Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones

by Micah Dean Hicks

  Behind Hogboss’s house, the tree line began. The forest wrapped the ridge and collared the town, years and years’ worth of Swine Hill’s secrets lying forgotten inside. Now the wreckage of Pig City lay within it, still humming with a few stubborn ghosts sunken so deep into its concrete and tile that they didn’t even know it had been destroyed. Henry led him under the trees.

  He had never thought about what Hogboss might remember from before he had become a self-slaughtering pig. Hogboss seemed to have come into the world already a plant manager, fully formed. But of course he had a past, a time before the ghost’s knife had reshaped him, before he’d staggered up on two legs and before language had stained his tongue.

  “I’m sorry I was going to make you work at Pig City,” Hogboss said. “They owned us. I thought it was the only way. Henry must have done something, because they don’t want us anymore. I don’t know what to do with myself now. You would have been ready for this.”

  They passed through a row of trees that had swallowed up an old cow fence, the barbed wire sunken deep into the bark and stretched tight between branches. The pig man snapped limbs and furrowed a trail with his passing, the woods dense and still around them.

  “I shouldn’t have insisted that you be a plant manager like me. But I was excited. There were so many things I wanted to share with you. The smell of a burned-out light bulb. The taste of the brine we use to package cuts, and which cuts are good to eat raw. How heavy and right a knife can feel in your hands. The way the pigs in the pens look at you, like you’re one of them. That factory was my whole world. I was good at what I did. I thought you could be good at it too.”

  They passed through a strange grove of trees that had been painted with graffiti, looping red words that dripped and smeared to the point of being unreadable. Old cars had been junked out here, trees splitting them open and vines wrapping their hoods. Sometimes Hogboss’s boot found a piece of glass or an old board in the dirt, snapping it under his weight.

  “You let me go to school,” Henry said. “I got to have friends. I danced. You were a good father. I wouldn’t have wanted you to be any different.”

  “I wish, so much, that I could have seen you dancing with your girl. Henry told me you had a date. People must have liked you. At least, some of them must have.”

  “They did,” Henry said. “I was happy.” He wanted it to be true, hoped that it was. Either way, this was the story Hogboss needed to hear.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to protect you.” Hogboss stumbled, catching himself on a branch. He made a low grunt deep in his throat. “I’m so sorry I let them hurt you.”

  “There wasn’t anything you could have done.”

  “If I had known,” Hogboss said, “I would have killed them first. It wouldn’t have been any different to me, butchering a man.”

  “Tell me something good that you remember,” Henry said. He wanted to steer Hogboss away from thinking about murder and revenge.

  The pig man sucked in a shuddering breath. “I remember how small you were when you first started walking, down on all fours. You chewed on everything, and you couldn’t talk. I got a television from a pawnshop and set it up in the warehouse. I thought it would help. You remember, I wasn’t around much then. I was so busy managing the plant. And the gene treatments and hormones were making you grow so fast.

  “I came back from the slaughterhouse and hooked up the TV for you. I don’t remember what video I put on. But you sat right in front of it, your hand on the screen. You couldn’t watch anything without touching it. I was worried about you then. I knew you were going to want more than what the plant could give.”

  Hunchbacked pines with their sparse needles and green-crowned oaks fell away. They walked into a deep grove of peach trees, bushy and fruit-full. Wheelbarrows and ladders, chained to the ground by ivy, lay among them. Baskets had rotted into the dirt. In the middle of the grove, the leaning peak of a storage barn, its walls gapped with missing boards, stood over the trees.

  The trees themselves were haunted by the ghosts of the families who’d tended the peach orchard. After a fire destroyed the farm and it went up for sale, after the woods swallowed up the fields and it never sold, the spirits had brought the trees back from blackened stalks. The earth was stony with peach pits, the grass green and thick. The scent of overripe peaches was overwhelming, unpicked and rotting in their skins.

