HAUNTINGS: Porcelain Ghosts

By Shilo Niziolek

I was born with violence in my bones and my teeth were the first to know it. As soon as they started pushing through my gums I began biting. They called me Little Monster. I think I’ve always been sick. I look like something that could eat a man. Last night I couldn’t sleep. My roommate sat on the edge of my bed in her work dress, pastel pink and looking like someone from an old diner. She didn’t know how to devour a man; she’d never even tried. You’re either born with it or you’re not; her canines never grew in. “Sometimes it makes me angry that I fell in love with someone who is so much like me,” she said. “We’re tiny baby narcissists searching for mirrors,” I said, twisting the end of her long black braid around my pointer finger. I nodded to the mirror tilted on my nightstand, part way towards the bed, then got up and padded to the bathroom. Two black spiders ran in, one after the other, I tore up the tiles trying to find them. Squished them, one by one, with the imprint of my big toe. At night I check on my roommate, crack her door and watch her while she sleeps. She’ll never know what bad love can do to a woman. When wasps crawl up my arms, I think about eating them. Sometimes I dream that all my teeth fall out of my mouth at once. When I had braces, they would all be attached, little train tracks littering the ground.

-2-

I still want all your ghosts. When I think of rivers rising into the sky, ready to swallow us all, I imagine standing naked, arms held open. In the end my reflection’s not who I thought it was and crows follow me wherever I go. I can’t ask my mom if my biological father beat her while I was in the womb, even though I know he did during the short time she stayed with him after. You’d be surprised to know that the anger comes from my mom’s side of the family. It’s the intelligent madness. I’ve had enough of that. I like my body best when it is propelling through space, when I’m all bite and bark. I don’t want to be humble; I want to be ferocious. I’m watching leaves rustle in the wind and clouds drift across the sky. There’s so much peace inside the violence of a woman’s body. My dog once caught a mouse and killed it with one clamped motion. It was screeching and then it was dead. She shook her head violently from side to side, wringing it out.

-3-

There was a ghost story my mom used to tell. In an old house that didn’t yet have modern plumbing lived my mother’s family. Each September they heard the wailing of the parents whose eleven-year-old daughter had died while they lived there. All month long the parents cried, but they would never get their daughter back. She was bound to the land, where she died. When you’re a ghost, your body doesn’t need the things it did before. She only thought she wanted to be real, forgot she could move through walls. I forgot to think about all the things an eleven-year-old would never have. Every September my mom would find the ghost girl sitting in the outhouse, crying into her empty hands.

-4-

There’s damage in naming things. I don’t name the things I want for fear of getting them. I wander the lonely streets. In my dreams it’s a separate world and ghosts aren’t ghosts, they are only the people I keep locked in a box, and a box isn’t a box it’s my heart, and my heart isn’t my own after all. I stepped out in the woods behind my backyard and found a note waiting for me. I followed a trail that wasn’t where I left it and left a trail of teeth behind me, to guide me back home. My translucent feet left no marks on the ground, and each tooth I dropped began burrowing, stretching its roots down where I walked. There was a woman at the end of the trail where a waterfall met a river and I followed her body like water into the stream. We dove under, faced each other in the cool black rapids, eyes wide open, hair wrapped around my body a straitjacket. Her lips formed sounds that echoed through me, “You’re a ghost and you don’t even know it. You’re a hungry ghost, but a ghost all the same.” She swam closer, her body fit around me. Into my ear, she spoke, “I’ll pretend I never knew your name.”

-5-

The first man I pretended to love had long chocolate hair that fell down his face in ringlets. We were young and I didn’t have to try hard. I just swung my hips when I walked, sometimes hearing the click of my hip pop in and out. I felt satisfyingly sexual. I bought a pair of jeans that were laced up the sides with leather straps and when I danced in the dark of a school dance the boys stood in a row and watched me, mouths gaped. “Where’d you learn to move like that?” They asked. Do you know what it’s like, realizing you’ve been a spider all along? I see the ghost of my former self dancing all around. When the boys I pretended to love think of me, I hope they think of my body, a lithe animal, a body twisting, filled with the temptation of wild bones.

