Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones

by Micah Dean Hicks

  Trigger finished his food and headed for the door, motioning for Jane to follow. He wanted out of the house before his father got angry about him having company.

  They got in the car and buckled their seatbelts without a word. Jane felt tired, wondering if she should have just left him alone. She knew exactly what was in his head, a snarl of frustration and blame, but knowing it only made things harder. She put in a CD of something slow and sad, the singer’s voice burning higher and higher, a rocket of grief.

  She felt her phone buzz and saw that there was a long message from Henry. She skimmed it. Some kids at school had started a fight with Dennis on the bus. Bethany was seeing things or forgetting things. Their father was marking haunted houses. Something about a heart.

  Did you talk to Dad? she wrote back. Does it seem like he’s getting better?

  Trigger radiated frustration, so she put her phone down and pulled out of the driveway.

  “Everything okay?” she asked.

  “Can’t you just read my mind? Don’t you know already?”

  “Sure, if you want. You don’t like Hogboss being in charge of you at work. You’re overwhelmed by how different everything feels without your ghost. You’re exhausted from your dad asking you questions. And because you can’t be angry at anyone else, you’re being a dick to me. How’s that?”

  His frustration collapsed into guilt. Her ghost grinned huge inside her. Everything was mixed up in her head: the ghost’s pleasure, Trigger’s pain, Jane’s love and hurt. She was glad he felt guilty. Trigger still didn’t understand how much he had taken from Henry, and he’d been cold and thankless to Jane. It felt good to make him sting, even if she felt gross for enjoying it so much. She focused on the music, trying to separate the ghost’s feelings from her own.

  “It’s fine,” Jane said. “It must be really hard to have everything change.”

  “I’m grateful. I promise I am. It’s just a lot to get used to. I never thought I deserved a second chance.”

  His mind buzzed with self-loathing, a swarm of winged and fast-beating thoughts that covered up her own image of him—shy and careful, eyes down and smiling, cautious like he might scare her away. Having to see him as he saw himself made it harder to love him. She was irritated with him for being sad, and angry at herself for feeling so. Her ghost spread as wide as night in the space between them.

  “You’re getting a second chance anyway,” Jane said.

  She drove them a little south of downtown. On the way, they passed the gray shell of the grocery store. One of the front windows was shattered. Someone must have broken in to scavenge whatever canned and boxed goods hadn’t sold.

  Trigger squeezed her leg in apology. “Where are we going?”

  “To get you fitted for a tux.”

  He’s wondering if someone died.

  Jane let him wonder.

  At a rundown strip mall, Jane parked in front of Rae’s Bridal, between a taxidermist shop that had closed years ago and a hardware store only open on the weekends.

  Trigger followed her to the door, eyeing the white dresses stretched over the yellowed mannequins in the window. “Are we getting married?”

  “Is that your proposal?”

  He struggled to speak, terrified that she knew what he was thinking as soon as he did.

  She kissed him, laughing softly into his neck. “No, we’re not getting married. Let’s hurry. Hogboss gave me a shift this afternoon, and I can’t miss it.”

  The shop was narrow and dark. Aside from the owner sitting behind the register, it was only the two of them in the store, but it felt crowded. Old mannequins missing limbs and scuffed of paint stood along the wall and between the racks of clothes, all of them in tuxedos and gowns. It was like they had walked into a silent party, as formal and still as a cemetery.

  “He needs to be measured for a rental tux,” Jane said. “We’re going to prom.”

  The owner came around to measure him. Trigger stood stiffly, arms out. “Aren’t we too old for that?” he asked.

  “The school wants me to DJ again this year. You can help me carry speakers and set up. We might even have time for a dance.”

  The ghost brought her a sunburst of joy from Trigger. Even he didn’t know why the idea made him so happy.

  Mirrors covered the walls, but the light was bad, making everything murky and dark. Jane held a blue gown against her chest and stepped right up to the mirror, but the face that looked back wasn’t hers. The girl in the mirror was white-skinned, blue-eyed, smirking.

