Gamut Magazine
Issue #10

You Must Cut It From You

By: Andrew Kozma

(Originally published on Andrew’s Patreon.)

1.

            This is a city of ghosts. I have walked the streets when a crowd of ghost bikes rode by, their invisible tires throwing up asphalt from a dying road. I’ve stood on the Waugh Bridge and watched a Cooper’s Hawk dive bomb ghost bats and climb back into the sky with something in their claws which dissolved into the air like steam. I’ve given a dollar to a street corner panhandler only to remember, a block away, she’d been dead for two years. That, in fact, I’d seen her die on that corner, the sirens of the ambulance wailing in their too late, foregone conclusion.

            This is a city of ghosts. I am not one of them. Not yet.

2.

            The night is alive with echoes as I stand outside my ex’s door. From inside, the sounds of the party he’s having, a slurry of words and music that’s barely intelligible, but still, somehow, comforting.

            I knock decisively, as though I haven’t been standing out here for fifteen minutes, as though I haven’t been imagining I’m inside with a glass of wine, leaning against the wall like I was always meant to be there, installed when the house was built. And when the door opens to Henry standing there, dark and handsome as though he’d just been cut from the shadows, I force an easy smile to my lips.

            “Jessamine,” he says, every syllable building a wall between us.

            “Hey,” I start. And end. I’d had a prepared speech, but it evaporates in the space between us.

            “What are you doing here?” he asks, meaning I didn’t invite you. How did you know about the party? You don’t belong here.

            His voice isn’t loud or angry, but still the party quiets behind him, the wrongness that drove us apart born anew, and spreading. Henry fills the doorway. He is immovable. An obelisk. A statue carved into meaning.

            But he’s got holes in him, and I slip through the space between his arm and the door before he has a chance to react. He’s still thinking of the old me, the me who deferred to him, who kept her mouth shut, and didn’t impose unless she’d absolutely no other choice. He’d forgotten that’s not who I am, that was just the person I’d become over the last year as our relationship tailspun through an endless abyss.

            I sprint through the crowded rooms, smiling at people I know and nodding at those I don’t. Everyone, whether they know me or not, looks surprised to see me. One girl holds a whiskey neat frozen before her lips as though it’s an offering. She looks like someone Henry would like. Like like. I take the glass from her and down it in one gulp, giving her my most charming smile. She smiles back, her eyes gone flat.

            All of that is a distraction. As is my shouldering past Jericho so he tumbles into another guy, both of them scrambling hard enough to keep balance they become an octopus filling the hall behind me. It gives me the few precious seconds I need in our room before Henry comes to stop me.

            Our room.

            No longer our room.

            I shut the door behind me, turn the lock while knowing it never really worked, the latch bolt slipping from the frame with the slightest shoulder pressure. It takes me a second to focus, and when I do I see everything that isn’t there. My clothes in piles on the floor. The antique bedside table my grandmother gave me for graduating high school. The boy band posters I kept for, I told Henry, ironic enjoyment.

            Not only is nothing of mine left in the room, but the room—Henry’s room—looks unused. No evidence of anyone other than him sleeping in the bed, and no real evidence of him, either. It’s a Henry-themed hotel room. And the urn’s not here. The whole reason I crashed the party.

            Henry never wanted his mom’s ashes out for display. “It’s personal,” he’d say, and I told him if it was so personal than he should have buried the ashes, or put the urn in a cemetery, settled and forgotten in one of those alcove-filled remembrance walls. If it was too personal to share, he wouldn’t have cradled her ashes in a beautiful black urn with gold trim, wouldn’t have had tiny, perfect bluebirds painted onto the side. Eventually he gave in to me putting the urn out for show, but he ignored the urn completely. If someone asked about it, I had to step in and explain. And in some strange deferment to Henry’s feelings, I lied. The urn contained my favorite family dog when I was young. A college professor who willed his remains to me. It wasn’t an actual urn at all, but art carved from a bowling pin. I lie to myself when I say I lied to spare his feelings. I wanted him to correct me, to be so angry he claimed the ash-filled urn, put his feelings out there.

            In the back of the closet, on a shelf meant for shoes but that’s only ever collected roach carcasses, I find the urn. I stuff it in my purse where it only fits because I emptied out everything else before leaving the house.

            No one’s even tried the door. Henry hasn’t knocked. The music and conversation is back, an electric undercurrent to the atmosphere I’m insulated against. I get back to the front door without anyone giving me a second glance. They’re all pretending like I don’t exist. I suppose they think any attention they give me will explode this strange, small distraction into a full-blown scene.

