A few ghosts remained in the city. Some of those haunting people had already found the life they had lost, and they wouldn’t easily let go. But the swarms of lost spirits that had flooded the town and made it unsafe, circulating through flesh and wood and wiring in frustration, had all been swept from the earth.
Everywhere in town, the power snapped back on. Microwaves chirped and refrigerators rumbled. Air-conditioning units flung their bent blades and stuttered to life again. People shrugged off their heavy coats of spirits. The hollow men awoke from fevers to find themselves lying in abandoned buildings far from their homes, guilty memories of hate and violence tunneling through them like worms. They walked into the open and looked up at the sky, seeing the city of light and its ghosts lift into the stars before vanishing forever.
Henry had done what he’d needed to do. What now? In his moment of satisfaction, everything around him became shadowy and soft. He felt heavy. At any moment, he could fall.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” Henry said to Bethany. “I wish I could have seen all the worlds that you saw. I don’t think there’s anything waiting for me after this.”
Everything below him faded away. Henry dropped toward a pool of nothing, his horizon a rising ring of black. Lost in all that emptiness, would he even know if he was still falling?
Bethany caught the bleeding wisps of Henry and hauled him up. She spooled her hands in his spectral body like it was cotton candy, and dragged him toward her. In her palms, he was gathered back to himself, kept from passing on.
It hurt. He struck out at her, but he was smoke and Bethany was marble.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“There are countless other worlds, Henry. Don’t you want to see them?”
He struggled, tried to wriggle away into that soft night, but Bethany wouldn’t let him go. She was as much a being of singular purpose as any ghost. He had to leave, but she had decided he would stay. She was his opponent, and she couldn’t lose. For the first time, he was afraid of her.
“Henry is dead. I’m just his ghost.”
“Not all ghosts are less than they were in life,” she said. “My ghosts live through me. They do things they never could have done before. They feel just as strongly. The dead are worth caring about too.”
“I don’t want anything,” he said. Every moment he stayed here without purpose sent knives through him.
“You aren’t trying to want anything.”
“I didn’t want people to live with my mistakes. But I’ve already fixed everything I can. Why would you want to keep me around? I hurt my whole family. I took away the world from you.”
“You did.” She looked sad for a moment, but her hand didn’t relax on his arm. “This wasn’t a good place for me, though. And it wasn’t a good place for you, either. We’re going to find somewhere better. But first you have to want something. What about before you became a ghost? What did you want then?”
It was hard to think. What was left now? His life had ended.
“I wanted to invent something no one had ever seen before,” he said. “I wanted to make the world better. But I think the pig people are going to do that. I don’t know how. But they’ll help us be more than what we are.”
Her face loomed over him, pitiless and stern. She had climbed so far, had suffered so much to come back here. She had changed down to her cells, and she demanded a change from him, too. “The Henry I remember had more imagination than that,” she said.
“You don’t understand what it’s like to be a ghost. Not being sure hurts. It’s so hard to stay. I wish I had wanted more.”
“What else?”
Uncertainty burned. Henry thought back over his short life, all the people he had been unkind to, everything he had put before his friends and family, all of the things he never understood. How he had flinched when his mother needed him. How he was too afraid to stand up for Dennis in the cafeteria. “I wish I had been a better person.”
She shook him. “More.”
Henry considered it, let the idea sit with him. He felt himself grow more solid, starting to take on body. The pain of staying—the feeling that he was being torn away piece by piece and dragged into the void—lessened. He did want to be better. There were things about himself he didn’t like. If he could live again, he would stop thinking he knew what people needed better than they did. He would be less of a coward. He would never let someone like Dennis get hurt if he could stop it.
It would be hard. Everyone wanted to be a better person than they were, and people always messed it up. What if he was aiming for something he could never have? Would Bethany ever let him stop chasing it, ever let him surrender and sleep? He didn’t think so. It chilled him.
He was still just a spirit, though. A person only had one life, and he had spent his. Could he make a new body for himself ? A Henry-machine that he could haunt, reborn in steel and electricity? Was that enough, wanting only to live again and live better?
But he didn’t hurt anymore. He was full of purpose again, as whole as a ghost could be. He relaxed in Bethany’s grasp and, seeing that she had won, the girl let him go. The roof felt solid beneath him, the world sharp and full of depth.
“I’m going to try to build myself a new body,” Henry said. “I don’t know how. I would need whole new technologies and sciences, things that haven’t even been dreamed of yet.”
“I can’t stay here,” Bethany said. “The alien light in me is too heavy. If I don’t go, I’ll tear this reality apart.” She reached for his hand. “Come with me. We’ll find what we need.”
