A Girl and Her Ghost.

Susie’s 7th birthday was the worst one ever. It was meant to be a big party all about her, where everyone would be nice to her.

But then Ian said she was selfish for having more birthdays than everyone else, and Susie had told him that it was because her parents used the Old calendar because they were Traditional, but then he said it was just an excuse to spoil Susie more and that's why she was so annoying all the time.

So Susie stabbed him with a fork.

Then he was screaming and calling her more names, and then the adults came around and told her off, and then everyone was only paying attention to him on her birthday.

So she ran into the forest.

But the forest was scary so she started crying even after trying her hardest not to and was thinking if she should go back to the 'party' or to stay there until something killed her, to teach them all a lesson- when the choice was taken out of her hands.

A rock slipped out  and she went with it. She tumbled and screamed down the hill, breaking open skin and bruising bones, until one last drop ended her trip with a wet crack.

Then she couldn't scream, or do much at all but suffocate on the dirt she'd landed face-first into.

Her mind filled with wailing she couldn't let out. Until it, too, ran out of air.

Well, damn. I had a lot of plans resting on you lasting a little longer than that.

….

When Susie woke up, in her own bed, she could move. 

The doctor had come by, poking at her and asking questions, then left saying her head seemed to be fine. But added 'as it ever is', because doctors are mean.

Susie would go on to largely forget that day, even dissociating it from Ian persisting in calling her "crazy stabber girl". She could have gone the rest of her life with that miraculous recovery fading into a dream, coming out only when something or someone would restrict her movement, where she would thrash and storm for fear of losing it all again.

If only a small plague hadn't danced across the land, dealing death in every footfall. And under its boot, Susie choked.

In that horror, the memory of dying at the bottom of a gulch blending into the reality of dying in her bed, Susie grasped onto part of the memory which was comfortingly fake.

When her life was ebbing away once more, she remembered the words differently.

Again? Most people go all their lives without dropping dead until the end, and yet you can't go what… twelve years without dying twice?

….

Susie woke up to her father by her bed, where he had fallen asleep praying for her to live through the night. She wasn't cured, she discovered through a coughing fit, but she was through the worst of it.

After a few days, she could even walk around outside for a couple hours a day. She didn't go very far, after the first time.

Everyone in the village was either mourning their dead, praying not to lose someone else, or begging not to die. Susie heard the town was worse, but nobody would tell her how.

Though she had too many thoughts running through her mind as it was, and was sure not all of them were hers.

Over months the villagers returned to life, beaten and broken, but resigned to last another round. Susie returned to living her life as well, but some questions never left the back of her skull.

Most winters are unkind, by nature, and their company can only be tolerated in the flattering light of a roaring fire along with a healthy excess of alcohol. 

This winter was a spiteful cunt.

It stormed in early, freezing crops that there hadn't been enough living hands to reap. Then smothered the roads when people were kind enough to sell scraps for fortunes.

In her home, buried under the snow, Susie overheard the conversations of adults. Of her parents. Arguing who should die so that the others might have enough food to last the next month.

So, on a day when her parents ventured out for more supplies, and to exchange grim plans with their neighbours; Susie wrote one letter that she hoped no-one would read, and another she very much hoped someone would.

Then she jumped off a table with a rope around her neck.

It was not a pleasant way to die, but she'd had worse.

Her hands fell away, fingernails bloody, as her consciousness faded. And a thought, clear as the summer sky she ached to see, said:

Oh… Poor girl. Worse hangman. Now what…

It saw the letter. Which wasn't long, the hand that wrote it had been trembling so much the meaning threatened to bleed away.

'To whatever is living in my head:

Please help. 

Please save my parents.'

And a throat, already healing from its being crushed and clawed, said:

"Shit."

....

Susie woke up sitting next to the fireplace and felt at her throat for breaks, but she couldn't feel much through the sock.

"What…?" She poked the buttons sewn onto the sock..

"I thought-" It started to say– flapping Susie’s hand arguably in time with the words coming out of her mostly closed lips– when the mouth it was borrowing became too busy with screaming instead. "-that this might make it easier to talk."

Susie prodded her face, then the pouting sock.

"Rude." It said, turning away to not catch a finger in its mouth.

She grabbed at her mouth again, catching something that had the shape of laughter made of the fabric of screams. When her hand came away, a question fell out.

"Are you a ghost?" And then, excited, "... A demon?"

"Sure. Why not? I've been called worse." The puppet answered with a drooping head. "Didn't you have something you needed from me? If all you woke me up for was to poke and insult me, I'll just go back to my nap."