  The ghost of a young girl had gotten trapped in the mirrors of the bridal shop. When Jane tried to look at herself, she saw the reflection of the ghost instead, wearing her clothes and posing as she did.

  “What a needy little thing,” Jane said.

  The owner frowned at her, and Jane wondered if the ghost was a relative. It must be, otherwise the woman would have smashed the mirrors to be rid of it by now. She stared into the ghost girl’s eyes and watched it clutch the dress tighter, pulling it back into the depths of the mirror. Jane felt the dress tighten in her hands, like something was trying to take it from her. She stepped away from the reflection.

  The owner rang them up. The dress she wanted—not a rental, but Jane planned on returning it—was more expensive than she had realized. Jane opened her wallet and saw that she was ten short. The plant still hadn’t processed her first paycheck, and who knew if she would ever get her last check from the grocery store. Her mother would need money for bills, and there was always something wrong with the car. She stared into her wallet, wondering if there was a cheaper dress or if she could just make do with something she had at home.

  Trigger counted out the bills and paid for them both.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’ll pay you back.”

  “It’s fine.” He shrugged. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere.”

  She felt something go tight in her chest, not wanting to say it but feeling like she had to. “You could, though. Now that your ghost is gone, I mean. You could get out of Swine Hill and find somewhere better.”

  He took the suit from the clerk, glancing toward the dusty windows and the rundown neighborhood outside. “Maybe someday. I still have people I care about here, though. I can’t just leave them.”

  Jane nodded, neither of them looking at each other. It wasn’t the best thing for him, but she was glad he was staying. She wanted to go eventually, but for now, so many things tied her to the town. Just getting the money to leave felt almost impossible. When Henry graduated. When her father came back to himself. Maybe then. At least while she waited, she would have Trigger. She squeezed his hand.

  He’s not just staying for you.

  Jane tried to keep the irritation off her face. She knew that. His father was here. Maybe he had other family in town, aunts and uncles. She still didn’t know him as well as she wanted to. It was hard to imagine him sitting down with relatives at Thanksgiving, harder to imagine her sitting beside him. What kind of future did they really have here?

  You still don’t understand. He won’t go because he thinks his brother’s ghost might come back.

  As they left, Jane looked back to see the owner staring into a hand mirror and combing her hair, no doubt looking into the eyes of some lost sister or daughter or friend. Jane felt her own ghost heavy around her neck. Trigger and Henry were both obsessed with spirits that had already left them. Across Swine Hill, the dead reached up from the earth, bony fingers tight around the ankles of everyone in town. What would it take to break their grip?

  * * *

  When she got to the plant, Jane went to the payroll office to pick up her check. It wasn’t much, about the same as she had made at the grocery store, but better than not having a job at all. Looking over her pay stub, Jane saw that her job title was listed as “Pig.” Hogboss had said they weren’t hiring any new human workers. He must have lied on her paperwork so that Corporate would okay the job.

  There were a dozen working screens i
n the security room now. Jane turned the lights off and swiveled back and forth in her chair, submerged in the glow of monitors. She’d found an old boom box and set it up under the desk, filling the room with crackling, tinny sound. Her ghost couldn’t read people as clearly through the video feeds, but it could pick up a few things, worries and fears that were written right on their faces. It sent Jane an unending stream of heartache and bitterness, soaking up their secret thoughts.

  There was a crew of boys who worked packing the cut meat with gloved hands and hairnets, shifting from leg to leg in the chill of the cooler. They were the ones who’d tried to hurt Henry and Dennis. Their faces were bruised and swollen, all of them marked from the fight. They were angry, wanted to get even with Bethany. As they grabbed bloody chunks of meat and slapped them down on Styrofoam trays, violent fantasies curled through them like thorns. They imagined Bethany on her knees, begging. When one of the pig workers walked through the room with a clipboard, they imagined throwing him down on the floor and hacking him to pieces. One of the boys thought of Jane’s brother standing with Dennis at school. She changed the monitor to a different feed.

