The Ghost Spice

Trigger Warning -- Our story could cause depression or anxiety to anyone surviving a death in the family.

Riley and her ghost husband, Steven Puck, have decided to take their daughter, Corinna Jayne, who is five, to the cemetery this morning. Or so Momma Riley said, as she packed up the diaper and lunch bag with its separate compartments. She placed Corinna Jayne in the backseat driver part of the electric vehicle.

Three mornings in a row, mother and daughter have woken up to a “starving ache.” Riley tried to say it consolingly, “in the inside, down-there.” She added waffles with Nutella and when that wasn’t adequate to stave off the ache, Momma Riley announced, “It is Turkeybone Bluffs calling us. Turkeybone, where Papa rests as we allow him to!”

Corinna Jayne, dear sweet child that she is, does remember that Turkeybone is a big complex of cemeteries, of course, but she still gets confused about how Papa could possibly be calling them. He could be a ghost, and that all that gets even more confusing because Momma made her swear “never to tell even a bestie about it, not in a billion years. When you have a husband of your own, you’ll understand.” 

But if it was something real and easy to understand, you’d talk about it to anybody that would listen, wouldn’t yea?

Corinna Jayne’s bestie right now is a young kissing cousin named Chewy Mandel. They have sandboxes, under the tree trunks with swings, all made alike to show them kids it is alright to feel at home in every yard. Normal cousin stuff, Corinna and Chewy share, instead of, say, tenterhooks at windowsills, getting endangered girls torn at by daggers in the curtains and stuff. Not worrying about grieving. It is as easy as breathing.

Though part of the Turkeybone graveyard complex is sandy by the tarmac, the last time anybody made it through the motions of going up there, it was for high times or piety. It was was to visit Papa, a year ago. The funeral attendees were winded being there that night. It was up on a hill. Even Cousin Chewy and his father, Uncle Stive Handel, were not going there twice. It was said if Papa Steven Puck had them as the nearest living relation, besides Corinna Jayne and Momma Riley herself, they preferred to remember him as he was while alive. Uncle Stive inhaled legally availed THC so hard it “gave them a coronary” to think they would ever give him a funeral again. The man they had known was more deeply remembered with every draft raising up their words. Then as ever a hush came over their smoky circles. This time the fault was they were in the columbine gardens of the funeral parlor late at night, rather than anywhere he seriously had been alive in.

But the circumstances of his death were not forgotten, no. Not by Stive.

It was engine combustion. The pastor explained from inside the sunlit pulpit all about how the kind of gurgled rust in Steve’s pipes doesn’t happen except when there is pop-cultural help. (As from the types of movies that have one realistic scene mixed with a spooky one, bad things do lead to worse.) Leastwise, church mice Corinna Jayne and Arthur Handel got it. Just like in all the horror movies they weren’t typically awake enough to watch with the adults…. We make the wrong decisions when spooked, instead of at the opposite time. Who could fall off a bridge when happier than three jumps in the air?

“It might be circumstantial,” nodded seven-year-old Chewy somnolently with Uncle Stive.

But Momma Riley ached to see her husband again. The amount of time and perspective — one year — did not very much for the complexion of the suddenly widowed lady with child. It had been very precipitated. Papa Steve had been practicing reckless nights at the other end of Nevada’s countryside ever since she was fat at the ankles and swollen in the belly. In that car of his, while she was pregnant, he was cheating on her. Six or seven years ago until the day he died in the Buick Skylark.

Stive told him if he kept pushing his car and did never stop for a pit… something might happen with a jealous boyfriend of his whore’s — notwithstanding the placations of his staid wife’s — apologizing for each thing about them that was true blue and American as they come. So, prognosis said it would be a reaction in violent opposition to his rights to own the beaut.

He, Clive, finally would fill the tank of Steven’s car with propane or sand or what all he could get his hands on. As if inspired from a popular Netflix movie or book, jealousy and righteousness were both present and accounted for, in many a clustering angle. All witnesses questioned at the police scene offered testimony saying how much Steve mistook the boy for a disinterested pimp.

So. He had a gleaming, refurbished Skylark from the fifties, red and chrome. So what? He’d just picked it up from a used car lot like it was any young man’s right to do so. The young pimp was jealous of the car, not the whore’s chances. He thought nobody deserved it if he was only going to use it for run of the mill reasons like telling his wife she was knocked up albeit taking the bum rush.