Henry let his mind circle the idea obsessively, dancing with it like the ghost girl had danced alone with her want for so long. He would write himself a new skeleton. He would wind it in tissue and fill it with blood. He would sink into it and suck breath into its new lungs. He would open his eyes from inside his new self, and he would be better than he had ever been before.
Henry felt solid and real, almost alive already. He needed something. And he wouldn’t rest until he had it. He took her hand.
Together they plummeted through the thin fabric of reality. Henry saw only darkness in this place between living and death, a mouth that swallowed ghosts. The only light was Bethany, shining bright as a sun beside him.
“What do you see?” he asked.
“There are so many worlds around us,” she said. “It’s like staring into a kaleidoscope.”
Bethany stretched out her arm and pointed toward something only she could see.
Henry closed his eyes and tried to imagine it, some new universe filled with strange people in strange towns, their pain and love familiar. A place where he could be new. He hoped it was real. He hoped there was something beyond the dark.
They fell face-first. The weight of all that they had lost fell away, and the heat and dust of the ruined town streamed away from them and scattered in their wake like wreckage from a storm.
Behind them, the comet’s tail of Bethany’s ghosts followed.
Acknowledgments
First, I would like to thank my wife, Brenda Peynado, for reading draft after draft, always giving me her honest opinion, and pushing me to do the best work that I could. This book wouldn’t exist without her.
I would also like to thank the early readers who gave me such great feedback on this novel as it developed: Robert Barton Bland, Billy Hallal, John Jarrett, Tabitha Lowery, Emily Rainey, and Laura Smith.
I owe a lot to the creative writing program at Florida State University, particularly the professors who helped me with this book: Julianna Baggott, Diane Roberts, Robert Romanchuk, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, and Mark Winegardner.
My agent, Kerry D’Agostino, has been such an amazing champion of my work. I want to thank her for loving this novel so much through all its many drafts and revisions.
Thanks to John Joseph Adams for his great feedback, Chris Thornley for the beautiful cover, Alison Kerr Miller for her sharp edits, and to everyone at John Joseph Adams B
ooks and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for making all of this possible.
I also want to thank a few of my friends for their years of kindness and support: Kilby Allen, Garrett Ashley, Mikayla Ávila Vilá, Laura Bandy, Gabrielle Bellot, C. J. Bobo, David Bowen, Alicia Burdue, Julialicia Case, Leslee Chan, Emily Rose Cole, Marian Crotty, Jessie Curtis, John Deming, Eoin James Dockter, Okla Elliott, Brett Gaffney, Brandi George, Jesse Goolsby, Liz Green, C. J. Hauser, Anna Claire Hodge, Rochelle Hurt, Daniel Kasper, Donika Kelly, Girwan Khadka, Gitanjali Shrestha Khadka, Sydney Kilgore-Manuel, Gwen Kirby, Katie Knoll, Julia Koets, Lindsey Kurz, Sara Bland Landaverde, Lucas Lowery, Joshua Manuel, Dyan Neary, Ashlie Rae Odom, Dan Paul, Ondřej Pazdírek, Daniel J. Pinney, Ellis Purdie, Misha Rai, Jessica Reidy, Sophie Rosenblum, Shannin Schroeder, Kimberly Shirey, Andrea Spofford, Lindsay Sproul, Kayla Henderson Thompson, Kristina Treadway, Dillon Tripp, Linda Tucker, Anne Valente, Ann VanderMeer, Jeff VanderMeer, Nathan Waddell, Josh Webster, Melinda Wilson, Michael Yoon, and Tina Raborn Zuniga.
Finally, thanks so much to my family for their unwavering belief in me and my writing: Billy Hicks, Melissa Hicks, Patience Hicks, Trevor Hicks, Bianca Peynado, Celia Peynado, Daniel Peynado, and Esteban Peynado.
Visit www.hmhbooks.com to find more science fiction and fantasy titles from John Joseph Adams Books.
About the Author
* * *
Micah Dean Hicks is the author of the story collection Electricity and Other Dreams, a book of dark fairy tales and bizarre fables that won the 2012 New American Fiction Prize. He is also the winner of the 2014 Calvino Prize judged by Robert Coover, the 2016 Arts and Letters Prize judged by Kate Christensen, and the 2015 Wabash Prize judged by Kelly Link. His stories and essays have appeared in dozens of magazines, ranging from the New York Times Magazine to Lightspeed to the Kenyon Review. He teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.
Connect with HMH on Social Media
Follow us for book news, reviews, author updates, exclusive content, giveaways, and more.
* * *
* * *
Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones Page 29