Ghost Stories: owwww by Lauren Kalita

owwww

Lose yourself clearing the dark corners of the cabin, family of dead mice in the oven (later build a fire pit out front so you’ll never have to use the defiled oven again). He & his son out ATVing as the patriarch approaches from behind, bent at the waist w/ your head in the oven trying not to vomit. Elbow-length, pink, rubber gloves squeak w/ the strain of back-&-forth friction, channeling the murine spirits. Violet, cashmere cardigan itches where you cut out the DVF tag, nicks the nape of your neck. At the moment you feel the patriarch move from w/in his threadbare slacks notice for the first time the dials of the oven are encrusted w/ tar-like muck. The patriarch finishes w/ an atavistic thrust that pushes your forehead into the middle dial; it leaves a numberless indentation where your third eye should be, filled in by the black goop. Now bathe in the winter-white stream behind the cabin w/ the patriarch watching from a small clearing nearby. Stand naked in the stream, cannot wash the smell of death from your nares. Scrubbed of the day & skirting the old man, join your emperor of bread & circuses, your patron lover & his son as they return for target practice. Watch them place the butts of their rifles against the cavity between shoulder & clavicle, nestle father-son jaws down into it; cock heads, close one eye, inhale sharply & hold…until the release. They are 3 for 7 and 4 for 8, respectively, when they pause for Johnnie Walker Red & Sprite. In the lacuna you enter, shoulder the larger rifle, carved generations ago by old-world hands w/ inscrutable family insignias. Breath held, topple 3 cans of Red Bull & pockmark the cleft in the bosom of a Sharpie drawing on a paper plate, tacked to the trunk of a birch w/ seraphim eyes that up-&-down you. Later, w/ your bare ring finger, caress the bruise coming out from under your shoulder as fathers & sons are downstairs cleaning their guns before dinner. Sit like a Sphinx on the floor at the end of your nonconjugal mattress upstairs. Know that it happens by the aggressive suck of all the surround sound pulled somewhere you can’t follow, the funneling flight of sound. Puts you in mind of something some guy once whispered into your ear, wet & unwanted: in his native tongue the word for “yes” sounds like “owwww.” Hand moves down to a new, hot hole in the violet cashmere cardigan, scrapes over the rough eruption in the wood of the floor alongside your rear end. The men appear at the opening in the floor that leads in & out of the loft, stop short of coming to you. Over an hour before your hearing returns. All the while perfectly still, staring at the place where the bullet is lodged in a flimsy beam overhead. Mean to dislodge it, make a pendant out of it. A fungible asset of love.

Lauren Kalita is a writer and visual artist living on Cape Cod in the US with her family. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Discount Guillotine, Sissy Anarchy (as Lunare Aiktal), Worms Extended Lunch zine, Spunk Art & Perspectives, Cape Cod Review, Lit Angels, Gilded Dirt, Still Point Journal, Big Red Cat, Columbia Review, and others.