            Henry’s still at the front door leaning against the doorjamb, his long legs blocking the door. The door’s open, unseasonably cool air blowing in over the two of us, the only thing we’ve shared for months.

            “You didn’t come find me,” I say.

            “There’s only one exit. You had to come back this way.”

            His eyes narrow in curiosity, asking a question I’m unwilling to answer. I smile and run a finger up his leg, and he pulls back like I knew he would.

            “Nice party,” I say as a kind of goodbye.

            “Goodbye, Jessamine.”

            My eyes tear up despite myself, but my face is turned away so he can’t see a thing as I leave. His words sound so final. And they will be once he finds out the urn is gone. But they’re the only chance I have.

3.

            The urn breaks against the concrete curb with a crack loud as a gunshot. The night rings with the echoes, but I’m not afraid of anyone interfering. No one’s awake here, and even if they were, the Houston default is to let the outside stay outside until it tries to make its way inside.

            The beautiful fragments of the urn lie half-buried in a pile of gray ash and white nuggets of bone. It was a person, now it’s not. As long as it was in the urn, the remains had the essence of a person. Henry saw it as his mom. Now the ash and bone is simply trash. But it’s trash I can use.

            I uncork a vial of blood I stole from my last medical check-up and empty it into the mess I’ve made where it pools at first, like mercury, then absorbs down to darken the ash. My breath is stuck in my throat. I’ve never done this before, but the wiki said to be patient, and I’m trying to be patient, but if nothing else happens then I’ve burned all my bridges and spread human remains on the Houston streets for absolutely nothing. And the curse I’m trying to avoid, it’ll come down on me and it’ll be exactly what I deserve.

            But then the blood evaporates, the ash undarkening to light gray again. A swirl of breeze twists the ash and the bone into a dust devil. Except there is no breeze. The night is classic Houston suckhole, a too-humid mixture of just-spat-out gum and steam-filled bathroom.

            The ashes and bone rise up, turning slowly in the motionless air until they reach my height. Then they fall again, except instead of falling back to the street the ash settles on something invisible. In a moment, I’m staring at Henry’s mother, Cassandra, her face outlined in ash, the fragments of bone stuck in the air where, I suppose, the bones were in real life. A fragment of a tooth sits behind the gray ghost of her jawline. Bits of skull and arm and hip and leg hang in the air, a constellation of bone. Her eyes are gaps surrounded by ash, but I can feel them focus on me. The ash eyebrows scrunch up. Her ash lips condense into a frown.

            “I’m so hungry,” she tells me, as though discussing the weather. Her voice is dull and lifeless.

            “I know,” I tell her, not knowing at all. I had expected maybe a tirade on how terrible a girlfriend I’d been since she’d never liked me, and I’d fulfilled her predictions by ruining the relationship just as she’d always knew I would, and convinced Henry to leave his steady research job in the process in order to become a musician.

            “I’m so, so hungry, Jessamine,” she says again, reaching for my arm while trying to keep my eyes locked with hers.

            Shit. I back up and root through the plastic grocery bag of supplies for the salt shaker. And when my hand grabs the cold glass cylinder, I throw it at the concrete sidewalk with all my strength, shattering it into a pile of glass and salt directly between the pile of ash and bone and me.

            Instantly, Cassandra pulls back as though the salt burns her.

            “I’m hungry,” she whines, a child denied ice cream.

            Quickly, I trace the salt in a tight circle around me, broken glass biting at the tips of my fingers. Tiny drops of blood dot my skin and Cassandra goes quiet and intense as a cat stalking its prey. Her empty eyeholes don’t leave the blood. And maybe it’s her obvious hunger or the curse starting to take hold, but the blood is beautiful to me, too, like rubies embedded in my skin.

            “I always loved you,” she tells my blood. “You were too good for Henry, that was all it was. And everything I said, I didn’t mean it.”

            “What did you say?” I can’t help asking. Everything I read implied that revenants lose memories, so I want to know if she remembers.

            “That you were a feckless slut with less than half a brain. That you made my Henry dumber just by sharing his bed. That you were bitter and bad with money and couldn’t cook worth shit. That I knew you hated me, but only because you were jealous, and you were right to be.” She stops. If she were living, she’d take a breath here. But the dead, their voices are continuous and forever. “I lied. All of that was a lie. I loved you.”

            I want to believe her. I don’t want Henry’s leaving to be my fault.

            “I loved you, too,” I tell her, as if my lying will make her lies more true. As if our rewriting the past can weave my relationship with Henry back into something whole, something true, something without the seeds of its destruction planted in it from the beginning.