  “It’s beautiful.” Hogboss sniffed deeply. “Whose is it?”

  “It’s yours,” Henry said. “If you want it.”

  Hogboss plucked a piece of fruit and ate it whole. He sat down in the shade, his back against a tree.

  “People in town have forgotten about the orchard,” Henry said. “The ghosts in the trees aren’t dangerous. You and the other pig people can hide here.”

  Hogboss frowned. “We don’t want to hide.”

  “What do you want?”

  “We want to rest. To be safe. We want a home.”

  “Then make this your home.”

  Hogboss looked around, inhaling the scent of the place. His ears were up, intrigued.

  Henry wouldn’t last much longer, and the pigs would have to make their way without him. The world was such a cruel place, but if they could shelter somewhere until they learned to navigate it, they might have a chance. Henry imagined them having children and building communities of their own, joining with humankind, making people rethink everything about what it meant to be a person. It spiraled away from him, a messy and multivariable equation that he couldn’t solve. He was in awe of what he had made.

  “I have to go,” Henry said. “I love you. You were good to me.”

  Hogboss lurched to his feet and ran forward, grabbing at Henry to stop him, to keep him near a little longer. But night was coming on soon, and with it Henry would sharpen, taking on his old form. He didn’t want the pig man to know the truth. He broke apart like smoke in Hogboss’s arms and let the wind carry him away. Behind him, the sky darkened over the orchard.

  The trees shook with ghosts.

  * * *

  Night fell, and Henry grew solid and quick. He went back to his house, finding the robot oil-smeared and surrounded by car parts in the driveway. Jane’s car growled low and throaty, idling on the concrete. The robot had both arms inside the cab, taking the dash apart and fixing her CD changer.

  “Is that necessary?” Henry asked. “We have a lot to do.”

  The robot groaned, deep in conversation with the ghost that lived within it. While it worked, Henry checked the robot’s servos and battery cells, the dozens of feet of wiring inside. Everything seemed fine. It needed to last Jane a long time. One day it would be damaged or something in it would break loose. Maybe its ghost would be so at peace that it would fade away, erasing the robot’s code as it went. When that day came, his sister would remember losing Henry all over again. He hoped it would last her until she found friends and family, people to care about her in whatever new place she made for herself.

  As the robot finished its task, Henry looked up at the laser array that had called down the alien light. It sat still and dark on the roof. All he had to do was use the robot’s hands to write a new program, and then it would paint the sky again.

  “Hurry,” Henry told it. “I’m blowing away.”

  All night and into the next day, Trigger came for her.

  He hovered over Jane and battered her with his need, probed into her mind, desperate to haunt her. She tried reasoning with him, explaining that he was too hard on himself. She tried to comfort him, telling him that it was okay he had failed, that his suffering was over now. Finally she screamed at him, agreeing with him, telling him that he deserved all of this so that he might vanish and leave her alone. No matter what she said, he only drew closer to her. He asked Jane to remember all the times she had failed, everything she deserved to suffer for.

  She did feel guilty. Henry had gone up to the plant every day for months and she never tried to stop him, never asked what his ghos
t might be doing. He had his nose cut off while she was in the same building as him. And he died a few dozen feet from her while she drove away in her mother’s car. Even now, with Henry’s mournful ghost roaming the town and trying to undo the harm he had done, Jane could only think of getting away.

  Trigger’s onslaught was fracturing her. Soon she would break apart and he would curl inside her. A reptile sliding back into its egg. The opposite of birth, an ending.

  At the height of day, Trigger’s ghost weakened. He floated up through the walls of the building, but she could still feel him close.

  Dennis’s MP3 player was in her pocket, and she pushed the headphones into her ears. His bass-heavy, ethereal music crashed into her head, blocking out the world for a little while. The heart was heavy in her pocket, barely beating at all. She slept for a time.

