The Hungry Ghosts

by Miguel Flores

  “Girls! I’m so glad you’re home.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  good stories end with troublesome girls

  There once lived a house on the top of a hill by the edge of a cliff. His name was St. George’s Home for Wayward Girls. Living with him were the kindly carpenter-mother Doris Barterby, one lazy moss-bull, fourteen little girls, the ghost of a cat, and a blue borkoink named Junebug.

  Tonight St. George’s stood beneath the light of a milky full moon. Accompanied by playful wisps of clouds and the whisperings of a late wind.

  Sitting in the open windows of his library were Milly and Cilla, swinging their legs out and watching the stars slow-dance overhead. Next to them sat Jasper, visiting again, curled with his head beneath his two front paws. Outside, Junebug snapped at wildflowers on the moss-bull’s toes.

  Come autumn, it would be one year since Milly had first left St. George’s.

  St. George’s knew his girls were all content and safe, and that was enough for him.

  Milly, however, didn’t know what to do with herself.

  When Milly had first returned, Doris refused to let her do anything but rest and read and teach magicks to whoever was curious. Including Cilla. Since the whole affair, Doris’s mind seemed to have gotten sharper, now full of the memories she’d lost. She listened with rapt attention and worked every day with the renewed energy of a much younger woman. Milly could have sworn she even had fewer wrinkles on her face.

  Over the past few months, Doris had gradually allowed Milly more responsibilities, but Milly still felt rather unhelpful. In fact, the longer she’d been home, the surer Milly was that Doris no longer needed her.

  It made her happy, but now her problem was figuring out what to do. And so, for the first time in her life, Milly stopped thinking about being a mother all the time and thought of her own childlike dreams and childish affairs.

  She was almost thirteen, after all. There wasn’t that much time left to be a girl. She didn’t tell any of this to Cilla, but I’ll bet Cilla knew anyway. Neither of them seemed bothered enough to talk about it.

  While they sat there, and Doris readied Ikki for bed, and Nishi chased Marikit around the room, and Lissy and Abby began a too-late pillow fight, and Mei chased the tiny bat fluttering around in the rafters, St. George’s felt the presence of a stranger approaching the foster home. This person was dressed in long, tattered robes and a pointed hat.

  The stranger smelled of magicks, just as pungent as that last witch that had come.

  St. George’s tensed his timbers, unsure of this intrusive presence, unwilling to let anyone take one of his girls away again. But then, the stranger placed the palm of their hand on his front door, and he recognized something strange beneath the magicks, the smell of something familiar.

  St. George’s relaxed, and the stranger knocked on his door. Their knuckles rapped softly against the wood, and St. George’s knew from the gentle touch that they must be a friend.

  When Milly opened the door, she couldn’t speak. And then, when she did open her mouth, she began to cry. At first, St. George’s was afraid Milly might be scared, but the stranger threw off her robes and took off her hat.

  She had locks of bright green hair studded with flowers. She knelt down and hugged Milly, and Milly hugged the woman back. The stranger asked her a question.

  Milly nodded her head, even as she was burying her face into the woman’s shoulder.

  A strong wind blew through St. George’s, warming him from the inside out. The wind made the scent of flowers rise throughout St. George’s, and he absorbed their sweet scent.

  Bamboo blossoms.

  If the house could smile, he would have.

  Milly didn’t need him anymore.

  For her, at least, he had done his job.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First to my editor, Maggie. This book’s best ideas came from you.

  To Ms. Peggy, who used to lend me a puzzle every week. You are the reason I love searching for solutions instead of problems.

  To Hillary, for the Spotify writing sessions and falling asleep during video calls.

  To Liz, for growing up with me and this talking cat.

  To Gabrielle, for your love and your patience.

  To my sister, Ysabel, for inspiring me to always do more and be better. To my tatay, for teaching me to be honest. To my nanay, for showing me how to be brave.

  To my kids.

  To M, who once told me they were going to be the first female president of the United States after they came back from leading a team to the moon. To R, who showed me how to perfectly balance temper with kindness. To J, who always offered me their extra animal crackers and taught me how to use TikTok. To S, A, and A, who helped me understand what it means to be a good sibling. Milly’s best qualities belong to you.

  And last of all, to my cat, for teaching me the importance of a well-timed nap.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Miguel Flores is a Filipino-American currently living in the Midwest. Prior to writing a middle grade novel, they went to school for Business Information Management, taught high schoolers about racial justice and toxic masculinity, and sang “Baby Shark” at a shelter for elementary school kids. They like to refer to their background as a halo-halo or “mix-mix” of experiences.

  When not working at the library, you can find them perching on chairs to “unlock their throat chakra” or performing spoken word poetry at local coffee shops. Sometimes they laugh too loudly at their own jokes. Miguel is the winner of Penguin Young Readers’ and We Need Diverse Books’ Roll of Thunder Writing Contest. The Hungry Ghosts is their debut.

