In the Silence That Follows

Written by A. M. Johnson

In the silence that follows I am reminded that I am a ghost in life as much as I will be in death. My joke has landed at the party flat, like uncapped soda left in windowed sun. Desperate desperate desperate. I need to tie myself back, to wrap a ribbon around my waist and pull until I’m almost sliced in half, but not, just bleeding and bandaged, but I can’t. It’s too late. I’m open and desperate and bleeding all over the psychiatrist’s floor, so to speak. I run to the yellow bathroom, and am now quite prepared to cut my throat with the wife’s rusted razor. Luckily, at the last moment, I have a revelation, that those unseen can do as they please. 

Recognition is a gift as much as a curse. 

So I leave the party and walk. The concrete is cracked and hurts beneath my rotten ballet flats. I watch the peeling pleather thin with every step I take, flaking off onto the street like the breadcrumbs of an orphan in the woods. I walk blind, my stumped legs blurred behind my tears. Gooseflesh rises on my arms and turns me sick. But I have to walk, have to feel the party getting quieter and further away. And I walk, and I plan. I will go to the graveyard and pray. I will ask the dead to send me divine purpose on swift wings⁠—whatever the hell that means. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know where I am. I just feel these words and know it’s what I must do. Because I won’t last the night without a new god. 

Don’t count your kittens before they die. 

The graveyard is across the street from the party, as it always should be. I cut through the grass diagonally, brave and offensive, like walking through a school for the blind. I am trying to open myself. I am trying to breathe cold air and dim stars. But I am still sobbing, still picking at the scabs from my most recent god. O God of vodka tonics, creator of casual smoke. I came to you tired and hungry and you smote me at once. I offered you my bread and oranges, I gave you my loneliness and devotion, and this is how you repay me? Burn my mortal flesh. Stomp my teeth to powder against the curb. Are you this cruel to all your new disciples? Or am I simply the worst one to try? Either way, your true disciples are wise. They smelled the lie on me at once. They knew a good disciple would never wear a dress like this to a party, this black sack which is too old and too young at the same time.

Never wear a good dress twice.

I limp my way to the smallest, oldest headstone. The grey name is unknowable, worn flat with time. I kneel before the stone’s elderly face, before its mossy cracks. The nighttime grass is damp, and I am instantly soaked through. I lay my hands against the ground and shut my eyes and say, “Anything, please.” An owl hoots somewhere. I wait, and I try not to see the dress, the way it stretches between my shoulders and my knees. This ugly, sagging, ancient thing smells more like mold with every godless second that goes by. But I’m trying to pray. 

Try to pray. Try not to remember how you used to sit in the bathroom stalls at school, waiting for gym class to end⁠—and one time it was quiet, too quiet and you were certain as you were washing your hands that someone passed by in the mirror. You told everyone. No one believed you. They called you ghost girl and laughed. So you learned a vital lesson, that regardless of truth, faith is a currency, one you spend where you’d put your money, that is, where you’d put your mouth. 

There’s no use trying to force divinity. 

I lay down on my side and let the cold seep into my dress. I tie my arms around my waist and cinch the straps tight. My eyes refuse to close, wired to the tempo of my terrible joke. I play it on a spiral, getting stranger every time. I listen and listen and listen to the sound of my own voice in my ear until it is no longer the joke that failed. And yet, when I hear the noise I am startled as if dragged from the premises of sleep. My eyes open to nothing but vertical grass. Still, the noise remains. It sounds like dirt being dug, and then, a muffled voice.

“Excuse me?”

In the triangle made by my arm’s makeshift pillow, the grass is disturbed. It seems the dirt is being pushed up, dug from beneath. A hole opens between the weeds, just big enough for two pink things to poke through. The fingertips disappear, replaced by a single open eye. 

“Excuse me.” The eye blinks away the dirt as it falls. “Excuse me, I need to get by.” 

“Oh,” I say. “Sorry.”

