ghosts

Nothing is fun without Girls.

You’ve hauled aside the dark, heavy drapes, dusty with years of disuse. Now people pass the house and turn to look at you, nudging their companions, as you stand shiny and luminescent under the street light falling on the window. This is what it is like to be beautiful, you think. It is not something you know. You have only recently begun to understand the concept of beauty.

He has always known about beauty. The sensations you feel are new, too. The Girls would call it hate, this hot, hard fist that clenches your stomach each time you lay your eyes on him. It is hate you see in his eyes, too.

There are no Girls on the street. If there were you would take off your clothing and linger in the doorway, chemise turning transparent in the moonlight. He used to stand you there like that. He’d put his hands on your shoulders and stay back in the shadows, and when the Girl wandered over in a daze and laid eyes on him, her fate was sealed. No one could hope to compete with the two of you, then. You were invincible.

The Girls are beautiful. He would laugh, and they would disagree, but you have a mind now. They fit your concept of beauty. They are substantial, a word no one would ever ascribe to you. They leave something to hold on to. There is nothing pathetic and wispy about them.

You are unendingly weary of being pathetic and wispy.

There are plenty of men milling about out there. They all stare dumbly at you and take hesitant steps closer to the window, but they are not what you are looking for. There are a few girls as well, but still no Girls, and any ordinary person would not be strong-minded enough for what you need them to do. If only you had played more gently with the Puppets. If only…

You turn away from the window. It has been days that you’ve spent waiting for the presence of a Girl. At first you simply reached out with your mind, feeling around. When that produced nothing, you gazed out from the porch a few times. Today it was the window. You stroke the thick fabric of the curtains, and a dim memory of staring out mindlessly from this spot rises up. Everything that used to be is difficult to keep in your mind, now. You turn around to talk to him about it.

“I used to—watch, here.” It is almost a question. He does not say anything. Of course not. The Girl would have answered you. All of them.

Most of them.

“You didn’t like it.” That brings up a few more grainy seconds of memory. You know you are right, now, you remember it; you would watch the people leaving the theater nearby, stare at anyone who wandered by. He would forbid it. You would do it again the next day, which would seem a flimsy display of disobedience, had you then had the memory to know he had forbidden it. The thought makes you smile.

“How I must have maddened you all these years.” It is so boring with him not speaking. Not that he was ever one who spoke often, but at least his thoughts were better than none. Now you might as well be the only one in the room. It makes the existence of beauty seem all the more impossible.

But you mustn’t forget about beauty. You recite the instances you gleaned from picture books. Girls are beautiful. Everyone believes you are beautiful. There is beauty in the way the moonlight ripples along the carpet when the drapes fall back against the wall. You can be certain of these things.

And there is beauty here, too. There is beauty in this spread of red around his face, the way his eyelashes look stark against his face. In death he looks pale. Nearly as pale as you, now that he has bled all his life’s blood on the carpet. If there was a Girl, she could clean it. You smile down at him and pat him on the cheek, carefully, ever so carefully. You are not as cruel as he. You would never hurt anyone.

You twist the knife, though, because it creates more beauty. Or it had, at first. Now nothing else spews from the fount in his chest. It is a disappointment. And still no Girls come, no one you could charm into disposing of the body. Confessing to his murder.

It is so dull being alone.