"No, wait!" Susie begged the sock on her arm, as it nestled for a nap. "You have to help them, you can do that right? You brought me back from the dead, of course you can do it. Please don't let them-" that was as far as she got before the sobbing crowded out any sense in her words.

”Look, kid,” the puppet groaned, “You have to be a little more specific than that.”

"We don't have enough food," she hiccoughed, wiping mucus from her nose with the unpossessed arm, "to last the rest of winter.”

”Oh no! Humans need that!” Its face was a cupped hand of horror.

“Can you… help?” Susie’s frustration losing its flavour of desperation, for that of annoyance.

“Sure! What do you want me to do?”

“Get us some food!” Susie immediately regretted shouting, but the puppet spoke before she could start grovelling.

“Of course! Easy! How?” The sock asked, only patience and fraying thread in its button eyes.

“How… Can’t you just… Make food?”

“Maybe!” The puppet said with as much cheer could fit through the girl’s closed mouth. “But… how are you gonna explain where you got it?”

“Why would…” Then Susie realised she might just live to see the consequences. “Oh. Then… Um… Oh! What if-” 

"Susie? Who are you talking to?"

The girl and sock turned in united startlement as Susie's mother walked into the room. The woman, dusted with snow and face frozen into despair, looked at her panicked daughter. Then at the button eyes that were doing a decent job at mirroring that panic.

She burst out laughing for the first time in weeks, while Susie flushed and hid the puppet behind her back.

"I was just-" the girl stammered, her failure to improvise selling her embarrassment better than any lie could, "I just thought-"

"Hold on, sweetie," smiled her mother, turning around, "your dad needs to see this."

"Mum!" But Susie's protests fell on deaf ears, as the woman rushed her husband inside to see what their daughter had done when left unattended.

While embarrassment was cementing the memory, the puppet pretended to whisper in her ear.

"Always have an excuse."

She ripped off the sock and threw it at the wall.

….

After a well earned round of pouting, Susie retrieved the makeshift puppet to keep discussing plans.

But their home wasn't large, so her mother would overhear her 'practising her act' and have a giggle not quite quiet enough to miss.

When it was time for bed, the three all armoured themselves their thickest nightclothes and huddled under the same blankets to conserve warmth. Which made it nearly impossible for an endeavouring teenager to sneak out for mischief.

On the other hand, all it took was a simple-enough sleep spell from the mysterious not-a-ghost living in her head, and the two had an alibi.

Draped in the most unremarkable coat her father owned, Susie crept out the window into the frozen night. 

The cold didn't touch her. For a moment she stood outside her humble cottage, in a world without heat or cold. The only light being the flickers that slipped out of her neighbours' shutters.

It felt for a moment like she didn't exist.

A whistle of wind reminded her of reality, and she forced out a step across the snow. Her foot landed on it as if it was solid rock, rather than a loose pile of crushed crystals.

She snuck across the frozen ground, into the black unbroken even by the memory of firelight. Her only guide was a voice in her head that told her when she drifted from her bearing.

Comfort only came when she reached out and touched a shed she'd walked by a thousand times and never into. With it came meaning; the agonising walk had not been through empty void, just the bit of land that wasn't quite part of the village.

Susie fought with the snow to open the shed door, and slid in through her sliver of victory. With the door shut, she donned the sock that the puppeteer had insisted on bringing. 

Hidden from the world by walls and distance– and now properly attired– a faint light shone from the puppet's mouth, so Susie could search.

The first part of her plan was simple enough; 

There was a pond with pretences of lake-hood that the villagers used for ice fishing, though there had been fewer days that year when it was safe enough to use without freezing to death. The extra occupant of Susie's skull would make sure that the fish would bite a bit more than usual.

She pulled out the bucket of bait, either too cold to wriggle or too dead, and a gleaming needle.

Then sat for a moment.

“Is something wrong...? Are you afraid of needles?” The light dimmed with every flap of the puppet's mouth.

"No," she answered in a whisper, "I just…" And finding no excuse, she stopped putting it off. "What's the price?"

The puppet couldn't blink. “The price for what?”

"For all this." Susie gestured around the shed as if it were the concept of magic itself.

The puppet looked about, frowning. “A drop of your blood. I thought we covered that?”

"Not for the spell," she hissed, and faltered at her own wording, "well not the- whatever. The price for your help."

The sock heaved a great sigh, and then was just a sock on Susie's hand.

I believe you deserve a serious answer to that. Would you grab some snow for me?

Like the dutiful daughter she wasn’t, Susie opened the door long enough to pick up a handful of snow. It was odd, to hold snow in bare skin and not be burned by its chill.

Odder for it to melt in her hand without spilling a drop, and for her fingers to flick the water into a perfect flat circle of ice.

