Not Flesh Nor Feathers

Same as you want. Why.

“Jesus, I do not understand this.”

Caroline came into something like a solid image then, looking out the window through the gossamer layer of white curtains beneath the darker lining. She wasn’t gazing at anything in particular that I could see, not peering down to the streets below where the dead things crept towards us, only avoidable and not at all stoppable.

It was a mistake. It was a lie.

“I don’t understand,” I said again.

My sister didn’t really go to marry the newspaper man’s son. I said it to be mean. I didn’t know anyone would go there, to the church. I didn’t know Julene was there.

“Julene?” Ah, a name for the small zombie queen. “She wasn’t your sister, was she?”

No. Her mother worked in the laundry. Not “seemly.” Should play with little white girls, but there weren’t too many then, not here.

She sounded positively lucid, and it unnerved me more than when she behaved like a madwoman. “Let me get this straight—your sister, was she older than you?”

Caroline nodded, not turning away from the window. The way the light came in, watery and sick though it was, almost made her more rounded, more solid, when it hit her face. More real.

“And you were jealous, or angry, so you told someone that your sister was going to marry the newspaper man’s son—at the church there? At the First Congregationalist . . .?” I let the title die in my mouth. I didn’t need to say it, she knew it already. And the only thing we knew about the old newspaper was that it was owned by a black family.

Outside the door the dragging footsteps neared.

“You were lying, but someone took you seriously. And it was someone with connections to the Klan.”

Everyone had connections to them back then. I shouldn’t have said it. It was a mistake. Sister wasn’t even there. She was on the riverboat with a boyfriend she kept secret. And all that time, I’d wished he was mine.

And I heard it, in a flash—I saw it, with a flicker. Caroline, flesh and blood and maybe twelve years old, all knobbed knees and folded arms. “She keeps it secret because she doesn’t want Daddy to know. It would make him crazy to know. You know who it is? That newspaper man’s boy. That’s why she keeps it quiet. She’s going to marry him in that church, you know the one.”

Behind the girls, a door closed quiet, like someone was shutting it and not wanting to be seen—not wanting the people in the room to know that they’d been heard.

It was a mistake.

We were both repeating ourselves then. Both of us running out of things to say, but the dead things were still coming and our talk wasn’t going to slow them down. So why was I bothering? From that flawed logic, I think—the kind that says, “If I understand how this works, I can fix it.”

But the more I listened, the less confident I grew.

“What does she want, then, Caroline? Revenge? She can’t very well kill you, if that’s what she wants.”

I thought, though, of that moment of contact Julene had made with me down by the ball park. It was so blind, her anger—her hatred. Driven like an infuriated child, and I imagined that when she reached this room, nothing she’d find would satisfy her. Just as a child will scream for a toy so long that when she receives it she doesn’t want it anymore—that’s what this would be like.

And I heard a scratching at the door.

Caroline backed away from the window to sit on the bed. The door would hold a minute more, I thought. I sat down beside her.

“I guess you could apologize.” It was a pitiful excuse for a suggestion, but she didn’t mind it.

That won’t work, will it?

“It’s worth a try, don’t you think? You don’t want her to burn this place down around you, do you?” Or around any of the handful of people still here, either, I thought. She probably didn’t give a damn who else joined her, but she probably wanted the hotel left standing.

Where would I go?

“I don’t know,” I shook my head. “I don’t know what happens. The only dead people I ever see are the ones like you, who stuck around for some reason. Those who leave don’t ever come back to talk about it; not that I know of, anyway.”

I’m not ready.

The scratching had turned to banging, which turned to beating, and to the disgruntled squeals of hinges being strained to their breaking point. I looked at the window and thought of the ledge; I wondered if it’d be worth my trouble to try it.

I kept my voice steady by pure force of will. “Caroline, they’re here.”

I know.

The door burst open in a bent, awkward break where the wood gave out before the hinges and the deadbolt.

Julene came first.

She ducked her head beneath the battered door and entered the room deliberately, carefully, with one foot firm in front of the next. There was a thickly-rusted chain on her right wrist, looped there but pried apart and left to hang. Her eyes were still that awful boiled yellow.