  After flipping through cameras for a while, Jane rewound footage until she saw Trigger and his father, insulated in their heavy suits, spraying the empty workrooms of the plant down with corrosive foam. His father was hollowed out, struck with the new loss of his son, while Trigger was ashamed that he was so happy to have his ghost gone. Their minds blew about, as light and skeletal as dead leaves.

  On another monitor, she saw night footage of a crowd of ghosts surrounding an antique grinder. A ghostly man had gotten caught in the machine up to his shoulder. The others stood around him, shouting and shoving, cigarettes falling from their mouths. She knew that they would argue and wail until the man’s blood muddied their shoes, until he finally passed out. Then the ghosts would take their knives and cut him out of the machine. They would lay him down on the floor, and then the whole scene would dissolve into cigarette smoke and fog, waiting to repeat itself tomorrow.

  Someone knocked on the door and wheeled in a stack of new monitors and cables. Jane spent a few hours hooking it all up, letting her ghost feel out whether there were spirits trapped in any piece of the equipment. Crawling around behind the desk, she fished out an old piece of coaxial cable with her hands and saw that it had been cut in half. Several cables had been severed, and a full bank of monitors smelled burned.

  Your brother was here every day for months. He must have cut the cables so no one would know what he was doing. What else has he been hiding from you?

  “His ghost had control of him.”

  His ghost helped him do what he wanted to do. The same as you and me.

  Jane replaced the damaged parts and switched on the new bank of monitors. Security cameras in the farthest corners of the plant sent her their bright data. After a few moments of static, the screens cleared. Jane looked upon a world of pigs.

  One entire warehouse was full of bunk beds and cubicle space. Hundreds of pig men, women, and children lounged or sat in circles on the floor, wrinkling their snouts at the stale air. Another feed showed her pig people working in a slaughterhouse, carving up meat and sending it down the line to be packed. A single wall separated the human packers from the pig butchers. Everyone knew that there were pigs living in town and working at the plant. At most, Jane thought there were a dozen families. But there were far more than anyone knew, packed into the cavernous spaces of the plant like refugees, watching from unlit catwalks, all of them waiting for their turn to emerge from the plant at night and find a home for themselves in the town below.

  She texted Henry a picture of the monitor, asking, Did you know?

  He didn’t answer.

  “Maybe he thinks that if they come down gradually, a few at a time, people will get used to it.”

  He’s wrong.

  She saw one of the pigs cut her hand and drop to the floor. A more senior pig came over and yelled at her, throwing a clipboard on the ground.

  Hogboss won’t let them leave until he’s sure they’re ready. Her mistake means that this group will spend another month here at least.

  Jane watched the pigs for a while, as if watching some alternate reality where humans never existed. Looking back to the other monitors, she saw her mother in one of the pig houses. She was on her knees near one of the stalls, her arm draped over the side. The pigs clustered close, overfed and crusted in shit, nosing and nipping at her hand for treats.

  Her mother’s hair was sweat-damp and stuck to her face. Her skin glistened. Jane’s ghost tapped into the raw need and loneliness she was feeling until Jane floated in it, as if her mother was in the same room. The other workers kept their distance, didn’t make eye contact, did everything they could to keep from falling into her beautiful, burning arms.

  “Why is she crying?” Jane asked. “What happened?”

  She didn’t think she could burn him.

  “Him who?”

  Her ghost didn’t answer. Jane could feel it holding something back from her like a weight in her mind.

  The pig woman still clutched her hurt hand on another screen. Jane leaned closer, trying to understand exactly what was going on. Finally, she called Hogboss to the security room.

  When he arrived a few minutes later, he hesitated on the threshold, not entering the room.

  He’s thinking about his neck. He hopes you won’t see.

  “What?” She said it aloud, glancing at the edge of Hogboss’s massive throat where it swooped down to meet his shoulder. There, in the twists of surgical scars from when her brother had molded the old pig into a man, her mother’s bright handprint was seared tenderly into his skin.