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  * I must clarify, West Ernost was not that little. Or shabby. It was stuck with this reputation because that’s what people called it. Names are particularly finicky magicks. West Ernost did not become little or shabby because it grew up that way. It became little and shabby because people told it that’s what it ought to be. And it believed them.

  * He’d never admit it, but he is immensely ticklish.

  * The problem was never that Milly had no dreams. It was that if any of the adults ever found out what her dreams were, they’d tell her that her dreams were wrong. So she hid them so deep inside her own curiosity that even she didn’t know how to find them anymore.

  * Sometimes they bork, sometimes they oink. Who knows what family of the animal kingdom these creatures belong to.

  * Grunkworms are bright, luminescent creatures that glow only when the moon is out. Otherwise, they look like normal worms.

  * Embarrassment can be a very powerful incentive.

  * The girls’ top three reasons for participating in the Happy Ghosts Festival? 1) Honoring traditions, 2) respecting the ghosts, and 3) eating lots of really great food. Not necessarily in that order.

  * This is not to say that all fearsome things must be hideous. Many of the best things in life are both beautiful and terrifying. There’s a special holiness that comes with making friends with the monster under the bed. Of course, for most of these kids, being scared was just very good fun, and fun is a form of holiness, too.

  * Of course, that’s not the real reason the few witches vanished. But stereotypes can be almost as powerful as names—it’s because of them that West Ernost is little and shabby and witches are malevolent child-eaters.

  * Arrett may not be much of a stickler when it comes to the rules of narrative, but they are an impatient fellow and we’re all on a tight schedule.

  * Most health experts will tell you that the very worst thing you can do is Take Risks. If you want to live a very safe, very easy life, then this is true and you shou
ld listen. However, any seasoned adventurer worth their salt would argue that the best investment you can make is to save up a pocketful of Risks. How else would you be able to afford a decent Adventure?

  * Found among wet marshes in and around West Ernost, swamp gronkles smell as unpleasant as they sound. They are most easily compared to growling frogs with wider-set eyes and flat, stubby toes. Their pants are made of moss and their shoes of sunbaked mud. They are covered in so much green and brown that most people can’t tell where their clothes end and their skin begins. Many a swamp gronkle has been known to use this to their advantage.

  * Most children seem to agree that monsters and witches cannot attack them if they manage to keep all four limbs inside a blanket at all times. That’s just science.

  * “Run” is probably not the right word when you’ve been walking for hours and your legs feel like wooden pegs and you look like a possum who took a bath in a mudslide, but there aren’t very many words which properly describe such an endeavor. Skip-hop? Slip-stumble? Tripped over herself thrice, fell on her face, and yet continued to move forward all the while? One of those things has got to be closer to truth.

  * Anything touched by magicks is bound to sound funny or smell weird. Can’t be helped. Everything in Arrett has a distinct sound, smell, look, or feel. Even lies.

  * Cats are not generally known to have a great sense of humor, so they were never given all the proper working parts to express themselves fully.

  * If you are an inhabitant of Arrett, your parents might wish that the word “boggins” had been censored. However, like many bad words, it is not inherently bad. It is, in fact, the name of a very real creature. Bogginses are orc-like, bulbous creatures that like to loot through people’s drawers. They are responsible for mischief like making only one sock in a pair go missing, which is why they earned a spot on Nignip’s list of minor curse words.

  * Rules and Regulations of Being a Wizard, Chapter 4. How to catch a broombranch: Hunt it at night while the tree is asleep. Do not try to wrestle or cut it off, especially not with a knife. The smoother the branch, the younger it is. Attempt to find one with a few knots. Middle-aged trees go through their own midlife crises and are thus unmotivated to run when you hunt them. We suggest these as the easiest option for beginning broombranch hunters.

  * Jeddison Licks and the Magnanimous Balloon, unknown chapter: Nignip is a fantastic place, if you like headaches and toothaches. I swear, if they serve a meal at my funeral, I want them to serve two hundred Nignip cakes and a barrel of firefly rum. As far as formalities go, this hoity-toity place is “protected” by some guy who refuses to be called king. He much prefers “The Great Wizard Weatherman Hightop” because: 1) “I am not a king,” and 2) I guess wizards are vastly more fearsome than kings. If you ask me, his head’s gotten too big for his buttons ever since the war, but you didn’t hear that from me.

  * Officially, the High Council came to places which most needed their help. Unofficially, they only came to places where they could get the least amount of work done.

