At a Great Distance from Herself
At first, the ghost seized her vocal cords, arresting an insult that dangled from her lips. One moment, she was going to take the waitress to task for leaving mayo on her chicken sandwich, and the next she was a hundred feet behind her face. Traces of what the waitress said only reached her through a thick fog. She turned her head without deciding to turn it, smiled at the waitress without wanting to smile, and took a bite of the sandwich even though she’d rather vomit onto a plate than let the slick flavorlessness of mayonnaise infiltrate her mouth. For the rest of the meal, her body acted on its own. Had she become insane? Was this a stroke? Surely other symptoms would arise, but there was no sudden delusion, no collapse, no burnt toast aroma alerting her to brain damage. Instead, the hours brought the emergence of intentions coursing through the fog.
Kindness rippled around her, and in the office kitchen, she smiled at that bitch Mary who always left a dirty mug in the sink. Something was in control. It stopped at Mary’s desk and talked for a bit about the weather. Kris could tell it wasn’t part of her because the phrase “barometric pressure” existed in no corner of her mind. But what was it? If weight was holding her down, she could thrash her arms and wriggle free, but all of her muscles were loyal to some other force.
As she tried to divine the identity of whatever it was that piloted her, her day blurred past her eyes, as far from her as the horizon. Though it didn’t escape her attention that instead of her usual evening routine– wine and Facebook in her dark living room– her body was under the bright lights of a gym. Waves of pleasure tittered in the fog as it stacked heavy weights upon her body and dared it to lift them away. This presence didn’t know her, didn’t know about the constant fatigue that kept her bound to the couch most nights. Yet the weights went up again and again and again, all Kris could do was hope that this thing would be the one to suffer the agony which resulted.
Even by nighttime, no pain had reached her. Her body slept soundly, but she was as alert as ever. In the entire day the presence had taken from her, she hadn’t endured a second of hunger, and was more awake than when it first grabbed her. Joy and terror agitated the placid fog. It was dreaming. Kris focused on those feelings. Flashes of color and scent wrapped in familiarity came to her, but that familiarity wasn’t hers. Probably remembering the last body it took a joy-ride in. But it wouldn’t have such an easy time with Kris. Over the miles and miles of fog, she tried to move her arm. Nothing. She kept at it for hours, and she tried once more as another flash of the fog’s colors flooded her mind, orange and red just like the sunrise, her fingers twitched. As the color drained, the twitching stopped, and her body rose from bed. A morning person, on top of everything else.
When the presence was awake, her body felt no closer than it had after the first moment she lost it. But as it took her through stolen day after stolen day, Kris worried about the images blurring past her eyes less and less. If it ruined her friendships, lost her job, it didn’t matter. None of it was as important as getting her body back. So when her best friend and neighbor, Lucy, greeted her from the lawn, Kris didn’t bother focusing on her face– ignoring that pock-marked skin was a relief– but sensed the electricity in the fog. Curiosity. Fear. Loneliness. Flashes of another face, just as fucked-up as Lucy’s. Did it miss someone? Those glimmers didn’t look much like Lucy, but the eyes looked at whoever was remembering them and when they lingered, gold glittered around the pupil.
Kris focused her hatred at that barely-remembered face. She imagined it catching on fire, being torn apart by wolves, getting pummeled by fists until it was a mass of black-purple that signified a face was once there. The fog snapped that image away, like it had touched a hot stove. From then on, every time the presence had a warm feeling, Kris flooded it with bile. When it was sad or upset, she gave it delight. For peace, anger at the world, herself, and it. Especially at it. And when it slept, she would sneak into its dreams. For a while, she could only get little flashes, like the first night. But as the months went by, she slid closer and closer until the dreams might as well have been hers.
Everyone in the dream was dressed in civil war re-enactment gear. It was a pretty high-budget production: cannons boomed and fake blood gushed from convincing severed limbs. But Kris could see the crowd watching from a distant hill, so she knew it was fake. A blue-uniformed man with a mustache grasped the presence by the shoulder and seemed like he was trying to say something, but the words didn’t come out and his mouth worked silently for a moment, and the gunfire got louder, and his eyes turned from the presence to the enemy lines; big teardrops ran down his cheek, quivering to the beat of the gunfire. He entered the crowd and became an inky void shoving his way through the soldiers standing still, all waiting for a cannonball to strike.
A baby nestled into the crook of a hairy arm. Its small hands grabbed at the lumpy nub at the end of a wrist, finding purchase only at those cliffs and divots where it hadn’t healed smoothly. A lilting voice called a name from the other room, and the viewer’s eyes looked at the rough wood walls like it could stare through them and find the object of the love which tingled at the bottom of the dream. But when it looked down the baby was gone. The house was empty. The presence’s one good hand was covered in blood.
Snow fluttered in the gusting wind. No trees, no buildings, no roads were visible in the blizzard which circled the presence. When it tried to grab the handle of an ax jammed deep into the tree stump in front of it, splinters pierced through its hand. There was no wood to chop, no building to rest in, no end to the cold that settled deep in the muscles and bones and heart.
The fog had its chance at life, and it wasted it. Kris wasn’t about to lend her body to a charity case. She’d done her part. She’d been responsible. She deserved her body. When a co-worker showed Kris’s eyes a picture of a baby, she imagined violence after violence into the fog. It crackled orange, the formerly gentle wafting vapor now spiking and screaming. Kris felt her body smile, excuse itself, and find a secluded corner of the office. It sat down and cradled her head in her hands. Kris wasn’t done. She imagined blood and shards of bone and ribbons of flesh so finely shredded no one could tell where on the body they came from, but it was still so obviously human. The fog’s distress was a rope dangling from a distant light above, and with each horror Kris fed it, she climbed up further and further.