I crawl away from the grave. The ground slowly erupts, clumps of dirt falling away under the pushing of hands. I sit on an even colder, wetter patch of grass and let the dew seep through my rag underwear to my ass. I try not to stare as the body clumsily drags itself onto dry land, grunting with the effort. Is it ruder to offer help, or to say nothing at all? Before I can decide, the body rolls onto its back, panting, catching breaths. And then chuckling, a low, humorless noise. The body sits up. The shape of the curved spine is like one of Milton’s mountains, thrown by an angel who forgot to clean up after the war. A hand reaches up to scratch the mane-like mass of hair, heavied as it is by grease. Dust falls fast under the onslaught of nails. 

“Well, shit,” the body says. “No noose is good noose, I guess.”

The skin around the fingers of the body’s hand is perfectly smooth. As molded clay, as carved stone. I rub my thumb over the cracked mud of my own cuticles, the crunched red flesh at either side of the nails. Ugly. Another wave of blurriness enters my eyes and I know I must hide my face. I duck my head and hold it until it refuses to shake. Salted water drags over the broken skin of my lips and stings. Even a corpse is more lovely than me, I think, even a corpse is more alive. So I mourn. And when I look back up again, the body has turned its head to look at me with a face that is both human and alive. The weight of being seen descends⁠—the terrible crawling of it all. I avert my gaze, only to remember that I am the ghost here. 

I point blandly to my flat chest. “You can see me?” 

The corpse’s eyes are round and black and wet like caviar.

“Sorry.” I mean to say more, but I don’t.

The body climbs to its feet and stretches. As it leans backward, spine groaning with the force of the stretch, I realize it is a woman-shaped thing. Her dirty hair is Farrah Fawcett huge. The shape of her chapped lips is sweetheart beneath the grime. Still, the idea of being wrong about anything, ever again, is too much to bear. I must find proof before I say a word. But she’s wearing a dress like an ancient brown sack, and the blunt fabric obscures everything between her shoulders and her knees. Finally I find the outline of breasts, the two nipples straining against the burlap. I find them just as she reaches the apex of her stretch. But she breathes out then, and releases herself, and catches me looking. 

So we stand there, sit there, waiting for the other to give up.

“Walk with me,” she says.

The woods around the graveyard are young. The teenage trees give off their darkness with a sick and smirking pride. But the moon is mostly full, and besides, the streetlamps are still visible from the nearby street, darting like orange fireflies in and out of the brush. So I can see fine as we walk through the thinned bramble, along the implication of a path. Our two bodies are accompanied only by the sound of leaves. The corpse woman stays ahead, leaving me to watch her shoulder blades move like mechanical parts. Her ankles are caked with grave dirt. The touch of mud illumes every fine, horizontal line which promises tendons underneath. I try not to stare, to watch only the awkward slumping of her shoulders as she lumbers from foot to foot. 

The urge to apologize is overwhelming. Sorry for calling, I want to say, in the middle of the night like this. But every possible configuration of apology sounds like doomsday even to me. My heathen mind does not know, but suspects that to say certain things, to ask certain questions, violates the rules of any given god. After all, the admittance of weakness damned me in the eyes of my last try. To Him, I am still damned. Is this god the same? Is it a virtue to want to know, in your omniscient eyes, or a sin to ask for anything more? 

Too afraid to ask, I walk in silence, waiting to untie my knot. The corpse woman weaves through the woods, which are thickening now, growing older with every step. The path crunches louder as we go, growing painful underfoot. My ballet flats catch on fallen branches, on spiked and leafless vines, drawing hushed oaths from the tender hollows of my feet. Meanwhile the corpse handles the path without fail, stepping on every hurtful thing. I check the arches of her bare feet and find them devoid of blood. What if somehow, the answer is to take off my shoes? Maybe this is the kind of faith where you are saved from pain by putting yourself in harm’s way. But surely I’ll bleed without callouses’ help. And besides, if I take off my shoes, she’ll laugh at me⁠—at how pale and clean my feet are. 

