Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones

by Micah Dean Hicks

  It began to rain outside, and Jane thought of her father wandering somewhere in the dark and wet. She hoped he found a dry place. She closed her eyes and drifted off to the soft sound of water whispering over the roof—

  The front window of the living room exploded.

  Jane started awake, bits of broken glass scattering across her lap. Long fangs of glass covered the carpet in front of her. The robot brushed shards from its shoulder. Their curtains stirred in the wind. Two red taillights burned on the road outside before a truck sped away.

  They’re angry, but they’re mostly afraid.

  “Who?”

  They want you to be afraid too.

  Henry came down the stairs and turned on the light. “What happened?”

  In the midst of the broken glass, Jane found a brick. She picked it up. Someone had written Pig Lovers on all four sides of it.

  “Who were they?” Jane asked her ghost. “Did you get their names?”

  They were gone too fast.

  Jane wondered for a moment if the spirit was lying to her, holding back some small piece of knowledge just for the thrill of keeping it from her. The ghost was silent in her mind, not deigning to respond.

  The robot wheeled itself into the kitchen and came back with a broom and dustpan, but Jane stopped it. “Not yet. Leave it until the police come.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Henry said.

  Jane didn’t either, but she didn’t know what else to do. She was already dialing. A bored voice answered the phone, music playing somewhere in the background. “Is this the police department?” she asked. “Someone just threw a brick through my window.”

  Henry went upstairs to get dressed before the police came. Jane opened the door and looked outside, but her mother’s car was still gone. She might have driven to a nearby town and hit up the bars after work. Her ghost had been burning hot. She’d want to find someone to release all of her heat. Or she might have gone home with Hogboss after her shift. Might be lying in bed with him now. Goddamn her brother. He should have invented something to get rid of her ghost, not something to feed it.

  A few minutes later, strobing blue and red police lights descended on their driveway. They cut through the thin curtain and licked over the living room walls. Jane opened the door, blinking, the brick held out in her hand.

  “I thought it would be you.” The officer smiled at her, blood staining his teeth.

  It was the same man who’d threatened her before. Blood dripped slowly from his ears, stained the hollows under his eyes, clotted in his mustache. It seeped from his scalp and collected thick in his wispy hair. Jane’s ghost injected her with the man’s tightly suppressed rage, flooding her with adrenaline.

  “So this is where you live?” he said. He took in the torn carpet, the stained drywall, every broken and dirty thing. He already had imagined the sort of person Jane was. He hunted for things to confirm it.

  She reached for her phone to text Henry or Trigger or her mother, but the officer took her by the arm and led her inside to the kitchen table, gesturing for her to sit. He sat beside her. When Henry pounded down the stairs a few minutes later, the officer’s hand slipped down to his gun.

  “Is anyone else at home?” the bleeding man asked.

  “Just me and my brother,” Jane said. The robot wheeled over to the table, its eyes widening and looking strangely concerned. “And the robot.”

  The officer pulled a pad of paper and pen from his pocket. Blood matted the pages together, oozing out from under his fingernails. “You consider the robot a person?” he asked.

  “No. Not really.”

  “What about pigs?” the officer asked. “Are they persons?”

  The brick lay in the center of the table, the words Pig Lovers facing her.

  Jane could barely speak, looking at her brother for help. Henry had put on a button-down shirt over jeans, trying to look nice, proper, innocent. He was quiet, trusting her ghost to tell her the right thing to say. But her ghost was balled up deep in her stomach, as scared as she was.

  “Some of them are,” she said. “The ones who wear clothes and work and talk.”

  “Are there any pigs here now?”

  “No,” Henry said. “It’s just us. What does this have to do with someone breaking our window?”

  The cop turned to Henry, droplets of blood falling on the blond wood of the tabletop. “You never know what will end up being helpful later on,” he said. “How would you describe your relationship with the pigs?”

  “We don’t have a relationship with them,” Jane said.

  Don’t contradict him. Her ghost was small and dim, a moth flitting in the back of her mind.

  “You say that they’re people.” He flipped through his pad, peeling the dark pages apart. “Henry has a history of making strange things, like the robot here. He spent quite a bit of time at the plant before the pigs arrived. That little, funny-looking pig that hangs around the school, what’s his name?”

  “Dennis,” Henry said.

  “Dennis has spent some time here at your house, hasn’t he? And your mother was seen getting drinks with Hogboss. So I’ll ask you again. Tell me about your relationship with the pigs.”

  The bleeding man leaned toward her as he spoke, jaw quivering, and more stars of red struck the table until the blood began to pool and run in lines around him. Jane asked her ghost what to say, but it was quiet.

  “We just work with them,” Jane said. “My mom works for Hogboss. Henry worked for him for a while. We do our jobs. We’re not any closer to the pigs than anyone else.”

  The officer picked up the brick and turned it over in his hands. “It looks like some people feel differently.”

  Henry opened his mouth, but Jane kicked him under the table before he could say something that would get them both killed.

  “People are worried the plant will stop hiring now that the pigs are here,” Jane said. “We understand why they’re upset. We’re worried about it too.”