  When she woke up, the sun was weak through the windows. It would be night again soon. Jane’s arms and legs ached from the cloud of ghosts that had nestled into her muscles. Her lungs burned with them, making it hard to breathe. Her stomach clenched with hunger. She got up from the floor, the ghosts in the laughing room roaring around her. She staggered out of the classroom and left the building, going back into the warm summer air.

  He’s following you, her ghost said. He’s never far.

  “I can’t run away from him. He isn’t attached to a place; he’s attached to me. If I leave town, he’ll just follow.”

  You need to make him stay here. The ghost curled around Jane’s thoughts, watching her ideas form. You need to find someone for him to haunt.

  Jane thought of the officer sitting at her kitchen table, blood foaming between his clenched teeth. “Trigger is obsessed with me. He blames me for what happened to him and wants me to suffer for it. Who does that remind you of ?”

  Oh, Jane. Her ghost moved as heavily as the tongue of a grandfather clock in her breast. This is dangerous. Maybe I could share you with him. I would be quiet, just listening. It wouldn’t have to hurt.

  Jane remembered the hollow men, crushed under so many spirits, their identities burned out of them. If Jane could have shoved the ghost out of her head, she would have. “I’m not letting him in.”

  The bleeding man will kill you.

  Her ghost circled, full of concern. It knew she was really leaving this time, that Jane would choose dying if that’s what it took. Jane wasn’t the same person she had been a few weeks ago. The ghost’s attachment to her was tenuous. It wasn’t sure it could hang on.

  And for the first time in years, Jane wasn’t sure if she needed it anymore.

  * * *

  The school wasn’t far from the old center of town with its courthouse and police station. Jane hurried, trying to get there before the phantoms grew solid and filled the streets. She listened with her ghost, staying far from even the weakest embers of spirits. If she walked through another swarm of them by accident, they could paralyze her.

  The lost ghosts of the Pig City plant had salted themselves across the town. They gathered in transformers and power lines, craving heat and violence. They filled the skins of those left behind, pounding in their chests, pinching deep inside their flesh. In the metal bodies of cars, they found steel walls to wrap themselves in. As she listened with her ears, the town was silent. But when she listened with her ghost, Jane heard it wail and beg, crying out that everything had been taken from it. Every place was just as haunted as downtown now.

  The buildings in the city center looked like monuments or tombs. Their brick was crumbling and faded of paint. The names on the old signboards were unfamiliar. In the two decades she had lived here, none of these stores had been open. The center of town had been a festering wound for as long as she could remember.

  With every step, she could feel Trigger pulled along behind her like a kite. Ravenous and inexorable, he fell closer. She only had a little time left before he descended on her again. She didn’t think she would be strong enough to resist him much longer.

  At one corner of the square, the edifice of the police station rose before her. Its steps were strewn with trash, rain-sticky wrappers and old newspapers clotted to the concrete. From the window in the second story, the bleeding man stared down at her.

  He won’t come outside. He’s afraid. Somehow he knows that another ghost wants to possess him.

  “Why would he think that?”

  Because he deserves it.

  Jane held the railing and climbed the steps. She didn’t have any problem with that. He had killed her brother, had wanted to kill her whole family because they were close to the pigs. If he needed to punish himself for the sins he had committed, she would let him. She only hoped that Trigger’s ghost would see a mirror of itself in him, would be willing to take the bleeding man instead of her. If not, one of them would kill her. If that happened, she hoped that she wouldn’t come back as a ghost.

  If you did, I would hold on to you. I would stay with you even if we were only lights in the sky.

  To the ghost, it didn’t matter if Jane was living or dead, host to dozens of spirits or only itself. It just didn’t want to be left alone. It wanted to care about her, believed that it did, but its first love would always be itself.

  Jane walked into the police station, Trigger’s spirit cold and invisible and close behind her. In its wind, she could smell Trigger’s hair, his sweat, the faint antiseptic and rubber scent always clinging to him from his work at the plant. It made her remember the afternoon she’d spent in his bed before everything fell apart. She had loved him. That was what made all of this so hard.

