Painting Their Portraits in Winter

by Myriam Gurba

  The ghost walked to a chair in the corner. She parked her bony pompis on it. She folded her hands in her lap. She gazed upon the sleeper.

  The snores that unfolded from the sleeper’s mouth were sharp and wet. She gobbled up air like it was going out of style but then choked on it. Moonlight beamed down through a skylight directly above her face. The ghost stared at the lady’s features, guestimating her age. Bunches of lip lines and papery neck skin told that she was probably sixty-something. Her short gray hair might’ve once been chestnut. She snuggled in a plaid nightshirt. The ghost glanced at her nightstand. A half-empty glass of water and gold hoop earrings. She glanced back at the lady. Her eyeballs twitched against scrotal eyelids. The ghost reached beyond her gray hair to taste her dream, to savor its meaning or lack thereof.

  The lady was dreaming about a woman she knew, the volunteer coordinator at the hospital where she lent her Saturday afternoons. The snorer’s brain hid the volunteer coordinator’s mini-biography in a mental attic. The ghost reached for the attic door’s dangling rope, yanked it, the trap door fell, and the ghost crawled in. In the musty black and white space, the ghost found the knowledge that the volunteer coordinator had come of age as a Belgian Jewess named Françoise. When the Nazis invaded, they took Françoise’s parents to be cooked while she and her brothers and sisters ran. The Nazis hunted for them, so, as the oldest, Françoise made up her mind that it would be nobler for her and her brothers and sisters to die by their own hands than by Nazi ovens. She was huddling with her siblings behind a train station. Sweat was plastering her shirt to her underarms. A rivulet leaked from her jewfro. It slid down her forehead and cried down the bridge of her blunt nose.

  “We are going to find a place where we can sleep forever,” she told her brothers and sisters. “Help me to find the bridge.”

  The orphans shuffled away from the depot and wandered through nightfall, searching for the right jumping spot. They spotted a curving one that was both high and pretty. Their shoes clopped along its stone, to its highpoint. None of them knew how to swim, and Françoise had picked up her youngest sister and was holding her over the river, about to toss her in, when a finger tapped her shoulder. Françoise turned to see who was interrupting.

  She looked into a freckled face. The freckled pest asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Dying,” Françoise admitted.

  “Why?”

  “We are Jews.”

  The freckled pest glanced around the bridge to make sure they were still the only ones on it. She saw no one else, but chose to whisper anyways. She asked Françoise, “What if I hide you? What if, in the name of Him, I hide you? Will you not commit this sin then?”

  “Who is He?” asked Françoise.

  “The father, the son, and the holy ghost,” she answered. “I’m a nun.”

  Françoise looked the nun in the eye. She promised, “If you hide us and we live through this, I will give myself to your Him.”

  The nun led Françoise and her brothers and sisters to her nunnery. She herded them to a barn in back and hurried them to a wooden ladder. They climbed it to the hayloft. The kids lived through the war there, nibbling turnips and parsnips, reading books about the lives of saints, peeing in buckets, drinking straight from cows’ udders. When the war ended, the kids came down from the hayloft, and Françoise took her vows (she also made a silent vow never to eat -ips — parsn- or turn- — again). As a wife of Jesus, Françoise changed her name to Sister Barbara. Instead of dangling a crucifix from a thin gold chain around her neck, she hung a silver Magen David. It sparkles as she yells, “You’re late again!” at hospital volunteers.

  The ghost sighed with satisfaction. The information in the snoring lady’s head had tasted of precious metals, miracles, and olive oil. She thought to herself, This is why I left the poppies behind. To get to chew on stuff like this.

  The ghost wondered if what she was gathering by entering the snoring lady’s mind wasn’t just knowledge but wisdom. She felt unsure. In the morning, she’d have to find a dictionary. She wanted to be sure of wisdom’s exact meaning.

  The ghost slid back into the snoring lady’s head to taste her actual dream. This event layered like lasagna noodles across Sister Barbara’s backstory. In the dream, the snoring lady was wearing a blue jumpsuit. Motor oil stained her knees. She sat, legs hanging apart, on a chrome and red leather stool. She held a cone piled high with chocolate soft-serve ice cream. She licked her Gene Simmons tongue up the side to the tip.

  In that way that only happens in dreams, where you just know that one thing is another, the ghost understood, the soft-serve was Sister Barbara. The ghost giggled.

