Issue 33.3

By Erica Quinones

Costume Jewelry Cemetery

You don’t mess with witchcraft. You won’t be the one in control, ma says with a brisk cut of her knife. Slicing through green pepper shells, the tension in the kitchen thickens. My sister stands in stasis across the granite no man’s land.

Spirits are trouble, that’s what your grandmother’d say. Wreak havoc. Take you back down with them. The tea cools in my hands, evening light slipping through the windows, gold tinged red and blue and green where it refracts through her stained glass windchime. Cathedral fingers trace my sister’s cheek as she disappears upstairs without a word.

Catholics are superstitious; ghosts are part of their unwritten doctrine. Something about Purgatory that sits deep inside their minds. The idea that we can’t be sure grandpa is in Heaven because, while it’s been seventeen years, the man was a drinker and a smoker and a veteran who shot people in Korea and, even if it was for country, it was murder, so he might still be burnin’ and purgin’ in The Great In-Between just really gets the Catholics seeing ghosts everywhere.

Aunty sees sister ghosts in cigarette smoke, urging her to keep puffin’ cause by God when they stopped, they dropped. The pale eyes of bygone in-laws watch the children from the staircase top, guarding their moonlit monk cells, listening to the silent thrill of their own breathing and ghastly imaginations.

Funny that it’s almost always children who channel spirits. Little girls vomiting pea soup and little boys siccing rottweiler hounds on unsuspecting nurses.

Funny that those spirits are always malevolent. Spirits are always a punishment for some infantile sin, innate or preordained, as if Grandpa can’t visit the kids on his way for supernatural cigs and PBR.

Maybe it’s because kids can’t tell the living from the dead.

Too young to remember ma’s parents, I wouldn’t’ve clocked the supposed-to-be-resting if they stood before me. They’d just be a couple of old folks with her double-chin.

But we don’t stay children forever, and we don’t keep seeing ghosts.

Ghosts don’t appear in photographs. They’re not orbs of light or shadowy figures just on the edge of comprehension, captured in radio static and film.

Ghosts are words. Ghosts are grief.

His ghost’s forever falling.

A break in the rhythm of our life.

If there’s one thing we are, it’s on-beat. We find something and someone we enjoy, and we stay there. We sit on the same section of stone wall, tucked behind the metal bleachers beside the football field. The grass is just becoming wet from dew as the autumn air chills. Our fingers are anemic and blue because we can’t wear gloves to practice, but soon we’ll be in our car with the heat on and we can sit on our fingers, pressing them into warming leather, and feel them thaw as we wait on whoever needs a ride tonight. But, for now, we are tacet until…

A thump breaks the silence. A yell just on our periphery. We turn to see a growing crowd, the band director sprinting across the field. It’s hard to see, but her target is laying in the gravel, long limbs twisting in a contorted dance that just breaks through the tangle of aghast children.

Joining the throng, we all embrace the dancer, a sea of hands pulling and pushing until we get him on his side. As we sweep away his glasses, fingers caressing his face, it finally dawns on us that our twisted dancer is Xae, and we don’t know what’s going on.

Xae is a concerto. A solo voice that enraptures you, entangling you in all his vivacity. All you can hope to do is accompany him, enriching this voice with your humbled harmony.

A tall boy with a bit of a gut, his head tips back when he smiles. Xae is a living limerick. He’s the one who sits beside us on the locker room floor and checks in when it’s all so much the director demands we nap in her office.

He isn’t perfect. He’s moody and a little petty and makes the bad jokes all high school boys make, but he listens when we tell him off.

And for all his flamboyant, fan-popping, drag wearing, musical-singing, gay-best-friend-stereotyping ways, he never comes out as anything.

It doesn’t matter now.

What matters now is that when we are together, we are together. He sings and we listen and we play and he listens and we resonate in the same key, low chords vibrating deep in our chests, swelling with subtle breaths until our lungs burn out and their sonic smoke lingers.

And now we dance with him whenever he falls.

It happens maybe three more times in the following year. We will be sitting or standing, talking or in stasis with Xae and his eyes will go glassy, his mouth drooping into a neutral frown, and then he’s falling.

Like a plane dropping from the sky.

Xae falls, and we do our best to be parachutes, protecting his head, taking his glasses, moving the chairs, making sure he wakes up. We never know what’s happening.

He sees doctors, they’re unsure. His parents are worried. But it’s ok, we’ll take care of him until they know and fix it.

It never occurs to us that they may never know.

Perhaps there was a question they forgot to ask. I mean, we watched a plane fall from the sky and never asked why.

A little white and red T-28, flying belly-to-belly with its partner, higher and higher in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a female voice narrating the whole ordeal over spitting fry grease. And like popping the tab on a soda can, the little engine sputters out and the plane hits freefall.

We can’t remember what it looked like when it hit the ground. An explosion? All fire? There’s a picture of it in the newspaper. All we can remember is our friend crying and her mom holding her and our ma lamenting that the little girl would never get in a plane again.

We never asked who the pilot was.

When Xae drops, he hits free fall, but there’s always a parachute. But what about when we’re all gone? Who will catch him then?

I have spent a ridiculous amount of time thinking about age.