“If you don’t stop that.” The corpse woman’s deep voice cuts through the dry din. 

I realize only then that I’ve been picking at the skin beside my nails, rending blood from beneath fragile scabs. 

“Sorry.” I tuck my thumbs into my fists. The rub of skin on skin burns. 

“It makes this awful sound, like a…clicking noise.” She curls her lip in the direction of my hands. “Why do you people do that, anyway?” 

“We get nervous, I guess.”

“Nervous,” she scoffs. “Does it help?”

“Not really.”

The sound that comes from her nose, halfway between a sniff and a honk, reminds me of a laugh. It is so close to genuine that I feel emboldened. 

“If I may ask…”

The corpse woman scratches her scalp through her matted hair again. “Yeah?”

But it is suddenly so embarrassing to say anything strategic or practical in the wake of her assured casualty. The way she picks bugs out of the knots in her hair and considers eating them is suddenly so divine.

I clear my throat. “Where’d you get your dress?”

“Oh, this thing?” She pinches the broad straps. “Had it for as long as I can remember.”

We walk like this, in the comfortable silence of a treaty, for a long time before breaking through a gap in the woods. The clearing ahead is a strange bright spot amongst the trees, which crowd at the edges of the grass, straining to see inside. If I were to look past the trees, I would find nothing. From the center of the clearing, I can’t see further than the next tree’s bark. But I don’t try to look, I don’t even really know that the woods are there. All I can think about is sitting on the cold wet grass, prying the ballet flats off my battered feet. The plastic pulls away from my bare ankle with a sticky sound, like suction. Blood has stained the inside of the shoe, but not much. And the wound is not deep. The thin skin has merely been ground off by my refusal to touch the ground. 

I toss the ballet flats away, scrunching the earth between my broken toes. The grass is soft and damp again on my now-bare feet. I rub my legs forward and backward like a cricket, letting the dew soothe my skin. The sensation is like itching, like the need to do nothing but scratch. Who knows how long I let myself do this. Only when the grass gets warm from the friction of my blood-warmed body do I stand up. I roll onto my hands and knees, ready to push up, but I’m so tired suddenly, so happy and so strange in that happiness that I lay face down on the grass instead. Holding the whole ground with my body, the dew soaks me, chilling me to the bone. But the gooseflesh is gone, replaced by a flush of blood. I am chilled to the bone, but I am not shivering, I have never felt warmer in my life.

“I’m so relieved.” I roll on my back to talk upward, toward the stars. 

The corpse woman is somewhere above my head, sitting on a blank spot of grass. 

“Why?” she asks. “Some creep at the party?”

“No.” I look to see her sitting like a hina doll. “It doesn’t matter now.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I’m okay now.”

“If you say so,” she says, and stomps over to another spot on the grass. 

I hold my head in my hands and watch, making grass angels with my legs. I tear a blade to pieces and watch from the corner of my eye as she reaches under the world. The corpse woman rifles around. The noise that follows is like junk. Like an aluminum trash can, dumped just outside your front door.

“Sorry about this,” she says. “We haven’t organized the supply closet in ages.”

“That’s alright,” I say, and mean it for once. “I don’t mind.”

“Well, you might not mind.” She grunts, and her forearm disappears into the world beneath mine. “My boss, on the other hand, is pissed.”

“Can I help with that?”

She scoffs, wiggling the other arm into disappearance. “I don’t see how you could.”

“I don’t know. I could put in a good Yelp review?”

The corpse woman laughs, forcing a bead of sweat to drip off the end of her nose. 

“You’re funny,” she breathes. “But seriously, that’s not your job. I’m here to give you a hand, remember? Well.” She nods to her erased arms. “When I can.”

“Ha, ha.”

“Yeah, I’m here all week.” She pulls, holding her breath, and then lets it all out in a puff. “Actually, I take it back. I have it, it’s just stuck under something heavy. Would you…?”

“Oh, yeah.” I climb to my feet. “Sure.” 