            “Then give me your blood,” she insists.

            “In a moment,” I tell her. “But before the blood, I need you to tell me something. Where is the witch house?”

            Henry’s mother goes as still as a photograph. In the sudden stillness, her details become clearer, the ash stopping its constant movement to become the fine lines of a pen and ink drawing. The revenant is unmistakably Henry’s mother, but not from when she died, not after the months of wasting away, not a skeleton draped in skin. No, it’s from when she was younger, maybe even in her thirties? Is this the way she always saw herself, and so her ghost is made in her self-image? Even though I can see the heat-cracked bones behind the veil of ash, it doesn’t stop her from being beautiful. Beautiful and terrible. The woman who always tried to drive a wedge between Henry and me. Even after she’s dead, even after Henry and I have split up due to my own fault, I can’t forgive her, can’t rewrite the past between us.

            “Windsor and Cherryhurst,” she says, finally, her insubstantial body shivering back into life.

            “Windsor and Cherryhurst?” I repeat. I’d thought the witch house would be next to a graveyard or in one of the run-down areas of Houston, not in in condo-sprouting, constantly gentrifying Montrose. The intersection of Windsor and Cherryhurst is only a few blocks from an elementary school, not exactly where I’d expect to find the spiritual equivalent of crack dealers.

            I pick up salt from the circle around me and sprinkle it around Henry’s mother. More glass cuts my fingers, and that keeps her, at first, from noticing I’m hemming her in.

            “Blood?” she asks, sounding like a little girl. Not angry, just disappointed.

            According to what I’ve read, revenants are tied to their remains at first, but will break free as time goes on, their hunger overcoming the pain caused by separation from their earthly body. Salt will hold them as long as the salt remains. In Houston’s humidity, that won’t be long. But I didn’t find out how to return her from wherever I called her from. I didn’t have time. Truthfully, I didn’t care.

            “Jessamine!” she screams out as I start to walk away, utterly the angry woman I remember. “You promised!”

            I turn back.

            “You’re right.” It’s better not to break promises with the dead. “Hold a sec.”

            Squeezing my cut fingers brings a few bulbous drops of blood welling to the skin’s surface. I flick the blood at Henry’s mother and, more quickly than I can see, like the stutter-step of a spider, she catches all the blood from the air and brings the blood-wet ash to her lips. The muddy dark grey of the wet ash lightens and, for a moment, her lips return to life, fully-fleshed and blood red.

4.

            Houston is a city of ghosts, both of the living and the dead. I walk past Anvil, a bar Henry and I used to go to all the time, someplace we could pretend to be rich with fancy cocktails in our hands, gloriously ignoring the debt we were piling up. Debt isn’t real. It’s just another ghost, right, Henry?

            The bar is full of hipsters and the young moneyed, eyeing me as I pass. The guys think they’d be slumming it to be seen with me. The girls think the same, but are envious of that slumming. I smile at them all, pinning them down with a stare I’ve practiced to be a barbed hook. What I wouldn’t give to be one of them, separated from the Houston dark by a flimsy iron railing.

            Instead, last night I walked along Buffalo Bayou and saw a man fighting with a woman, pushing her closer and closer to the edge of the concrete path. The bayou was flooded with recent rains, branches and bags of trash clogging the current, water swirling in dangerous undercurrents. And, of course, there were always the alligators, the snakes, every wild thing which convinced people to keep their dogs leashed tightly to their side.

            Usually, I let people drown in their own problems. But usually I’m not confronted with some jerk holding a woman by the neck, lifting her in the air, screaming at her like she’s less than human, less than dirt. I ran up, didn’t even call out a warning or a “Hey, fucker, stop that!” and clocked him on the side of the head, so hard he stumbled away before crumbling to the ground.

            The woman he’d been abusing, she spoke in a whisper.

            “Jessamine.”

            But it wasn’t a woman anymore. It was Henry. His eyes were two burning coals and his dark skin unoiled ebony left in the sun for years and his lips, I couldn’t believe how much I’d missed his lips. I couldn’t stand it. All of him, resting there against the railing, reaching out towards me, hurt to be so close to, and not touching.

            I was distracted for a second by the sound of running and saw the man I’d punched already almost gone in the shadows of the night.

            Of course, I knew even in that moment I wasn’t looking at Henry. It was some form of ghost. But I didn’t care, no, I didn’t care and instead of fighting it like that man I’d saved, I opened my arms and welcomed Henry into my embrace. I kissed those lips—those full, cold lips—and stared into those eyes which burned like Henry’s, his intensity which I both couldn’t endure and couldn’t live without when he turned his attention to me.

