Blood Ghosts

I actually hate fun.

Photo by Azure Productions on Unsplash

Maybe I’m haunted. There are ghosts in my blood that howl and vibrate. And there are other ghosts who want to get in. Ghosts that want to invade me. It hurts, I can’t see through the pain sometimes.

“Shut up,” Rob says. I’m being melodramatic. This is a simple case of wrong place wrong time and if we want to live, which he does, we need to keep our wits about us.

We were walking from the liquor store back to his apartment, past the abandoned Dollar Tree. It was after dark. A big man stepped out from behind the dirty, tagged up “Space for Lease” sign and asked Rob if he wanted to buy anything. My ghosts were screaming in my veins. Racing through my blood like pent up dragons.

“I got it all, plus some new stuff. Make you feel like a god. Maybe a treat for the lady?”

“No thanks, man, I already got a guy.” Rob had grabbed my arm and tried to pull me past the asshole, but he put a meaty hand on Rob’s chest. One of those dealers who doesn’t try his own product. His nails even looked healthy. I pulled my coat tighter around me. His ghosts liked him, they didn’t try to leave him for me.

Rob can’t feel the ghosts like I can. He is made up of chemicals that cloud his judgement, that blind him to the truth. He always thinks he can save us, just by being himself.

“Why don’t you two come with me? Your lady looks like she could use some fun.”

“I actually hate fun,” I say, which is true. Music, people, drugs, noise, it makes the ghosts go wild in my blood. They need quiet. The big guy takes it like me being a smart ass, though, and grabs me by the hair.

“We’re going inside.” His breath is hot and smells like cigarettes. Rob just shrugs and follows us across the parking lot and into the Dollar Tree. It closed down years ago, no one wants to lease it and deal with the squatters who took over the place.

Wherever we are now, it’s unremarkable. A store room in the back of the building with a locked door, cheap carpet, fresh paint.

“This is going to be bad,” I say. “They’re going to get out.”

“You’re a fucking lunatic. That’s what you’re worried about? Your imaginary friends?”

He doesn’t know what it’s like to fear your own body. But I could feel new ghosts slipping in under my fingernails and worming their way into the follicles of my hair. Swimming up my nostrils until I could barely breathe. My veins were stretched tight with ghosts. Rob was whistling, listening to his notes echo in the empty room. Trying not to seem scared.

It’s never going to be him they invade.

There are footsteps out in the hall. We can hear them coming closer.

“Let me do the talking,” Rob says. I say ok, but I know talking won’t be necessary. I’m fat with ghosts. The door opens and a man is standing there. He has the pallor of day old market fish and his ghosts peel off of him like sunburnt skin. They float toward me and wriggle into my cuts, widening them with the force of their entry. They pry my eyelids up and slither across my eyeballs.

I scream.

Rob tells me to shut up, he’s negotiating.

The ghosts are moving fast under my skin. My body is angry. The first tear happens at my wrist, the skin splits like watermelon rind up to my elbow. The ghosts pour out.

Rob is pleading with the man to let us free. We’ll buy some drugs, whatever we can get for the money we have on us.

I let myself shatter. Land broken, crust cracked by molten ghosts flowing beneath it. And then I’m bleeding them out. The floor is slick with all the ghosts I’ve bled.

The man with the pallor of old fish is swallowed in my blood-ghost deluge. His ghosts turn on him. They have fed on my blood and know the truth.

Rob is screaming.

I tell him to shut up, stop being melodramatic. And then my blood ghosts tear his husk apart.

When everyone is dead and there is quiet again, I call them back to me. They heal my cracks and splits on their way back home to my veins. And I am whole again.

We have an understanding now.