  She continued eating the lady’s dreams. As the sun rose, and its rays really lit up the lady’s face, the ghost wondered, How many of us watch the living sleep?

  Once hearty daylight took over, the ghost rose. She crossed the bedroom and traveled back through the cramped hallway to the living room. She could now see that the lady dusted often. Spider plants spilled out of pots in all four corners. The ghost glanced at the glass-topped coffee table, at the magazines splayed across it. One, two, three Time magazines. A Readers Digest. A Catholic Digest. A box of Kleenex. A matchbook.

  She heard stirring coming from the bedroom and headed for the window. She hopped outside, and landed back beside the fallen gnome.

  A fox was prancing along the northern edge of the pumpkin patch that the ghost had crossed the night before. Sensing death’s presence, the fox quit her morning exercise and stared. When the ghost sensed the fox sensing her, she waved and called out, “Hi!” to the fox.

  The fox coiled her head back, a little shocked by the upbeat greeting, and kept her eyes on the non-existent girl. The ghost kept going. The fox watched her trample daises, crunch across front yard grass, and pace to the road. She stepped onto its sandy shoulder and walked, feeling pebbles tickle her feet. Talc-y dirt.

  The fox looked down at its shadow. Her plump shape reminded her she was pregnant. She resumed her morning exercise.

  The ghost headed in the opposite direction that had delivered her to the chocolate soft-serve dream. Daylight made the oaks look more real. Scrub jays dueled around mossy strands dangling from their branches. A fluffy tarantula sidled along the pavement. Thoughts of what a tarantula might taste like kept the ghost busy for one, two, three, four, fifteen miles of parched canyon. At the twenty-second mile, the road bent, bent again, and at the proceeding bend, it cut through very thirsty grazing land framed by gray-brown cliffs. Near the jags, thirteen mostly white people stood about at a smattering of boulders and rocks. One of the ladies was holding her hand to her forehead, blocking the sun. She stared across the road. The ghost followed her gaze.

  It landed on a man standing beside a parked yellow school bus. He was shoving his finger down the heel of his shoe, fiddling with his sock. The ghost looked back at the rest of the people.

  I’ll bet they’re trespassing, she guessed. The rocks and boulders formed a natural semi-circle around a dead cypress tree weathered ivory smooth. The tips of its leafless branches were blackened, as if they’d been struck by lightning. Votive candles and flower bouquets littered the base of the trunk and the rocks. On the biggest boulder, vandals had spray-painted a pink human heart.

  A balding man knelt, facing the cypress. He clasped his hands in front of his chest. He bowed his head. His silver watchband glowed. His bald spot shone. The ghost dipped into the brain of the lady watching the man by the bus.

  “Come on!” she called out.

  In the lady’s brain, the ghost groped her way to a mushy little tabernacle. She pulled open its meaty door to find herself sitting on a pew, facing an altar with a sexy crucified Jesus hanging behind it. A white lady wearing green polyester pants and a yellow shirt polka-dotted with bingo dauber stains was addressing an audience of twelve. A priest was sitting off to the side, supervising from his armchair. The lady teetered on the shag-carpet, shifted her stare from a stain to the parishioners,
and proclaimed, “I had a vision! A woman with a sword appeared in the sky over Alamoc Canyon! The blade was shining, and she pointed it at the ground. She threw it into the dirt beside a cypress tree that was crispy at the tips! I know that this woman I saw is the Virgin. She has chosen us for something special! Who would like to go to this place in Alamoc Canyon and pray with me?” she asked.

  Every attendee’s hand shot up. Growing Catholic gangs had been making fieldtrips to the spot for months. The ghost could hear the murmurings of the pilgrims’ hearts, Virgin, help my son find a job. Virgin, help a job find my son. Virgin, we can’t afford braces. Can her teeth get straightened by accident? Virgin, make my husband stop spending so much time with the neighbor with the huge chichis. Virgin, give me the winning lottery numbers. Virgin, who is more important: you or god?

  “Come on!” the lady yelled at the guy again. The straggler’s hands moved along his temples, smoothing his black and silver hair. His hands fell to his pants pockets, and he looked at the lady. Lifting his knee, he sprinted towards her. Canyon winds stirred. Their whwhwhwhwh muffled the grumbling semi turning at the blind spot. It careened at the straggler and its grill slammed his hip. He erupted everywhere. Burning rubber smell and horn sound wrung every other noise and smell from the air. The Catholics froze. Body parts hailed and slapped the pavement. The pilgrim’s foot landed on its sole, by the ghost’s toes.