  The police station was dim inside and coppery with the odor of blood. Dark stains bloomed over the backs of chairs, matted papers together, dripped in constellations over the white tile floors.

  The building was full of ghosts. They darted, birdlike and afraid, under desks and behind furniture. They slipped in and out of cracks in the walls.

  These ghosts were all people that the bleeding man tracked down, locked in his cells, and killed. Being afraid of him is all they have. You’re lucky Henry didn’t become one of these. Imagine him lost in here with all the rest, startling at shadows for years and years?

  The thought made her wince, and the ghost knew it. Let it say what it wanted. It only had a little time left. She turned her music up louder until it filled her head. The ghost thrashed desperate and sour beneath her ribs.

  There were no other police here, no deputies or assistants. The station had been understaffed before, but with the new flood of ghosts come down from Pig City, shutting off power and stopping cars on the roads, most people had left. Only someone like the bleeding man, someone who consumed pain like it was bread, would return to the most haunted part of downtown amidst the most vicious ghosts. Jane was surprised that he only had one ghost within him, that in all this time he’d never encountered another spirit that felt as he did.

  But most spirits were tied to their work. A lifetime of labor had worn a deep groove in them, and they startled awake from death like waking up to an alarm clock for an early shift. They did what they had always done, taking purpose from their work even if it made them unhappy. Most of them didn’t mean to hurt people. That happened by accident.

  With the power out, Jane climbed the stairs to the second floor. The pain of spirits threaded through her muscles made her brace her hands against the tops of her thighs. Halfway up, she smelled coffee. The smell startled her, making her think of the kitchen at home, her mom getting ready for work in the morning.

  On the top floor, a hallway led to an office with a window overlooking the street. The bleeding man waited for her inside. She could smell him, a dark, adrenal, wounded animal scent. Would this be where she died? Would this smell, coffee mixed with blood, be the last thing she knew? Trigger’s ghost was close behind.

  Jane went to meet her fate.

  On his desk, the bleeding man had a metal coffeepot sitting on a tiny camping stove. Beside it lay his gun. The only other item on the table was a plastic
bag full of pale dust. The bleeding man stood with the desk between them, strangely fearful of her. Bright lines of blood ran from his ears, eyes, and the corners of his mouth, matting his collar to his neck.

  Small shadows played over the ceiling and blew around like shreds of paper over the floor. The bleeding man’s ghostly victims could feel that he was afraid. They had come to see him suffer.

  He was thinking of how he had become haunted. He had tried to stop someone, a shuffling and suspicious man, his body too big, clothes baggy, eyes downcast. The man had pretended not to hear the officer at first, and then he had run. The officer chased him to his house, the neighbors hanging their faded laundry in the sun.

  The officer had believed somehow that people like this were the reason Swine Hill was poor and unhealthy and full of ghosts. They took more than their share, he believed. They made every place worse. He would see them fined, in jail, forced out of town.

  The man ran into a dim house, and the officer followed him into the hot rooms. His heart raced, and he was afraid. Not afraid that the man might be dangerous, but that he might be innocent. The officer feared he was mistaken, his chase an embarrassment.

  To be who he thought he was, the officer needed the runner to be guilty.

  In the living room, children stopped their play to stare. He saw himself as they must see him, the pressed uniform and raised gun. They were afraid, and he liked it, wanted them to remember this moment, wanted his feet to stain the floors so they would never forget that he could go where he wanted and do as he pleased.

  The suspect locked himself in the bedroom. The officer crashed into the door, splitting the hollow wood, and found himself tangled up with the man who’d been leaning against it from the other side. Arm in arm for a moment. Shoulder to shoulder and chest to chest. The man’s wide eyes inches from his. The officer squeezed the trigger over and over, separating himself from this other person with sound and heat and shooting stars of steel and lead.