-6-

I was born with violence in my bones and it shakes like the hollow branches of the cherry tree. A man once told me a ghost story. It went a little something like this: In the night I can still find you. I’ll follow you across the land. Do you think you can run from me? That you can hide? When you dive from this car and hide in a ditch, I’ll drive up the mountainside calling your name. I’m there watching. You may lay in bed beside another, but when you sleep, you’ll dream of me. He told me this ghost story so many times, that when I try to conjure up other men, their breath turns to ice, and their lips are always the same. “Do you understand? You can never truly leave me,” he said, the imprints of his fingers, pale ghosts under my skin.

-7-

I still want all your ghosts, and the sunflowers cast their petals as I walk by. I sneak into my roommates’ room as she sleeps. With a serrated kitchen knife, I cut off her long black braid. I twine it through the yellow rose bush in the backyard, waiting for her to say something. When she comes out of the bathroom in the morning the cut looks as if she had it professionally done. A cute bob that frames her delicate features perfectly. “Have you seen my mustard yellow sweater,” she asks, all rosy cheeks and eyelashes. I bite my tongue. I can’t tell if she is playing coy. “It’s hang-drying in my closet,” I say. My teeth ache from the tight clench. A hornet comes in through the backdoor, drunk on weather. I shut it in the window and watch it, this way I can’t be ignored or forgotten.

-8-

There was a ghost story my mom used to tell. The ghost didn’t present herself to me, only to my mom and my sister. I’d lie if I said I wasn’t a bit resentful. She wore a blue dress and kept her hair in long blonde pigtails and lived in the yellow house next to the church. I never saw her, but I felt her all the same. If you were home alone sitting in the corner of the living room a chill would surround you, and the front door would wobble on its latch. On many occasions the cats would go into a frenzy in the middle of the night, as if they sensed something I couldn’t. One night, they launched themselves back and forth over my bed from one side to the other. I had nightmares about someone knocking at my window, and the desert winter wind howled its shrill cry. When I woke, I found three scratch marks on the outside of the glass. Fingernails. I can’t be sure that the ghost wasn’t me.

-9-

I only want what I can’t have, that’s why I stole my roommates’ new boyfriend. I guess you could say, I borrowed him. It’s not stealing if you give it back, used and unwashed. She doesn’t know, but each time I watch him lean over to kiss her, I imagine his thin lips on my neck. When his hand is in hers, I feel the movement of his dry hands slip up my skirt. It was an accident, honest, but sometimes I turn into other people in the dark. At the bonfire she went off to go find somewhere to pee in the woods. She wanted me to go with her. “No, I’m too cold,” I said, and wrapped her yellow scarf tighter around her neck, exposed to the cold without her plaited hair. But then I found myself being led to the opposite side of the fire, behind a tree. I listen to her go on and on about how great he is, what a good man, how he takes care of her, never pressures her, is delicate in bed. But let her think what she wants. His lips tasted like her watermelon chapstick. Even good men are not good men.

-10-

I know how to pretend to love a man.

Convince yourself you want out of whatever life you’re living.
Kiss him slow and sweet.
Convince yourself that you could love him.
Pretend the ghost of the man you love isn’t there beside you when you sleep.
Let the man think that you love him.
When he says I love you first, don’t say it back immediately, but, eventually, say it back.
When he says, “move in with me,” say, “okay.”
Imagine that the man you love is outside your window.
Fuck him the way he asks to be fucked.
When you start crying roll over and tell him nothing.
Think only, one foot out the door.
Pack up most of your belongings and begin to move out while he’s out of town.
Don’t be surprised when he keeps the boxes you didn’t get to and lights them on fire, the tiny bones of porcelain dolls, ghosts evaporating into the cold December air.

-11-

I was born with violence in my bones and when I lop the yellow rose bushes down, I cut the thorns from the stems and sew them into a necklace. Rose teeth, I think as they bite into my skin. I still want all your ghosts, so I go to the graveyard during a crescent moon and I collect the memorials left behind. My closet is filled with them, wilting flowers, vases and vases of them, love letters, stuffed and soaking teddy bears, each night I open the closet door and the stench of old haunts wafts out at me. Ghost babies, I think. There was a ghost story my mom used to tell. “There once was a blonde girl with lashes like caterpillars who carved out her own heart, the end.” I know how to pretend to love a man, you just turn your body inside out. Bite down, bone on bone, when he undresses you. Nothing but a ghost.

—

Shilo Niziolek is an Oregon based writer who believes in ghosts. Her work has appeared in Porter House Review, Broad River Review, SLAB, and Parhelion, among others, and is forthcoming in HerStry. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @shiloniziolek