“Li’l Deb…”
Silas kisses me. I feel the gills rippling against my lips. He presses further. His face is too soft, the underlying skull spongier than any bone. When he pulls back, I see where my lips left the slightest dimple in his face, his skull sinking in for a few seconds before swelling back again.
The can of paint thinner is heavier than I expect. I nearly lose my grip. I struggle to keep my wrists from trembling as I unscrew the rusted cap, releasing a strong chemical scent into the basement that cuts through the reek of mildew. By the time I turn back to face Silas…
He’s cradling our baby within the crook of his arm.
Lonnie nestles into Silas’s chest, settling against his flesh. He fits so perfectly. I realize Lonnie is a part of him, this new body. Lonnie grew out from him, rooted in his skin, plucked free by his father when he was ripe to run freely through the house. To keep an eye on me.
Silas holds out his hand for me to take. So does Lonnie. They’re offering me a choice.
We can still be a family.
This is my chance—it’s not too late. The house, the family. Our family. Even now, Lonnie’s mouth opens and flexes, as if he’s hungry for my breast. He needs me. I sense a low-wattage ache in my chest, as if my body is yearning to feed this thing.
Then I see the others.
Their vermillion lips shimmer in the shadows, glistening. One baby leans forward, out from the dark, its face nearly identical to its mushroom brother. Or sister. Who can tell? They’re identical in every way—and in that moment, it finally dawns on me: There was never just one.
The spongy offspring crawl out from the corners of the basement and climb up Silas’s corpse, one now two now three, all finding their original spot within the nooks and crannies of his body. They complete him, somehow, pieces of a three-dimensional puzzle. He’s whole now. All those mouths, opening and closing, reaching for me. Yearning for my body to feed them.
I splash Silas’s body with paint thinner. Even then, the babies’ mouths keep opening and closing, their sphincters widening and mewling for their mother but I’m not their fucking mother I never was, it was all a lie to get me to stay to use me.
I still have Silas’s lighter. It always comes back to me. I glance at it in my hand—REHAB IS FOR QUITTERS—feeling the weight of it in my palm before tightening my grip and flicking the flint with my thumb.
“Goodbye, Silas.”
His body goes up so quickly. There’s no resistance, no scream. His offspring do all the shrieking for him. Each tiny mouth puckers and hisses as the fire sweeps over. His children curl all along his body, writhing within the flames. His steps are clumsy. He lunges forward, then back, collapsing on the planter he climbed out from. It looks like a cradle full of flaming babies.
I never want to have kids for as long as I fucking live.
I splash Amara next. A tail of flame connects the planters. I can’t bring myself to look at her as the fire embraces her body, but for just a brief moment, I see—think I see—Amara reach for me. Her hand lifts up from the soil and something that was once her fingers branches out, twining together in the air and extending toward me, but I’m already racing up the stairs.
“Erin…” It’s not Amara, I keep repeating to myself. Not her anymore. “Erin…”
Everyone in the living room is dead. Their bodies just don’t know it yet. Those that are still moving are simply being puppeteered by the spirits possessing their fleshy vessels, gnawing on what skin they can still pull free. The Ghost must taste so good to these revenants. Good to the last drop. They dig into their own pulp for just another mouthful of that yummy substance.
None seem to notice the flames. Or care. The orange glow reflects within their blackened eyes as their bodies are quickly consumed by the mounting fire.
I’m on autopilot now. I have to bury my thoughts, compartmentalize, no matter how loud the screams in my head are. I can’t dwell on what I’m doing—who these people were—going through the motions as I draw a trail of paint thinner from the living room into the hall, then up the stairs toward the second floor. The sharp chemical smell cuts through the hallway, eclipsing every other odor. I cough, breathing in fumes, but I keep climbing the steps.
I start with my nest in the nursery. I pour the paint thinner over the insulation and realize it’s not the same pink padding as before. The insulation appears to have been replaced by a fleshy bedding of mycelium. Am I really seeing what I think I’m seeing? I have to be hallucinating this…It’s not possible. The inner walls are padded with a fabric of filaments. I break off a chunk of drywall and realize the threads run through the house’s inner cavities, branching out behind the plaster. A network of fungus consumes our home from the inside out.
The mycelium goes up fast. The flames chew through the soft tufts, like hair. It shrinks back, curls into itself, hissing and popping and sending spores into the air.
I don’t want to think anymore. My body functions on its own, as though it knows what needs to be done, even if I’m not entirely sure. My mind ebbs into a catatonic state as the rest of me waltzes through the burning house and finds my way to the front door.
I need to finish this, before it goes—grows—any further. I need to cut it all down.
Cut it out. Cut it off.
Cut, cut, cut—
I stand in the cul-de-sac and watch the flames take hold of our house. There’s a part of me that expects Tobias to stumble out, draped in fire, but he never does. He’s home now.
I feel the heat radiate across my face and I can’t remember the last time I felt this warm. A breeze blows through, whisking off a few lambent spores, embers so thin the cinders disintegrate as soon as they cool.
Once I’m certain there’s no saving the bones of our home, no possible chance of salvaging its structure from the fire, I make my way down the street to the next haunted house.
And the next. Trick or treat…
I watch as the squatters leap from their windows, running from the flames.
That’s right, I think. Run. Run as fast as you can…
I wonder what tales they’ll tell about me. I’ve become my own ghost story. Move over, Bloody Mary. There’s a new urban legend in town.
I’m able to burn most of the block down before the responding firefighters even reach Shady Acres. It’s so easy. All these haunted houses, every last one, simply yearn to burn.
All of Silas’s work goes up in smoke. All our ghosts, nothing but whispers now. And when it’s all over, when the police finally drag me away, I can’t help but say to myself…
Is that all there is to a fire?
EPILOGUE
recovery
The mural is of me. I don’t know who the artist is or when it went up, but there’s no doubt that’s my face spray-painted across the building’s broadside. My own sunken eyes stare down at me from their hollowed sockets. It’s my skull up there, hair all aflame, towering along the eastern wall of the five-floor walk-up at the corner of Boulevard Avenue and Leigh Street.
I’ve worn that same haunted expression for nearly a year now. The artist wrapped my head in a halo, La Calavera Catrina on fire, an ecstatic living dead girl rising out from the very fire I started. The spirits of every last addict who died in the blaze drift through the surrounding smoke, dozens of gray wraiths curling around my shoulders.
If there was any doubt who the subject is, then the epitaph is a dead giveaway. In bright, vibrant colors, written in an urban gothic font, it reads:
Ever hear the tale of Erin Hill?
She ground her lover into a pill.
She lived in a house just down the lane,
Until the day it went up in flames…
When I first found myself looming over Leigh Street, I felt my knees nearly give out. The air in my lungs curdled, but I couldn’t look away. Couldn’t believe the sheer enormity of myself.