  “What the hell is that?” Jane asked.

  He blushed and looked down at his work boots, trying and failing to meet her eyes. “You needed to see me about a security matter?”

  “You have to stay away from my mom.”

  Jane couldn’t keep the revulsion off her face. The thought of her mother tracing Hogboss’s wormlike scars, her lips on his wet snout, her hands pulling at the hairy tail hidden in his work jeans. He was barely a person, if he was one at all.

  Isn’t that what Mason thinks when he sees you with his son?

  “No more.” Jane was so angry with her ghost that she almost shouted the words.

  Hogboss frowned. “Adult love might seem gross to children, but when you’re older, you’ll understand.”

  It took Jane a moment to process that he thought of her as a child, this fusion of pig and man that couldn’t have been walking upright and speaking for more than a few months. What could he possibly know about how complicated and hard it was to love another person?

  Her ghost couldn’t resist showing Jane everything he was thinking. Hogboss’s mind was full of movie reel highlights, classic romance films in grainy black-and-white, chaste and simple and sweet. In the pig’s mind, he envisioned Jane’s mother as a woman in need of saving.

  “Jesus, no. Stop.” She covered her face with her hands. “You have to stay away from her because she’ll kill you. She’s killed every man she’s dated since my dad.”

  “Maybe she just hasn’t met someone strong enough for her.”

  “Are you listening to me? She will burn you to ash. She can’t help herself.”

  “Her touch doesn’t hurt me as much as it does others.”

  “But she still burned you. And it will only get worse, for both of you.”

  “Your mother is a wonderful and kind person. She deserves love no matter how terrible her ghost. You of all people should understand that.”

  “I didn’t call you here so that you could lecture me about my own mother.”

  Jane gestured to the screens behind her. On one monitor, her mother draped herself over the side of the pen, fingers brushing the cement floor of the stall. On another, the pig woman still argued with her supervisor, the white tiles smeared with blood.

  “One of the pig people hurt her
self,” Jane said. “In the secret warehouse you’re hiding from everyone. You should probably do something about that.”

  Jane swiveled around in her chair, turning her back on him. Hogboss left at once, closing the door behind him. She watched the monitors, waiting for his massive shape to appear on her screens. The pig woman was helped into a chair, hand wrapped in a towel, her supervisor and colleagues still cursing her.

  A few minutes later, Hogboss stepped into view, but not in the slaughterhouse. Instead, he approached Jane’s mother and lifted her up from the floor, pulling her against him in a hug. There was a flash of light when she laid her head on his shoulder and her heat passed into him. Hogboss shuddered in pain but held on. The other workers stopped, pig antibiotics dripping from their fingers, and stared at the two of them.

  Jane got up from her chair and walked out of the security room, not wanting to see any more. She hated Henry in that moment, absolutely hated him for making the pigs, for making Hogboss to fall in love with their mother.

  You’re worried he’ll make her happy.

  “After what she did to my dad, what she does to people all the time, she doesn’t deserve happiness.”

  When Henry does something, it’s his ghost’s fault. But when your mother does something, you blame her?

  It wasn’t the same. Her brother didn’t have control of his own body. And Henry had been haunted to begin with because he was curious, inventive, good with machines. Their mother, lonely and afraid that she wasn’t really loved, had been possessed by something that sniffed out the worst parts of her. She might as well have invited the spirit in. How could Jane ever forgive her for that?

  Her ghost didn’t have to point out that she was being unfair. It sat smug in the back of her mind, gloating in the fact that Jane already knew.

  Jane got home and found a pile of bills in the mailbox. She put them on the counter for her mother along with what money she had. Henry was up late in his room, going over Bethany’s lab results and talking to her on the phone. She only saw him for a moment, sunken-eyed when he stumbled into the kitchen to eat a bowl of cereal for dinner. Jane waited on the couch for her mother to come home, but she never did. The robot waited beside her, watching the door.