She stared at the disc, at a loss, until the faint reflection smiled kindly without a single muscle in her face twinging.

'This isn't the kind of conversation I'd like you to associate with my favourite visage.' Susie's not-quite-a-reflection said, half in her head, half as a whisper from the ice itself.

It made Susie quite glad, in retrospect, of the thing's first choice of representation.

"So, what do I have to…" she couldn't finish for the dread the shadowed reflection sparked.

'I charge you no price that you aren't already paying. I took sanctuary inside your head, and I can't imagine something you would ask of me that could compare.' It reassured, but continued with the catch before Susie could ask for it.

'But, there is risk. There are those that search for the secrets I’ve locked inside your skull.

If they find you, everyone you have ever met will die.

All I will be able to do is run away in your corpse.'

There were tears in Susie's eyes. Some of them might even have been hers.

"And this spell is worth the risk?" The girl asked in a whisper so low you’d have to be in her head to hear it.

'You tell me.'

Susie weighed the certainty of starvation against the uncertain annihilation. It took a few seconds.

Then she put down the ice-mirror, and pricked herself with the needle.

"What's your name?" She asked, while her hand played with the drop of blood like it was a marble.

Dangerous to know. You can give me a new one, if you'd like.

"Buttons." Susie said, smiling with innocence painted over malice.

In that case, I am the wise and illustrious Buttons. A pleasure to meet you… Susie, was it?

"That was a joke,” she blew disappointment out of her cheeks, “of course I won't call you something that dumb." 

Whyever not? It's my name, I can't imagine answering to anything else.

"Shut up,” Susie couldn't contain her groan, “I'm not calling the evil ghost living in my head Buttons."

Instead of responding to the insult, Buttons just finished the magic, the drop off blood falling to the insects as a mist finer than any mortal eye would be able to see.

By the last weeks of winter, the roads finally were clear enough for wagons to trudge through, allowing merchants to come and sell food at predatory prices. But at least the villagers were alive to pay them.

In-between complaining about the greed of merchants or preparing for the start of spring, the village folk gave their thanks to their god for the tide of fish flesh. They hadn't noticed that their houses had kept in warmth better than they should have, or that viruses which had begun to wreak within their organs, or a dozen other minor miracles.

Susie was a bit annoyed about not being able to take Buttons' hard-won credit, but had to admit it was slightly better than being on the receiving end of a genocide.

One evening, Susie was hiding away from the constant remarks about how she should perform her puppet act at the upcoming festival. She'd chosen the bottom of a too-familiar slope in the forest.

"Such a stupid way to die." She said, looking at the rocks that bore no trace of her blood.

"Oh, don't beat yourself up over it," said the sock, suffering no remorse over being the reason behind the girl's exile, "in my experience most ways are. It's a good spot you've picked though; to say farewell in the first spot we 'met'."

"Do you have to go? Or sleep or whatever?" Susie asked the puppet, almost as if it could be a real friend.

"I don't think either of us want me around for the rest of your puberty." It said, while Susie's arm shook from the thought.

A moment passed, while Susie chewed on words she was scared to say. And then spat them all out at once:

"Please-stay-and-teach-me-magic! And about your scary past! And about whoever's trying to kill you- or rekill you or-"

Her arm dropped away, with no animating will but her own to support it, and her eyes burst with panic.

"No!" She begged. "Wait, please! I need you!”

Alone and lonely again for the first time in months, Susie sank to the ground and began to cry. “I can't just go back to pretending to be normal."

Oh, I'm sure you could, most people manage after a while.

"I don't want to!" The honesty tore at her throat. "I hate this stupid tiny village and being tiny and stupid in it, I want to learn magic! And secrets and… be more than this."

Even if it might kill everyone you know? Your parents?

"Yes." Susie cried, with the reckless determination of the devil.

Then her head was filled with the cruel thing laughter could turn into. But it was not aimed at Susie.

Then let’s make you into something that can split open the skies and tear kings from their thrones.

The puppet bounced back up and looked into the girl's eyes.

"Now, Susie-pupil-of-Buttons," it mouthed, "to make sure that we don’t immediately, well, die; what are we going to need before I get to teach you even the littlest bit of a spell?"

She almost said 'a wand', or something about as magic-sounding, before realising that was the answer of a child chasing wonder. Which she was. But she wanted to be one of the ones who caught the fucker.

So, only after some pondering did she give her answer.

"Dang it-” She started exclaiming, then reconsidered. “Shit. I need a fake teacher."

"Well done! I'm going to need you to make me clap, I don't have hands." The puppet cheered. "Owowowowow. Now let's go find you a witch or wizard and blow their sparkly socks off!"