            It only lasted a moment, this bliss.

            After that moment, the ghost was inside me. I was both the living and the dead.

            Thank you, it whispered, passing its curse to me.

5.

            At night, Cherryhurst Park, like every other park in Houston, is closed. There’s no fence around it, and the lights glow like will-o-the-wisps above the bright grass and heavy-limbed trees, so it looks abandoned instead of forbidden. Or abandoned and forbidden. A man sits against the tall tennis practice wall, face completely hidden in the shadows. On the far side of the park, a feral dog and a possum face off.

            Henry and I first lived in this neighborhood, when I moved into his place because my last roommate had thrown me out. This park was our park. And when we’d woken up in the middle of the night and made love and couldn’t sleep anymore, our bodies too alive with each other, we’d walk down here and haunt the playground. Henry loved the feeling of lying back in the cool grass, the tiny footsteps of insects crawling over him as though he was just another part of the landscape, another stone, another tree stump. I tried to do that, too, for him. To lose myself to nature.

            Now I want to set the park on fire.

            All the houses around the park are dark, except one. It’s an ancient, one-story house from the forties or fifties, all red brick which looks like dried blood at night and white-painted wood peeling like sunburned skin. A screened-in side porch is empty, but a lamp burns brightly inside it, drawing swarms of insects to crawl over the mesh pretending to separate the outside from the inside.

            The witch house.

            I already know what I’m going to find inside. Rooms too crowded to walk through, stacked with cardboard boxes splitting at the seams, silverfish and roaches peeking through cracks. An old woman in a wide, shapeless dress with crazy hair and kind-looking eyes who I wouldn’t trust to serve me coffee in a clean cup. On the walls, faded pictures of people I don’t want to know mixed in with Zodiac art of the most banal kind, mass-produced Cancer crabs and pseudo-religious and pseudo-scientific charts of the stars and their untrustworthy meanings.

            Henry didn’t leave me. I left him.

            My knock on the door is sodden, as if the door’s just a mass of termite holes. I knock again, because this is my last hope, my fist hitting the door so hard it rocks back and forth in loose hinges. Sometime while the sun is rising over the horizon, if I don’t get this curse lifted from me, I’ll become a ghost, taking the place of that one which entered me. I’ll wander the lonely paths of the city searching for lonely people who’ve lost someone, and promise them what they’ve lost. And if they refuse me, I’ll drown them in the bayou or bury them alive in the loose dirt of a median or take them apart limb by limb, devour their flesh, and pick my teeth with their slivered bones. The wiki was specific. The wiki had pictures. The wiki had the obituaries for those who’d taken the pictures.

            The door opens and a tall woman stands there, almost as tall as the door. Thin, too, as though she’d once been average size, maybe a bit overweight, but had been stretched to her current height. Her neck is long, her face long, but framed perfectly by a curly mass of hair.

            “Yes,” she says. It should be a question, but her tone is unreadable.

            “I’m cursed.” She doesn’t move. It makes me nervous. “A ghost. It entered me?”

            “Ah.”

            She walks back into her house, down a bare entrance hall into a dim room. Closing the door behind me, I follow. For some reason, I’m scared, though there’s no reason to be. What could be worse that what I’m already cursed with?

            As I enter the room, the lights come on. It’s an almost antiseptic living room which looks like it was transplanted wholesale from an IKEA display. Everything is white—couch, coffee table, easy chair—except for a rag rug which centers the room with a burst of orange. The woman isn’t there. Every other door to the room is closed. On one wall is a floating shelf (white, of course) with a few candles. Closer inspection shows they’re all electric. It’s all a farce. All fake. Whatever this is, it’s not going to help me at all, and I should just go over to Cherryhurst Park and lie back in the grass and close my eyes and just let it happen. Let it come.

            I’m almost out of the room when a door swings open and the woman enters, a pot of coffee in one hand, two cups hanging from their handles in her other hand. The coffee pot is stainless steel and polished, but the cups are mismatched, their surfaces stained with paint, the edges chipped, and that’s what decides me on staying.

            I sink into the easy chair. She pours coffee and perches on the edge of the couch.

            “I have no cream or sugar,” she says.

            “I prefer it black,” I lie, taking a long sip of what might as well be bitter acid.

            She smiles slightly, as if she can tell I’m lying. I smile to let her know I’m not.

            “I can see it in you.” She doesn’t touch her coffee. The steam from it wisps up between us. “Usually, they take longer to blossom, but in you it’s been almost immediate. When was it? Last week?”

