ALICE
“Are you proud of yourself?” Sandra asks.
“What do you mean?”
“You did that,” Sandra says. The new ghost whimpers—a low, animal sound. “Congratulations on a nice little show.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, even though of course I do.
She means the lightbulb—the explosion. And I am proud. I’m ecstatic. It has been many, many years—decades—since I’ve felt that kind of power.
And it gives me hope.
I’ve only seen one bad fire. I was seven or eight when a conflagration spread through our neighborhood in Boston and leaped across several houses before attacking St. John the Divine and the funeral parlor next to it; by morning, the houses were gone and the church was blackened with smoke and ash. The air stunk like melted glass and something chemical I couldn’t name, and volunteers were enlisted to bring coffins out of the wreckage. My sisters and I went down to watch the action, and in particular, to see the bodies come out: coffins covered in a layer of silt and ash, bodies bundled in tarpaulin and half burned away, bits of hair and fingernail.
The fingernails keep growing, my sister Delilah told me. The hair, too.
Someday you’ll be dead like that, my sister Olivia said. You’ll be nothing but bone and fingernail, and no one will miss you.
Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.
Sandra doesn’t know about my plan for the fire. How could I tell her? If I’m right, it will be the end of us. That’s the whole point. In fiction, ghosts remain because of some entanglement with the living world, something they must do, resolve, or achieve.
I assure you that isn’t the case for me. The world has nothing to offer me, no single shred of interest. I’m a woman trapped on a balcony, watching a passing parade, a blur of noise and motion that eventually turns to a single point on the horizon, a gutter full of trampled and muddy cups, and the sense of wasting an afternoon.
There was Maggie. But even she might be dead by now. I like to think I would have known, would have felt it, but I know that’s fantasy. Maggie was a stranger to me in her adult life, a stiff-backed, short-haired woman with tastes and habits I hardly recognized. Tofu, she told me, the last time I visited her in San Francisco, when she served me a plate of vegetables and brown rice and some lumpy, milk-white substance that reminded me of curdled fat. I’m a vegan now.
Amazing, isn’t it? That hearts that once beat in sync could be so perfectly and forever separated. That’s the whole process of life, I think: a long, slow process of separation. It can be cured only by the reabsorption into everything, into the single heartbeat of time.
It’s my time to go home.