—high behind our house. The thought makes me laugh as I reach for my glass. Empty. I need more water. I glance at the waitstaff just to see which server’s attention I can get without disrupting my mother’s toast. I can’t make eye contact with any of them. They’re all staring off at the same vacant spot in the ether, their bodies present but not here.
Except him. There’s one more waiter standing directly behind my mother. He’s tucked into a shadowy recess, his back pressed against the wall. I hadn’t even noticed him before. Jesus, just how many servers are there? It’s not like Mom needed to hire an army to feed ten people.
At least he’s making eye contact with me. I gingerly lift my empty glass, beckoning him for a refill. He seems to get the message loud and clear because he takes a step forward and—
I see the long gash across his throat.
“Oh god.” It just comes spilling out of me. I can’t stop myself.
Mom glares at me before continuing. She thinks I’m trying to sabotage her toast. She can’t see who’s behind her, even when he comes closer. “Bill has been terrified of what Tom might say about his blood pressure, so we just had to invite him and Cathy. Tom—you brought your monitor, yes? The—what is it? With the Velcro cuff? The hand pump?” She squeezes her fist to mimic the pumping of an invisible sphygmomanometer. The guests all laugh on cue.
The man reminds me of my high school mascot, a bastardized version of a Monacan warrior. Centuries before this suburb was built, well before Midlothian was settled by Europeans in the seventeenth century, this land belonged to the Monacan tribe. I should know because I got an A-plus on my fifth-grade history project, making a shoebox diorama of their tribe battling the French Huguenot settlers who were themselves escaping religious persecution. I used my mother’s nail polish for blood, dripping the cherry acrylic over their bodies. My inspiration for the project had been my father’s prized cigar-store Indian. He keeps it in his home office. Still there. The older I got, the more I’d give him shit for it, complaining that there’s no difference between this representation of Native Americans and, say, a lawn jockey, to which my father always shrugged and muttered under his breath, Used to have one of those in our front yard, too…
The man stands mere inches behind Mom as she raises her glass, beckoning us to toast. His focus remains on me as his head begins to lean back, exposing the crevasse of flesh along his neck—an extra set of lips more than ready to scream while the rest of him remains mute. Whatever slit his throat wasn’t sharp enough.
I try so hard not to react. I try very, very hard to compartmentalize. I look down at my place setting. I see my soup has started to boil over and I need to look away before I retch. I’m wrestling against my own insides now, so I invoke a silent prayer. Please don’t puke please…
“To Bill,” Mom says. “May you have many, many more happy years ahead of you.”
“I hope to God not,” Dad jests, eliciting chuckles from all the men in the dining room. Kill us now, they silently plead. Put us out of our misery.
The Monacan moves around my mother and nears the table. His eyes are on me now, inflamed with desire. Someone sees him. He looks so stunned, so eager to have eyes on him.
“Happy birthday, dear.” Mom’s cheeks are fully flushed with merlot. Everyone taps their wineglasses over the table. The clinking of Waterford crystal is like an icepick in my ear drum.
I toast with an empty glass, which I know is bad luck. Eye contact, I remind myself, even though the only person gazing my way is dead. His mucous-colored eyes are fixed on me. His gray lips crack open, hungrily. Both pairs. The gash along his throat widens and widens and…
Don’t look Erin please don’t look don’t look—
The Monacan climbs onto the table, but no one else notices. The rest of the guests simply go about eating and drinking, laughing amongst themselves as he crawls toward me. Please, stay away, please…It takes every ounce of strength I have left not to leap up from the table and run.
He won’t touch me, I think. Won’t hurt me. The spirits at the office didn’t harm me, did they? All they wanted was the Ghost. To taste it, that’s all. There’s probably so little left in my system by now, this spirit will simply drift on as soon as he realizes I have nothing to offer.
But he can’t do anything to me, right? He can’t hurt me? I’m breathing deeper through my nose, clamping my jaw so I won’t scream. I bite my tongue. He can’t hurt me… He’s inches from my face, but I’m too terrified to move. All I do is sit and pretend like he’s not here. I look everywhere else. Just not at him. He can’t hurt me…I dig my nails into the meat of my thigh, focusing on the pain and funneling all my thoughts away from the man as he tilts his head back, back, back, the lips of his sawn-open throat parting and, oh, I feel his breath spread across my cheeks, drifting out from his neck, not his mouth, his neck and oh god I can’t.
I’m about to push my chair away from the table. Just as I plant my legs to push my chair back, the man takes my head in both of his hands. It happens so fast, there’s no time to react. To pull back. There’s a chill to his skin. It seeps into my skull. Everything within me freezes as I feel his fingertips against my temples and for a second it’s as if they’re burrowing through, plunging into my cranium. I can’t move. Can’t scream. All I can do is look at him as he stares back.
His eyes. I can’t look away from his eyes. I’m about to lose myself within them. Fall in.
His throat sputters. The gash peels back as far as the wound will allow—and in that moment, I believe he’s about to kiss me—but not with his mouth. His tongue, an ashen maggot, slips past his larynx and dangles through the wound.
My stomach recoils. I’m going to be sick—but I can’t breathe. I can’t escape.
Why can’t I scream? Why can’t I—
The man breathes in deep. Something in the way he inhales tugs at the very center of me, like he’s breathing me in.
I feel my own tongue swell. It’s expanding. Growing. The root presses against my jaw and pushes past my lips. There it is. Oh god, I see it now. I can’t help but frantically stare at my tongue as it winds into the air, the tip flattening then expanding into a pink mushroom cap.
My eyes sting and water. Make it stop please make this stop make it all stop pleeeease…All I can see is the underside of my tongue, gills rippling beneath the cap.
A stem of ectoplasm branches from my left nostril. It’s quickly followed by another creeping out of my right. The two stems thread throughout the air, thin and quivering, until they form a latticework over my head. This man is drawing it out from me, tugging on what’s left.
I can’t see the roots coming out of my ears but I certainly feel them, looping around the lobes and extending outward. My bones have locked in place but I feel myself budding. Blossoming. Pressure builds behind my eyes. Something inside my skull is forcing its way out and the only way to escape is through my eye sockets. I can feel my eyeballs swelling and popping out of my skull, floating into the air like balloons tethered to my body by optic nerves.
All these stems drift through the dining room, twisting and converging above the table—above my body—like a fungal colony extending for miles below the earth’s surface. These phantasmal toadstools explode from every orifice and reach for the air, sucking the life out of—
“Erin!” My mother shrieks from across the dinner table, snapping me back.
I’m surrounded by petrified guests. The dining room has gone so quiet, so deathly still, that the only sound I hear is the faint drip of my vomit trickling off my empty glass and onto the fine china. It runs down my job interview dress turned funeral dress turned dinner party dress.