  Somebody wailed. The ghost thought, Pilgrim’s lack of progress, and felt tingling in her invisible veins: she knew she was mentally referencing a book! She felt certain of that but she had no idea who had written the book, what it was about, or why she knew about it. Frustrated by her knowledgeable ignorance, her nostrils flared. A medley of screams came from the Catholics. Fate was treating them to a vision of sacrifice. Now they knew exactly what it was like to watch someone get hammered for their sins. It wasn’t just a metaphor anymore. Now maybe they’ll realize how important patience is, thought the ghost.

  The driver monkeyed down the side of his rig. His blonde mullet bounced behind him. Landing on the street, his eyes darted from piece to piece to ambrosia salad of the man he’d hit. The ghost sensed his desire to run in the direction of his victim but the circumstance paralyzed him: his victim was everywhere. He would have to resign himself to visiting the parts of the whole.

  The ghost stepped over the foot. It was wearing a civil oxford shoe. Its fresh stump exposed bone, marrow, sinew, and vein. The ghost’s foot landed in blood, and it clung to her see-through soles. As she headed south, dainty red tracks showed up in her wake. A lone Catholic dude noticed and watched their creation. The footsteps soon faded, becoming nothing.

  The Catholic dude wondered, Are those footsteps Anacleto’s? Is that his spirit walking out from the wreckage? It did not occur to him that the footsteps might be a virgin’s. But after all, weren’t the pilgrims there for a virgin’s sake?

  The ghost jogged to the new spirit. She tilted her head back to look up at his face. He was pursing his lips in an O, watching his aftermath. Her invisible veins sizzled with jealousy: at least he had answers. He knew how he died. He knew why. He might even be able to create jokes about his own death. Why did the Catholic cross the road? He had eternity to work on his punch line.

  “You’re dead,” the ghost informed the new ghost.

  “Yes, I figured that out,” he said.

  “How do you feel about it?” she asked.

  The new ghost pondered the question. He said, “At least I won’t have to listen to my wife scream at me anymore. She’s a really good cook, though, and I’ll miss her food. Especially her puto.”

  “What’s puto?”

  “A Filipino dish. Rice. Say, do you know how I can get some food around here? I’m starving.”

  The ghost rolled her eyes. Then she reminded herself, Patience, and explained, “You can’t really eat food like you could before you got hit by a truck. Most things taste like nothing, but people’s thoughts are sort of our food. They have flavors. You can taste what living things are thinking and feeling, but they aren’t normal flavors. Like, something might taste like joy, but it won’t taste like chicken. Well, it might taste a little like chicken. You can taste the weirdest stuff, like apathy, disgust, love, and procrastination. Anything that’s in a living thing’s mind can stimulate your spiritual taste buds.” The ghost looked down at her toenails. “Sometimes, though, you can’t get in touch with your own self. Like, I can totally know everything about anyone by going into their minds and scrounging around but I don’t know how I died. I don’t know my name. I don’t know how old I am or how long I’ve been wandering. I feel uncertain of almost everything. My grasp of stuff is slippery. All I know for sure for dead sure is that I’m a girl, I’m dead, and the best things to come out of Mexico came out of the state of Jalisco.”

  The new ghost laughed. “Sounds like you’re biased,” he said.

  The ghost raised her eyebrows and said, “That’s what knowledge is. An extraordinary bias.”

  The new ghost smiled. He said, “That’s something different to think about but for right now, I’m going to go be with my death. It was nice meeting you.” The new ghost smoothed the hair at his temples and sprinted in the direction of his insides and his outsides.

  The ghost watched him over her shoulder. People can be so weird, she thought.

  The ghost continued her walk out of the canyon. A fire truck with sirens and lights going squawked past. Its speed ruffled her nightgown. A fleet of police vehicles followed by an ambulance sped past, too. Their velocity blew her hair into her face. More and more vehicles zipped to the extravaganza. The ghost didn’t care about them. She cared about the aged eucalyptus trees coming into view. They shaded clapboard stables. Upon their wood-slat fence, a grizzled donkey was resting his chin. His black jellybean eyes watered, and the ghost wanted to pluck them and eat them. She floated across eucalyptus nuts. Apostrophe-shaped leaves mentholated the air. The ghost stretched her unseen fingertips towards the donkey’s muzzle. Her knuckles slid down his fuzz.