            “Last night.” I’m not sure whether I should feel special or ashamed. I have to force myself to keep looking into the woman’s face rather than the coffee in my cup, the coffee a dark and muddy mirror I could dive into.

            For the first time, emotion flickers across the woman’s face. It could be fear or surprise or even, maybe, awe. Who knows? She’s not going to tell me and I’m sure as shit not going to ask her.

            “I’m impressed,” she says. Irrationally, warmth floods through me like I’ve aced a quiz. “You must really want to die.”

            “I don’t! I don’t at all. I wouldn’t be here if I wanted to.”

            The horrible coffee leaves my mouth tasting like coffee grounds, but I drink more of it anyway. It’s still so hot it scalds my tongue and blisters the roof of my mouth, but the pain keeps me from bolting from the room.

            “Wanted to what?”

            It’s hard to get the word out. For what seems like an infinite minute, my brain is caught in a loop and my lungs refuse to push out the air I need to speak.

            “Die,” I finally manage, sinking even further into the easy chair. “I don’t want to die.”

            The woman stares at me. Her eyes don’t blink. The buzz of insects comes from somewhere close, like under the floor or the air vents. All I can smell is the coffee and my own sweat, both rank and stale as though days old.

            She shakes her head. “I can’t save you.”

            “What?”

            “Only you can save yourself.”

            Anger wrenches me out of the chair. “What is this? Some new age, self-help bullshit!”

            “It’s the truth. Take it or leave it.”

            Not angry in turn, again as hard to read as a rock, she leaves the room. After the door closes behind her, I notice a small knife on the table holding down a piece of paper. The knife is kitchen knife, razor sharp. The paper has a numbered list. At the top of the list, a heading.

            You must cut it from you.

6.

            Under the bridge where I pushed the guy clear of his own death and took the ghost meant for him, the air is cool and the night broken with the earliest of early traffic. My nose is stuffed with bat guano. From every direction, bats return in ones and twos. Henry and I came here early in our relationship, back when I wanted to impress him with my knowledge of the city, a city new to him and one he didn’t want to love. The exodus of the bats at dusk stuns everyone into silence.

            The knife goes across one palm without pain. I grab the railing and leave a smeared handprint of blood.

            “I don’t want to hurt you, Henry.”

            The instructions gave no indication of how I’d feel, but inside my chest something swells. It hurts as if something’s using my organs to claw its way to freedom. At first, it is a struggle not to scream, but then the pain dulls, like I’m drowning or falling asleep.

            Switching the knife to the cut hand, I cut my uninjured palm and mark the railing again.

            “I forgive you for the pain you’ve caused me. I forgive myself for the pain I’ve caused you.”

            Across the bayou, a woman jogs. She glances my way and glances quickly away. The pain in my chest grows worse and I can’t help a scream I cut short only by biting my lip so hard I taste blood and the flesh I rip away.

            “We were never meant to be.”

            Holding my breath, I stab into my stomach and cut the knife in a small circle. It slices easier than I expected, like cutting through lard, and barely hurts at all. When I’m done, I drop the knife. It’s at this point, while the pain I know I’m going to feel soon is building up in my brain like an ocean wave about to knock me down, I consider the knife and the instructions, it could all be a trick. A lie. Just something to get me out of the house.

            “Get out of me!”

            I scream. Nothing happens. Then the pain hits and the plug of ruined flesh is sucked in.

            “Get out of me!”

            A finger probes out of the hole, painted in blood.

            “Get out!”

            More pain, my entire body ripping in two, and I’m thrown against the railing where I hang, unable to do anything as the ghost scrapes my insides raw on its way out of my body. Its arm, then head through the tiny hole I cut, straining at my skin without breaking it, yanking itself free inch by inch, until it’s free and I’m on my back on the hard, stone path, blood all around me.

            Hovering above me is the ghost. Its hair streams around it in a wind that doesn’t exist. Her face is my face. Her eyes, my eyes. Her smile, cruel and careless, mine, as well. She licks her lips free of blood and then slips away into the night, leaving me to the slow, unavoidable dawn.

Andrew Kozma’s fiction appears in ApexFactor Four, and Analog, while his poems appear in Strange HorizonsThe Deadlands, and Contemporary Verse 2. His first book of poems, City of Regret, won the Zone 3 First Book Award, and his second book, Orphanotrophia, was published in 2021 by Cobalt Press. You can find him on Bluesky at @thedrellum.bsky.social and visit his website at www.andrewkozma.net.

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