The boy keeps the ghosts at bay. That’s why I birthed him in the front bedroom overlooking the garden. Stained the sheets with blood and shit over the blood and semen of his conception.
There are too many of the dead on our street. At night we hear them grind against each other, tearing and ripping themselves apart. The boy is a small thing, though we feed him well. Haunted. Maybe in a literal sense. He does not say. He never speaks.
•••
Every morning they open the door and bring in two bowls. Each bowl contains a paste. The first they use to paint symbols on my face. Shaking fingers smear bone grained liquid upon my skin. The only time they touch me. I have seen the patterns reflected in the window. Three white lines run from hairline to chin. Across my eyelids. Across my cheeks. The design will flake away during the night like rotten bark on the birch trees I can see in the garden. The second bowl is food. The same food they have given me every day for seven years. I do not know what it is made from. I do not know what it tastes like. I do not eat it. The ghosts do.
•••
We paint his face with the three lines of the way-marker. The three lines of the gallows. The three lines of the gibbet. The ghosts know the painted boy is in there. Out of sight. We hear them howl around the walls. Scrape against the brick. Force themselves into the hollow bones of dead birds. Into the cries of rutting foxes. Into the scent of crushed hyacinths rising from the flower beds
•••
They come through the glass and swirl around the room like clouds of moths. They have mouths though they are hollow, and they pirouette around me like they can hear music I cannot. At a certain moment they will drape themselves in the paste, soak themselves like old rags, and become solid. Then, when they are sodden, when their eyes are filled with sour milk, then we will talk and they will tell me many things.
•••
We hear voices in the night, though the words are not ones we speak. We do not know if one of those voices belongs to the boy. He has never said one sentence to us. The words are rapid, intonation high pitched, like nails dragged through skin to the tendons beneath. We play music. Old blues songs and soft rock ballads. Nothing drowns out the words of the ghosts.
•••
The ghosts have been everywhere. They have licked salt from the eyes of angler fish and written curses in the snow of Kilimanjaro. They have branded themselves with molten rock in the chambers of Vesuvius, and sipped caviar from the ovaries of beluga sturgeon swimming in the Caspian Sea. I know all this in the scents they wear like fading perfume. They ask if they can enter the hollow spaces in my bones. The gap between mineral and marrow. I let them in.
•••
We do not amuse the boy. We do not play games with him or read him books. We do not talk to him at all. This is the routine we have had for many years. It works. The ghosts do not bother us. They stay in the room to swirl around him. Attracted by the taste of grave soil on his painted face. Only twice during the day do we have any contact with him. When we enter with the two bowls of paste and when we collect them later.
•••
The ghosts always seemed so vast when they swirled around the room. Nestled within me they are slight, barely taking up any room at all. I call more to me. There is plenty of space. I invite them all in.
•••
The door is stiff in the frame, yet soon opens. There is food paste smeared on the boy’s arms. On his chest. Dried lumps of oats and milk. The ghosts are not in the room. I go to pick up the bowls. The boy stops me. He places his hand upon my arm. His skin is cold and too still. Firm like chipped stone.
•••
We are here. We feel your breath, even through the boy’s skin. Through his wasted flesh. Your cruelty is here in misshapen limbs and neglected mind. We are in his eyes and we see you.
•••
Their words resonate. Though they use my vocal chords I do not fear the loss of control. Control has never been mine. They shuffle through my capillaries and cluster themselves around the follicles goosebumped from the chill of the open door.
•••
The words do not move his lips. They drip out like water from a leaf clogged gutter. His ribs undulate. The ghosts are moving within him. Dancing. Muscles as maypoles for the dead.
I dip my fingers in the body paint and begin to smear the ghost trap upon his face. Three interlinked boxes that will seal the ghosts within him for good. I never planned him to become a container. Merely a distraction. He grasps my hair, my neck. His grip is cold.
•••
We have sucked dreams of dead sailors from rotting whalebone and feasted on burnt muscle from the torn metal of abandoned cars. We have spat musket balls from the soil and chewed human fat from the blades of flensing knives. We have drunk sweat from rusted batteries in darkened rooms but yours is a special exquisite cruelty, which we shall feast upon until your tendons turn to dust.
•••
I reach up to wipe the unfinished pattern from my cheeks, staring at the white make-up staining my fingers. I do not feel them leave me, but I see them in her eyes. See them slide into the cushions of her lungs. Into the gaps between her bones. Turn themselves to ash and sand as they lick her nerves. As they expand to fill every space she occupies.
•••
We are here.