I rose from the bed and moved myself as close to the far wall as I could. I positioned myself beside the window and wondered what it would feel like to fall those stories to the ground. It was only a few. People survived worse all the time.

The other blank, wheezing dead things poured into the room after Julene, but they held back in accordance with her wishes. She was the only one who was still angry, and the only one who remembered.

Caroline? I knew it must be an echo of her real voice, but it sounded pure and weirdly sweet. Friendly, even. Caroline, there you are. Still here, after all this time. I thought they sent you away.

The ghost, still seated on the bed, did not answer. I responded on her behalf, since it wasn’t like they didn’t know I was there.

“She came back. She lived and died here. Now she stays here.”

How did you die here, Caroline? It wasn’t another fire, was it?

She shook her head, no.

How did you die here, Caroline? It wasn’t a bloody murder, was it?

She shook her head again, no.

How did you die here, Caroline? Was it sickness or an accident?

You know it wasn’t. I did it myself. She turned her arms wrist-up, and I saw the long slashes that scarred her remembered skin. It was a mistake, Julene.

You should’ve followed me. You knew where we were. You knew where they put us. And you didn’t even tell our families where to get us, so they could bury us right. Instead, some of us washed up on the other side and lay there in the mud.

It was a mistake.

“What do you want her to do?” I asked the small, furious girl with the chain clinking from her wrist. “What should she say to make up for it? She’s dead, Julene. You can’t kill her. You can’t take anything away from her. Look what you’ve done—look at all these people you’ve hurt to get here.”

It was a mistake, Caroline repeated. I’m so sorry. I never did get to tell you that.

“And after Caroline, then what? Then what will you do—where will you go? Will it end here, or will you walk out into the sun and let the police blow you to smithereens with a grenade launcher?”

I might as well not have been there. Neither of them looked at me or responded to me, and the horde at the back of the room was sagging as the girl’s attention to them waned. It was possible that through those things was the easiest way out. So long as she ignored me. So long as they all ignored me.

But I couldn’t leave yet—I needed to see. I needed to know.

Even again, after they found us where we washed up on the other side of the river, no one cared. They buried us again. They hid us again, and left us.

Caroline did not stand, but she turned on the bed so that she faced her childhood friend; while seated, she was at eye level with the girl. I was selfish. I didn’t want things to change. But they always do. Everything changes but us. How long will you be angry with me? What should I do?

Julene looked confused, as I’d expected. There was no magic formula. Nothing for her to take, or give.

“You could go together,” I blurted out. “You could leave together, to wherever it is that neither of you went back to. Your quarrel can’t be resolved here, or now. You’ll have to take it somewhere else. You have no ground to meet on here. You can only stare back and forth and toss your accusations and apologies around. For God’s sake, you two. Leave. Leave together. And let them go, too.” I gestured at the things waiting patiently by the door and beside the bed.

They’re already gone, Julene told me. I’m all that’s left, and I move them. They are my dolls.

“Then put them down. Put them down and go.”

Now I had their undivided attention, and I didn’t know what to do with it.

Where?

And I had no good answer for that, for them. But someone else did.

There was someone else in the room, someone new and not good at this yet—this manifesting thing, this trick by which the dead make themselves solid enough to see. But piece by piece he pulled himself together until he stood in front of the mirror, at the foot of the bed, facing us all.

He looked calm—calmer than I’d ever seen him or known him to be. He looked . . . smart. Wise, might be a better word. Collected, and determined—but he was always determined. That much carried over. That much, at least, went with him.

I’ve got them. Don’t worry, little sister.

Strange. He’d never called me that before. Always by name, like he was afraid that acknowledging the relation would offend or embarrass me.

Come with me, he said to them both; and since neither of them knew what to make of it, or of him, they didn’t move or answer.

A flicker of irritation crossed his face, and it looked familiar. It looked like something I do when I’m annoyed, but not ready to be too vocal about it yet. Jesus, what other ways were we alike?

“Malachi?” I don’t know why I turned it into a question, because of course it was him, and it wasn’t until I said his name that I realized I was crying.

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