of a girl sat far in the back corner, holding her knees and muttering. If anyone had come close to her, they would have heard her threatening to kill herself in front of everybody. Her pain rooted her so firmly to the town that she didn’t remember that she’d made good on her threat years ago. Far below the ghost girl, a few students and parents sat with the small crowd of visitors, maybe fifteen people all told. There were more players on the court than were in the stands, the gym quiet except for the squeak of sneakers, the hollow drum of the ball thumping the floor, and the static hum of the ghosts.