  * There aren’t any equivalent words for this in human terms, but I will translate as best as I am able. Guurt: half noun, half adjective, occasionally a verb; to feel rock-congested or sedimentary, like the feeling you’ve had after taking a gravel bath and leaving too early because you forgot to scrape the mud off your toes first. Evidently, this is a common enough occurrence among giants for them to need a word for it.

  * And when the narrator says round, he quite literally means everything. A gnob’s nose is a button, and his eyes are portholes and his ears doorknobs, and even his belly is shaped like a barrel. Round isn’t just what they look like. They are defined by the very meaning of roundness.

  * More than that, she felt guilty. And sometimes guilt and anger are two siblings that hit with the same fist.

  * We must not be fooled by the appeal of instantaneous wishes. Milly realized just now that wishmaking, like many things in life, isn’t easily bought. Only a rare and lucky few get their dreams without consequences. For the rest of us, it requires a steeper price.

  * The whole notion of people pulling things out of thin air is a lie concocted by fake magicians who are too scared to reach into thick air. Thin air is the place where white lies and half-forgotten whispers drift about. Thick air is the home of deep hopes and heavy secrets.

  * Which is to say that he was still taller than even a large-sized man.

  * The artist who designed this door had taken some very serious creative liberties.

  * History can be an ugly creature. Contrary to belief, it is not objective. It changes its skin every few years the same way a snake sheds his. Because of this, history has a hard time knowing the difference between good and evil. Or truth and lies. It feeds on the tales told by whoever is still living and gets fat on only the stories that get told.

  * The giants of Arrett always referred to themselves as stone people because they came from the mountains and to almost everyone else as grass people because they came from the hills. Most giants found grass tongue very hard to get accustomed to, but Horace—being only half-giant—took it upon himself to speak both languages. Even if his grass father hadn’t been around to teach him.

  * “Keeping on” is a hard skill to master. It is not for the faint of heart or the slow of feet. Perhaps the worst part is that it’s a survival skill. You only get to practice when you don’t want to.

  * Favors are a dangerous business to get into. Most businesspeople in the Favors industry like conspiring with Shady Dealings and delegating in Strings Attached. Many of them are white-collar criminals, playing with the Gray Market and selling Favors back into the economy for half their market value. If anyone ever asks you to deal in Favors, hold one firmly in your hand and make sure it’s real. Bite on the edges with your teeth if you must. Study it under the brightest light you have.

  * By this point, Milly had more than mastered the art of Keeping On. Even so, she was glad that she didn’t have to face the even more horrible art of Walking in the Dark. There are some fears in life that we can beat with enough time and experience. Others have the unfortunate habit of sticking around.

  * You’ve likely heard it said that “curiosity killed the cat.” It’s often given as a warning to prevent you from taking unnecessary risks in your life. You know, like touching hot pots or crossing the road without looking both ways. But there are three universal truths that we don’t say: 1) Curiosity is very convincing, sometimes more so than death. 2) Girls are incredibly curious, sometimes more so than cats. 3) Curiosity doesn’t always result in death; sometimes it ends in something worse.

  * When Milly heard the word ricochet around in her mind, she finally understood the full weight of it. It wasn’t a curse. It wasn’t a spell or hex or even some kind of jinx. It was an old word full of courtesy and gentleness and urgency and hope. Not because it was inherently powerful. Because it was alive. It was the world’s simplest and oldest word. Older than “sun” or “love” or even “no.” It simply meant “please.”

  * On the contrary, Jasper was exercising the most self-control he possibly could at the moment. He wanted nothing more than to eavesdrop and offer his commentary on the entire conversation. But as a little wind, a profession which dabbles in the greatest of secrets, Jasper also knew exactly when not to listen to people’s conversations. Unlike most winds, he had boundaries.

  * We mustn’t judge Milly too harshly for how she reacted. If you’ve spent any amount of time among grown-ups, you know that they have a hard time looking at children as Actual Persons, regardless of whether they’re a gnome or gronkle, giant or tree. And Milly had spent so much of her entire life not being seen that experiencing it for the first time proved quite overwhelming.

  * A Witch’s Guide to Rudimentary Magicks, Chapter 2. How to befriend a broombranch: Becoming a broombranch’s partner is one of the first lessons a young witch must learn. Like all
things brimming with magicks, broombranches are living, sentient creatures with their own desires and wants and even language. We recommend treating them with the utmost care and patience. The best way to befriend a broombranch is to learn its language. Many broombranches are quite willing to partner with a witch, so long as the broombranch has matured to the point of detaching from its mother tree. Never try to cut an unwilling broombranch from its tree.

  * We treat this little voice like a dirty word. We don’t ever like to say it out loud at parties, for fear that it will ruin the mood or upset our guests. But even this voice, in the most particular of circumstances, can be a noble thing. Not for the person who holds it, but for the one it is given to. Listen, do you hear it? It calls itself Pity.