Riley is a beautiful woman deep down. You can’t tell by looking at her — hear me out — but she is even more gorgeous on the inside. He wanted to impress her with that car at one time. She’s a dullard because she thinks her hair should be shinier than her mirror, for Pete’s sake, but she knew she was white when she was with her man. An interracial relationship though it was, her knowing style of being easy in the world made them a magnet for trouble in their courtship. They went to the local Sock Hop, one icy glass of beer poured down his gullet, perfectly manicured pink fingernails on her hands. An opposite couple’s favorite jukebox song was on simultaneously… it was enough provocation to get them to gesture to the bouncer that he see to it that Steven and her were kicked out.

Not far away, their house, as vertical as an ice cream pop, they chose together. Halfway running out of gas out front just once, and taking each other in for one dazed kiss, they were confident there is such a thing as a charmed neighborhood, before they drove away. Riley, before her fiance knew it, used to take her rusty Delorian back to revisit the one, taking pictures laboriously on all sides. Big house this, yard this, paint that, tire swing these. It was a duplex. Turns out, he loved it.

They convinced Uncle Stive and his barely remembered wife with child to take up extremely nearby in the same place. Low-cost mortgage was involved, though each of the men already had starter homes. Stive had always been changing wives, with the commonlaw right to do so, do ya suppose? But Courting Steven had never been in love before. Crapshoot they were both approved for the mortgage, said most. However, but they were in business together somehow, cousins already, and now next-door neighbors, too. 

Equally pink houses grieving unequally, one without a man and young Chewy without a mother, if only temporarily.

Little Corinna Jayne was wondering, as they pulled out the drive that morning, Did Papa Steve have a way of making his unrest needs be met by kissing cousin, if anyone else? Well, her mother didn’t have the answer, unless by stirring Uncle’s smoke, but most likely the Ghost was to stack his jaw to the side about that.

Oh and it did hurt down there, like an indrawn breath. Momma was a madwoman behind the wheel. It was up to Corinna Jayne to make her slow down through the intersections. On the balance, it was also up to her to show her red stop signs, and the broken or divided highways, and even the right from Lucy Packaged Goods.

The mission, said her toy Oso, was to lay Papa to rest again. But at the rate Momma was going, a second freak accident was coming.

“Mommy?” asked Corinna Jayne. “Can I rest my foot on the sun dashing outside the window? In the side view mirror?”

“Oh, Corinna. You know that means I have to drive as slow as in a hospital lane.”

Hasan. There is no human being but that upon his head are reins in the hands of an angel. When he shows humility, the angel is ordered to lift his reins to raise him up. When he shows arrogance, the angel is ordered to fasten his reins to humble him.

Chapter Two

I wonder how the angels feel about us coming here today, and the caretakers. It's like a series of overhead arches clicking in our hearts like a combination lock, easy to confuse with any other numbered sequence. To find the Hearts Over Heads Funeral Parlor, of course, we must pass, though little Corinna Jayne is tickled each time we see she is in charge no way, no how. Slow speed drives are best for laying low, so it is said she was helpful. Surely the whole trip without the living Puck parent having to stop and turn around was a measure of the ingrace of the angels. It was no time to have a panic attack and go back home!

I want you to be able to picture this complex, with guards in booths wearing ranger hats who are caretakers also called armed police. Turkeybone cemetery is called the Bluffs for good reason! Not the least of these reasons are the rocky edges overlooking plains down below about 600 feet. We’re like gnats on the mountain ant farm here resembles, and when we beg Allah to mind our supplications, it isn’t an empty gesticulation. Trouble is, who can hear the Almighty inside a plastic farm? As to the ranger guards? They can be trained from the time they’re fourteen.

Driving through musty, dusty lock number one, this combination guard on the outskirts is beefy red under his hat. He stares at Corinna Jayne in between typing in information from her Momma’s driver’s identification. Them two are visitors, and the man, though he isn’t impeccable and there is a cigarette burner which can be seen inside his hot booth, wants to pick a bone about the youngster’s foot. It is bare and plastered on the side view mirror, although prettily manicured in hot pink.

Who am I to observe all this? Keep ‘em guessing.

Corinna Jayne knows she’s been shocking. She withdraws her filthy foot and ruffles through the bag to find Minnie Mouse pink sunglasses with lip balm and cooling spf factor.