  The cop nodded. He stood, setting the brick back down. “There’s a lot to worry about. The world just doesn’t have much regard for people anymore. If the pigs say anything to you or if they do anything strange, be sure to call and let us know.”

  He walked out of the house, back to his car still spinning its lights in the driveway. He sat there for a long time. Jane worried that he was calling for backup, that other police cruisers would slide neon down their street and surround the house, taking her and Henry both away. Finally he backed into the street and drove off, leaving their living room and kitchen streaked with blood.

  Henry got dishrags from under the sink and they scrubbed at the blood, but it stained everything it touched. It smelled dead. Jane’s ghost rose up in her again. It gave her a quick window into Henry’s thoughts: a ghost haunting a dog, the smell of death, violence, and teeth.

  “Can you at least fix the fucking robot?” Jane asked. “So we’ll have something to protect us in case they don’t just throw a brick next time?”

  “I’m trying. Everything is hard right now.”

  “Things are hard because of you. And don’t tell me you’re going to make it all better. We both know you can’t.”

  Jane could feel her brother’s shock, his chest tighten with hurt and betrayal. Hadn’t she been the one to tell him that he was more than his ghost?

  Before she could apologize, the front door burst open. Jane and Henry fell back against the table, their arms up to shield themselves.

  Their father stood in the light. His clothes were soaked with rain. He seemed confused, like he’d walked into the wrong house.

  “Dad?” Henry asked.

  Jane almost ran to him, thinking he had finally remembered who he was, that he’d come home. But her ghost hadn’t moved when he came in. It curled fetal at the bottom of her, not realizing that someone had walked into the house.

  Their father looked over the two of them, the robot, the inside of the house. He didn’t seem
to recognize anything. He turned and walked back into the dark, leaving the door swinging open behind him.

  They went to the door and watched his silhouette disappear into the night. Jane wanted to chase after him and make him stay, but she was exhausted and afraid. She didn’t have space in her head to worry about him right now.

  “What’s he trying to do?” Henry asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jane said. “If there’s anything in him, my ghost can’t hear it.”

  The spirit welled up in her, having found something heavy in Henry’s mind. He knew more than he was saying. Their father saving him from ghosts. Their father marking houses. A strange heart throbbing in a box on Henry’s desk upstairs. Henry thought he knew what was wrong with their dad, hoped he might even be able to fix him. He hurried upstairs.

  Could he really help without his ghost? If Henry could lead their father out of the cave of his own mind, it would change everything. Her family could be together again. Maybe they could even find a way to help her mother.

  Jane tried to remember the last time her whole family sat together at this table. Beside her, the robot swabbed at the blood, smearing it in a wide, sickle-shaped arc.

  “Where did Henry get a heart?” Jane asked.

  Her ghost stretched within her, listening to her brother working upstairs, every thought he couldn’t hide trickling down to her.

  He doesn’t know where it came from. But he thinks it belongs to your father.

  After his father left, Henry ran upstairs to his room. The heart knocked in its case on his desk. He opened his window and stepped onto the roof, holding the box out to the dark. It beat stronger, directing him like a compass. As he held it out in the direction of downtown, he could feel its frantic beats start to slow, like the footsteps of his father fading ever farther away.

  He climbed back into his room and fell into bed, the heart box beside him on his mattress. It must belong to his father. It held all the man’s pain and feeling, was the reason he had become invisible to ghosts. And if that was true, Henry must have been the one who had cut it out. He would have been only a child then, with a child’s understanding of the world. He shuddered, wondering what else his ghost had made him do.

  Maybe there would be a way to fix some of the harm he had done. If he could somehow get the heart back in his father’s chest, maybe the man would remember who he was. He would come back home to them, and maybe his mother wouldn’t need to love the pig man. It hardly mattered, though. Henry would never find a surgeon willing to implant the dried, beating heart. And without his ghost, how would he put the organ back into his father without doing more harm?

  He fell asleep, thinking of the father he barely knew wandering the dark, the pigs sleeping amidst all the ghostly history and hate of the town, and Bethany slowly being crushed under the alien’s heavy light.

  * * *

  Henry woke up to a message from Bethany: Come over.

  He pulled on clothes and started downstairs, hoping someone would be home to give him a ride. There were voices in the kitchen. He froze on the stairwell, listening. His mother was talking, her voice reedy and cigarette-strained, pulling the listener in like a chain around their throat. The other voice was snarl and bass, a low thunder of sympathy. Hogboss was here. Henry sank down on the steps, listening like he was a child again.

  “Jane and Henry keep bringing him home,” his mother said. “They think they’ll get their father back. But he died a long time ago. The man who looks like him is just an empty suit of clothes. He’s not in there. I can’t make them understand. It hurts me every time I have to see him.”

  “It’s different for us,” Hogboss said. “I can’t remember much of her. I didn’t have language then, so I only knew her by smell, taste, heat. And we were only together for a few days. Dennis remembers her a lot better than I do. It’s why he won’t eat pork. He’s afraid part of her might still be out there, frozen in a butcher’s cooler.”