It slammed her hands on the ground. It rocked back and forth and grunted and punched her thigh and bit her lip and clenched her shoulders and wasted a few of her tears on its plight, but the fog’s spikes grew more jagged and the orange looked like a bright fire burning deep beneath smoke. Kris imagined the baby from the dream, cold and blue on the stump, with the ax embedded loosely in the wood next to it. That time, the picture was a warning shot and the fog became light shooting in all directions. Kris’s eyes zoomed close and her tears wet her cheeks.
The first thing she did with her body was cry some more. Her body hadn’t been friendly to her the last twenty years, accumulating unsightly wrinkles and marks, but running her hand over the vellum hairs on her arm sent chills of pleasure up her reclaimed spine. She wanted to scream that she’d returned, that there had been an imposter, but no one would believe that. None of them had even noticed she was missing.
On the walk back to her desk, she expected to be questioned. About her behavior, about her sudden absence. But everyone was smiling at her. Was it someone’s birthday? Had someone everyone hated died? The most dour office she’d ever known was bubbling with joy. Maybe they’d sensed her triumph. Joseph poked his head out of his cubicle. “Hey Kris. How’s the weightlifting going? Five-by-five still treating you right?”
Why was he talking to her? The two hadn’t traded more than a couple non-work-related sentences since a tense meeting a year ago. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” No balm like the truth. His smile vanished, and his cubicle swallowed him back in, but unfamiliar little greetings peppered her throughout a workday that was usually accompanied by long silences. The next day, everyone was still delighted to see her, even though her elation had given way to the normal morning dreariness. Only a minute after she sat down and let the weight of the world tumble from her shoulders to the desk, Mary tapped a knuckle against the felt wall of Kris’s cubicle. “Hey Kris, you’re not gonna believe this, Brandon took his first steps on Saturday. I’ve got a video, and-”
“Who asked?”
Mary deflated and left without further disturbing the peace of Kris’s minute dominion. Similar visitors persisted one by one, but over the next week they stopped. The smiles which had shared in her victory faded and, absent their light, Kris learned they were never for her. She had stumbled onto a stage before an audience waiting to see the presence. Inertia had kept them in their seats, and by the time she’d become accustomed to their adulation, they were gone. One day, as the silence in her cubicle grew a little too loud, she ventured over to Mary’s corner of the office. She was better at being a person than some ghost from who-knows-when, she’d be able to win Mary’s affection back easily.
But when she got to Mary’s cubicle, suspicious eyes pinned Kris down. What would the presence have said? How did it get them to like her so much? Why couldn’t she remember what it did? She stammered out a few greetings, then said, “How’s that baby? Doing anything interesting lately?”
“Oh. Right. Because he’s so boring. Thanks, Kris.” Mary returned her attention to her screen and Kris slunk away. Further attempts to recapture the life the presence had won for her were met with similar results. Frowns, downturned eyes, and a quiet taking deeper and deeper root in her heart.
She tried returning to the restaurant, hoping the presence would have returned to wait there amongst the scarlet cloth napkins and abundant faux-gold light fixtures. But all she got was poor service and a plate of chicken marsala which was so unusually sweet that she could only finish a third of it. In her dreams, she called the fog back to envelop her, but nothing was listening.
If it wouldn’t come back of its own accord, she’d force it to.
Kris lit another candle, all of them arranged in a purposeful circle on her floor with black electrical tape tracing lines and curves between them, and read a list of phrases from a dusty book she’d gotten at the library. A girl at the front desk with one of those disgusting piercings through the bridge of an otherwise pretty nose recommended it and the circle, the blood, the tape. The clerk told her that it was an apology to the spirit, and an invitation to meet again as equals. She stumbled over some collections of h’s and t’s and strange configurations of vowels, but she got it close enough. With the invitation complete, she added her own conditions. “You will take my body only when I’m at work, or in other situations with my permission. You will tell people only what I permit you to say about us. You will not use my body to assist any other ghosts in possession, haunting, or other mischief.”
Once she finished, she tossed the book on the couch, and winced when a little puff of dust emerged into the moonlight streaming through the open window. Hopefully the neighbors wouldn’t see. The last thing she needed was the gossip mill starting up.
The book told Kris to use her own blood–the clerk too– but Kris got woozy in the break between lunch and dinner due to blood sugar issues, and losing a pint would break her focus. She’d purchased some pig’s blood to take her place. The book didn’t mention anything about strength of will, but how could anyone accomplish a ritual without it?
Blood splattered on the white tile, and Kris worried that it would stain, and she’d eventually take a hit on the resale value of her condo. Before she could go and get some cleaning spray, the candles flared into five pillars of swirling fire. Everything else in the room vanished behind smoke thick as a wall and the circle called her closer. Where was the book? No matter, obviously she should walk in and confront the spirit. Ask why it had left her in such an untenable position.
Before she could register her complaint, the spirit residing in the circle seized her neck and shoulders and lifted her in the air. Her face trembled and saliva sputtered from between her lips, and her wild, useless kicks to try and secure freedom carried less and less power until two feet dangled uselessly in the air. Once again, her body rushed away from her, but this time she could only see shadows backlit by the fire which grew and grew until it spread all over the ceiling. Deep in the darkness a bright little mouth opened and took a bite out of her mind. Little shreds of herself caught in its teeth as she forgot her name, forgot pain, everything. By the end the mouth was large and red and wasn’t it nice that it was smiling as the teeth came down one last time.