  “Velvet,” she said. “You’re so velvety. And your eyes are very, very pretty.”

  The ghost dipped her sixth sense into the donkey to see if he, too, was thinking of velvet. She was greeted by a mental image of him as a young stud mounting a white mare. His thighs pumped against her hindquarters.

  The ghost’s cheeks heated up. The donkey purred. He rubbed his cheek against her hand. The ghost plunged her fingers into his coarse black mane. She wanted to taste his hair. Leaning towards it, she opened her mouth and sucked. Flavorless.

  She pulled away. A spit string connected her to the animal till it snapped. The ghost petted the damp mane as the question Should I or shouldn’t I go to the town those impatient weirdos came from? bandied around inside her.

  “I’m on a knowledge quest,” she whispered into the donkey’s ear. “I want to know stuff. You know that expression ‘you don’t know shit’? That’s me. I want to know, like really know, so much I could fill a spiral bound notebook or two thousand. I want to pig out on knowledge.”

  The ghost smelled the ghost of donkey lunch. Its warmth wafted towards her. She peeked around the donkey’s neck, at his rear hooves. Fresh road apples comingled on the dirt. The donkey was helping the ghost to know shit. She giggled. She kissed the donkey’s nose and stepped away from him. She crept back to the dirt shoulder and walked.

  More and more cars filled the road, and then the road branched into roads. A looping overpass spanned a four-lane highway. Cars zooming along kept decent safety spaces, and rigs corralling oranges, peppers, and garlic hauled past. A green truck leaking white feathers barreled along. The ghost sniffed. Chicken shit.

  Near a freeway off-ramp, families were laughing on AstroTurf. They swung clubs, trying to putt golf balls out of mazes. Beside the mini-golf course, houses that looked like one another, white stucco tract homes with red tile roofs, were crammed together.

  The ghost floated across the freeway and walked along a
white fence. A Dutch windmill cast its shadow across her, and she gazed into the sky. sun still lit the world but the moon had also taken her position as queen. Due to this mutual occupation, there was no difference between night and day. Lavender ribbons sailed in the sky above the mini-golf course’s glaring triceratops statue. Orangey vanilla bursts streaked across the roof of the nearby hotel. Plump palm trees in a pumice pebble river made the lobby entrance look prehistoric. Splashing. Chlorine. People were playing in the hotel pool.

  Funky pepper trees lined the sidewalk leading towards traffic lights. The ghost walked along the sidewalk. She headed past Randall’s Feed and Supply, the Paradise Motel, the Sandpiper Motel, the Indian Motor-Lodge, and Refugio’s Tires. Mexican markets with signs you had to know Spanish to understand. The ghost trotted towards a windowless structure whose red and white sign announced FRUTAS Y VERDURAS.

  By FRUTAS Y VERDURAS’s automatic doors, a coin-operated merry-go-round with ponies painted in primary colors sat hungrily. The grinning yellow horse matched mustard but reminded the ghost of lemons. Her deceased salivary glands pumped sadness into her mouth. Papaya, she thought, give me a papaya. Anger quivered her lips, and she floated towards groceries through FRUTAS Y VERDURAS’s tinted glass door.

  Her feet touched down after the black plastic doormat. The shellacked concrete floor felt chilly. Fluorescent lights lit the frutas y verduras in an otherworldly way. The sight of pink, yellow, orange, pale green, and brown peels and rinds caressed the ghost’s spirit. She’d eaten these things — these fruits, vegetables, grains, and tubers — before, and her invisible marrow did back flips. She knew she’d eaten radishes that went crunch, and white hominy that soaked for days, and potatoes and carrots that turned tender and forkable in massive pots. Someone somewhere had placed plates of chirimoya and biznaga and coriander and chiles poblanos on a table in front of her. Memories of taste revivified: she hated mole. She knew she hated mole as sure as she knew she was not alive. She especially hated mole poblano. Why ruin meat with chocolate? Don’t let them play together. Dessert deserves her own throne, her own plate, her own spotlight. The ghost felt confident that in another time and place, she had eaten mangos and papayas till they gave her tropical diarrhea. She had eaten bolillo and birote drizzled with red sauce. She’d eaten sopes and huaraches and tunas, not the Chicken of the Sea but the chicken of tree, prickly pears to throw at people you hate: teachers, landlords, and dentists with big hands.