  “It’s hard losing someone,” his mother said. “They never really go away.”

  Henry’s phone buzzed: Bethany sent him an image. The loading icon on his phone slowly revolved. Finally, the picture spilled over the screen. It was an empty expanse of sky, a few wisps of clouds trailing across the edge of the image. Henry looked for something in all that blue but couldn’t find anything.

  Bethany texted, There’s a city above me. Can you see it?

  Henry pounded down the steps. Hogboss and his mother sat at the table while the robot viciously burned their lunch on the stove. “I need a ride,” he said.

  His mother pointed at the robot sitting in its wheelchair in front of the range, inky smoke rising from some small and black thing welded to the bottom of the skillet. “What’s wrong with it? I thought you were going to fix it soon.”

  Hogboss scratched a floppy ear, his broad face and neck reddening. “I was just heading back to the plant. I could give you a ride on my way.”

  “I’m ready.” Henry picked up his backpack from the hallway and shrugged it on, the straps straining from the weight of his junky old laptop and stacks of annotated medical printouts.

  The pig man and his mother shared a long, warm look. Henry went outside and got in Hogboss’s truck to wait. The vinyl seats burned his legs and back. Around him, the broken-down houses seemed to steam and sag in the summer heat. In the distance, he heard hammering and sawing.

  After the pigs fixed this neighborhood and more came down from the factory, would they start rebuilding the rest of the town? Would there be a future Swine Hill where new lumber and paint pushed the ghosts farther and farther away until the town was no longer such a haunted place? It was hard to imagine that people here would ever let things change so much. They were as attached to memory as the ghosts who haunted them.

  Hogboss got in the truck. “I’d be happy to teach you how to drive, Henry. It isn’t hard.”

  Henry clenched his teeth. He had created the pig man, edited him down to his DNA. Now Hogboss wanted to teach him how to operate an internal combustion engine. He shouldn’t be frustrated about it, but he was. Everything, the smallest kindness, was a reminder of how much he had lost.

  “My problem isn’t that I don’t know how to drive. It’s that we only have two cars: my mom’s and Jane’s. If I wanted, I would just build my own car. They’re barely more complicated than a popcorn maker.”

  Henry regretted the boast immediately. He still hadn’t adjusted to a world with limits. Maybe he never would.

  “Oh?” The pig man looked at him. “Can you explain to me how it works? I’ve always wanted to know, but it seems so complicated.”

  Henry took a deep breath, ready to outline the various parts of the engine and how they functioned. But it wouldn’t come together in his head. He couldn’t remember the names for things. Without taking a look under the hood, he wasn’t even sure what all was there. And he didn’t know where to start. He began to speak several times, but finally said, “I’m too tired right now. Maybe later.”

  “Do you know what Dennis is doing today? He went out this morning.”

  He shouldn’t have done that, Henry thought. “He’s probably getting ready for prom tonight,” he said.

  “He’s going to prom?” Hogboss’s face split in a too-wide and tooth-filled smile. “Does he have a date?”

  “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  Henry sighed. Let the pig man think that everything was fine, that people loved Dennis and that he had friends. What harm could it do?

  * * *

  Bethany’s house rustled with a wind of the dead. A basketball hoop and board was nailed to an oak tree in her yard. The chain net splashed and chimed, moved by the warm, foggy shapes of ghosts rising to sink their phantom baskets. The branches of trees shook with ghosts climbing and swinging, and tracks were worn in the front lawn from spirits doing line drills and sprints. There was nothing dangerous about them. Like the shades who marched in to work at the plant every nig
ht, these ghosts had everything they wanted.

  Her mother let Henry in the house, leading him down a long hallway lined with trophy cases. Ghostly hands, some solid as flesh but most only a shimmering in the air, wrapped their fingers around the statuettes or clinked fistfuls of medals in their hands. Henry saw a row of trophies for youth football and boy’s youth basketball too.

  When they were children, Bethany hated that she wasn’t allowed to play boy sports. There weren’t many teams for girls so young, especially in Swine Hill. Henry had cut her hair on the bus, the heavy black strands piling on the floor until she could pass as a shaggy-headed boy. Her parents didn’t let her play with him for weeks after, but they did dress their daughter in baggy clothes and drive her to summer practices the next town over. Bethany went to school in a different district for two years so she could pose as a boy, until the weight of ghosts gathered within her and kept her from leaving Swine Hill.

  Pull-up bars were mounted over every doorframe. Invisible ghosts rose and fell from them, sending tremors of wind across Henry’s face. Instead of a couch or TV, the living room had barbells and exercise mats. Even in the middle of the day when the ghosts would be at their weakest, the weights trembled and rolled around the floor.

  “I forget that she’s so haunted,” Henry said.

  Her mother nodded. “It gets pretty loud at night, but they don’t hurt anyone. They just want to be close to her. They want to remember what it feels like to win.”

  Ms. Ortiz gestured to the stairwell, lined with portraits of Bethany in athletic gear, her black hair sweat-stuck to her shoulders. Wisps of fog moved over the glass, as if ghosts had submerged themselves into the photos, trying to get inside these moments of victory.