I skip over and reach past her into the cool dark space beyond. She waits until I have a firm grip like hers. She counts one, two, three⁠—and we both pull at once. Our elbows lock as we lean back, pulling with all our gravity and strength. She mutters something about just a little more. I slip once in the misty grass. But we both recover in time to wrench the object into the visible world. The final pop is hard enough to send me sprawling in the grass. With the scrapes and the chill and the damp, it hardly feels like pain at all. I climb to my feet, just in time to see her brandish something, drawing it like a sword, like an arm from a too-tight sleeve.

“Alright,” she sighs and tucks the object into her pocket. “Let’s go.”

“Okay,” I say, and lead the way. 

The way back is easier than the way there. It takes longer but I’m safe this time. I know I’ll be alright if I stop and look up sometimes, to watch satellites cross in the gaps between trees. To my surprise, the corpse woman stops with me. When I look to my right, I find her eyes catching the stars. Her neck is craned back, and I have the thought that she really is pretty. And I don’t mean under the dirt and grime. I mean exactly as she is. I want to look at her for as long as I can, at the way her face cracks the dried red clay.

“This is going to sound strange,” I say. 

“Shoot,” she says.

I don’t know what this god wants from me, but I now know why I went to that terrible party in the first place. 

“I would like to love you,” I say. “If you don’t mind.”

When the corpse woman turns, she looks like an owl, surprised at the unfamiliar noise. 

“You’re sure about that?” she says. “I’m dead.”

“And I’m invisible.” I shrug. “Wouldn’t be so bad.”

“You’re not invisible. Stop saying that.”

“Then admit it. You’re not dead.”

She opens her mouth as if to argue. But I’m already smiling, and she can’t help herself. 

“Fine,” she says. “I don’t mind.”

We hold hands for the rest of the walk, my chill intertwining with her feverish warmth. It’s tentative at first⁠—her hands are the same size as mine. We struggle for a bit, trying to figure out whose thumb goes where. Once we figure it out, it's easy. This is the way it’s always been, her hand knotted tightly with mine. She talks to me about star stuff and tree bark, poetry and work. She points out the mushrooms as we walk, the white pucks growing like avant-garde shelves on the sides of rotted stumps. She ducks beneath my enormous hair and whispers that they’re quite perverse, those fungi⁠—you’re better off chatting with acorns. I laugh and say, “Of course, you would know.” 

“What about dandelions?” I ask as our bare feet cross over one small yellow head. 

“You’d like them,” she says. And then she snickers a bit, adding, “They’re actually a lot like you.” 

“Apologetic?” I ask, in a bashful sort of way.

“Brave.” She kisses the back of my hand. “When did a weed ever apologize to a lawn?”

At the graveyard, it is still night. Yet I can tell, from the way the owl has gone quiet, that dawn is coming soon. The traffic is almost audible now⁠—an occasional car can be heard from the major street that runs just outside the cul de sac. The party is over. It’s time to say goodbye. As we both dig the dirt of her grave with our hands, the smallest twinge of fear hits my gut like a hummingbird’s beak. But it's soothed quickly, as she takes my muddy, filthy hand and puts the object inside. She wraps my fingers around it until it is a package, a gift. It’s small now, and lighter than air. Holding the object still through the bones in my hand, she looks at me with eyes that say, do you understand? I nod and smile back. 

“Now you know I love you,” she says, as I put my new faith in the pocket of my dress.

“I do,” I say. “And I love you too.”

“You’re sure you don’t need anything? I can walk you home.”

“I’m okay,” I laugh. “But really, you need a good night’s sleep.”

“If you say so, lover.” She starts pulling the dirt over her neck, her face. “But I’ll tell you right now that I make no promises about sleep.”

On this night in the graveyard, I sit on the grass and laugh. I watch the dirt sink back into its rightful place, falling with a sound like leaves. 

“Call me when you get home,” I yell downward, into the depths of the grave. 

Distantly I hear her shout: “You already know I will!”