“Thank you, pass,” he says cursorily. Giant gates open.

The big challenge is to follow the maps printed on granite all along the chain link fences. He’s drawn the matching one in Riley’s hand with the lot number.

At checkpoint two, it is ascertained that they haven’t brought any flowers or anything. This guard is like a customs official. And a red-head.

“Can Daddy smell?” she asks ambiguously.

“No, Corinna Jayne. Daddy can be bewildered and tired, but he won’t have any appetite. Nothing of that sort.”

“He waits for us to give him words of support and upbeat harmonies for his forever rest,” offers the red-head. “There’s the sort on YouTube. Your phone there?”

“He can hear us?”

Once again, Corinna Jayne is wanting to know and shrilly asking if dead Papa has senses.

Sighing Riley presses her fingers to her temples, wishing she had ice.

Stop confusing the issue, Corinna Jayne, there there! Says the Spice Ghost. You know it is something like that. I think, structurally, it’s something like being felt and not heard. Then why am I losing it?

We’re both losing it, Spice and Momma! Most folk think it enough to bear being widowed before you are fifty. But look at the youngness on you. You’re no more burden than the squishing of an ant carefully in a napkin. Still, the tough planning in this life belongs to men. Not to Mommas. Do you think she even knows her mate is swimming in its small coffin with otherworldly beings made of light and fire? What decisions do they reckon he has made already, his young age passed away without too much of the bad or the good, right, that he can answer for?

“Mommy, Mommy!”

The Heart Over Heads angels, at Lock 2, look divided. Riley has not replied to the loquacious guard with even her usual, taciturn civility. Are tear works coming? He asks himself nervously. He broaches the subject, trying to get to the point. “Lots of people prefer a soft radio or telecomm to allergens and flowers. Especially these days.”

“Um,” says Riley. “Thank you. I would like to inquire about a cold compress, bottle of water, first aid squad kind of station? The other guard didn’t mark it.”

“So it’s the heat that’s got you?” he asks sympathetically.

“No sun screen either.”

“Yes, Mommy, we do have shun screen!”

“Hush,” soothes the red-head unexpectedly. “It’s hush screen. Everybody in the cemetery despite the broad daylight is sleeping. All the permanent residents, that is.”

Mascara is clumping in Riley’s eye. He sees. “I’ll take care of that map for you. Mark it up. Clear as day.”

He hands back the map. He has added an insert. It is interfaith.

Father Almighty. We come before you in prayer this day. Help us overcome our wraiths of doubt and forgetfulness. Give us the strength to keep holding on and waiting on you. We are weary and tired, oh Lord. Our spirit is weak and we want to give up. Grant us the grace to keep going on. Cause us to have patience and trust in promises that we will be supported until forgiven. We have only to remember you. We want to keep trying but we can’t do it on our own. So please be our strength and our guide. Now and forever, we pray. Amen. From the KIDS AT FUNERAL PARLOR A.

Riley finally gives the guard her eye. She sees on his forehead as if printed there, I am old.

Chapter 3 the bridge to terabithia

Fables abound about the bridges from the houses of the dead to Earth’s last day. So impressively engineered it is daunting, it is every suitor’s job, north of Cedar Lane, to describe it to his future mate. Whence he has already seen, he assures her he can take it all the way across. Catch is, she must provide a detailed explanation of what his husbandly duties and gifts to her shall be, if to make sure our pleasure in life in fact rivals all promises they’ve given to us describing Heaven. And yet, if the said rivalry is so tight, why the ever uncoiling lengths it takes to describe getting there from Here and Now?

Safe and Sound.

The walk of cool ghouls.

The walk on hot coals.

The goal to make it across one knotted rope bridge.

The moon in the kitchen window on an airless night.

The spool of unconsumed food creating here and there a blockage.

If I am indoors and inside and in, shouldn’t my feet be too cool to touch the linoleum without it crimping up, frozen dead through?

You mean, the one day when glittering opals were what we stepped on to get from one station to another has an import? We think it proves that once we are at the final station, it is like heck to go get over the old, scarcely remembered scandals.

Prithee, our special smugness comes from somewhere. 

We settle our accounts, by God, before we learn to souse each other’s.

The Grim Reckoner is never pleased, nor does he smile, before we step forth all sure we’re as prepared as can be.

It is a high that doesn’t intoxicate, but elation.