In an empty holiday suite, I feel myself growing old like some premature Prufrock. However, I am only twenty-one and cuffed jeans are trendy and, despite the quiet, the room is lived-in and warm in the autumnal afternoon.

But age doesn’t feel physical; it is emotional. It is watching old friends dissipate. It is attending a Thanksgiving dinner with only four guests because they all moved away. It is visiting your old spot and realizing the drinks taste like a Lush bath bomb.

It is about realizing that perennial does not mean immortal, that “haunt” is a state of being and not an action.

After a year of Covid lockdowns and death counts, you’d think we’d be more aware of the low drone of mortality. But in February 2021, we were just happy to be near people again.

Locked in a room for three which swayed sickeningly in the cold, we found a little solace in a thin wall, through which—if we knocked—our friend would answer. And despite the frigid weather, we could still meet up with the others scattered across campus. Babysitting three drunken students as they swordfight with sticks and the wind grows so violent a tent nearly collapses on us. It is as close to living as we’ve been in a while.

But it is still shattering when your friend calls you on this Sunday night. When you’re told to sit down, and you worry that something has happened to her parents who—you know—have Covid and Diabetes, but it’s not about them.

Xae is dead.

You don’t know what happened. His parents went to church and when they came back, he was gone.

You can see him falling. Spiraling. No parachute deploys.

You don’t know how he looks when he hits the ground. Was there an explosion? A raging fire?

You are standing in a row of sunflowers with shears in your hands. Thunder rumbles as lighting illuminates the boiling Mid-Western sky. You want to dance with its incensed song, keening into the rolling rain.

The last time you saw Xae, you were dancing together at Rebekah’s wedding. She flung a sunflower bouquet.

You can’t go to his funeral because the school won’t let you leave. You want to stand in the shower fully clothed but are too much of a coward to do anything.

Each choice you make is revised and redone and reworked until choice decrescendos to silence.

You mute social media then and again on what should have been his twenty-first birthday.

You still haven’t visited his grave.

Grief is an outpouring of love.

Sometimes that love pours out like a too-high note, just barely a squeak. Sometimes it resonates through the chamber, an unfinished chord. Little nocturnes, accompanying themselves, falling down the scale one step at a time.

I haven’t played piano in ten years but want to so my own left hand can complete the right’s chord. Wind instruments resonate hollow when unaccompanied. It’s too depressing without his tenor. I stop playing.

This is where we become haunted, you and me. In the After. The moments, minutes, months, over a year of After.

My dad tells me about his high school friends. I can’t remember their names, but one shot the other. I don’t know why. Dad learned from his teacher.

I couldn’t understand why he’d just tell me about two strangers I never met and never will and how one, at the age of seventeen, murdered the other for no particular reason. But now I know he is haunted too. He is we.

Ghosts are words, ghosts are grief.

Ghosts are stray thoughts that escape when our partner tells us about their new boss and her service dog which smells seizures and saves lives, and we just think Xae would’ve liked that but saying it is suffocation.

And hey, I never thought of this before, but I watched a man die when I was eleven. Isn’t that kind of fucked up? I never even knew his name.

Ghosts are songs that sneak into our shuffle and teleport us back to a summer dawn. We’re sitting on the bus. He has to hunch down because he’s so tall that he yanks the corded earbud from our head when he straightens up. But despite the awkwardness, we are comfortably twisted together.

We refuse to hit “Skip.” Haunting is an impulse.

Ghosts are myths made real. Shaping our mouth around strange words but alike meanings as we wander into Hades in search of the artist gone too soon, knowing our duets could loosen any chain as long as we’re strong enough to pull us both from the depths.

We are a haunted legion, made up of a chord of ghosts.

Growing up is asking the unasked questions by which we are haunted.

I only know Great-Uncle José because of his death. A delinquent till the end, the police hunted him from New York, NY. to Monrovia, Md., banging on grandpa’s door and demanding his brother. One day, grandpa told the police that José was driving around New York with their cousin, and he’d be in Monrovia on Monday, so come back then. When the police showed up, grandpa gave them José’s ashes and told them that, while he had omitted some information, he had not lied.

José was driving around New York with their cousin. He was just in the trunk.

It’s funny, it really is. But why was José in the trunk?

Why did a plane with a well-trained, Air Force veteran of thirty years fall out of the sky during a routine trick?

Why did a twenty-year-old boy fall in just the wrong way in the one-hour period during which his parents weren’t home?

Measure out days in coffee spoons. Precise and bitter but consistent.

I use the coffee grounds to read my fortune because the looseleaf is too thick.

The more I know, the better I understand this haunt. When it bubbles back up and boils out of my mouth, I know it is love overpouring and that is ok. It is the stasis that I fear. It is standing water that grows disease.

I excavate the memory of a summer day, of a little red and white plane that sings in the air. That screams in the air. Altissimo notes are just a pitched shriek.

The pilot’s name was Jack, but he went by “Flash.” He had three kids and a wife with the same name as my ma and when he died, his flight squad memorialized him in rows of data.

His digital grave is still archived, outlasting the team itself, a ribbon-wreathed haunt.

Researching him is like a genealogy of this grief, naming little ghosts which brush against my feet. Xae remains curled up in my chest.

I feel him stretch like a cat, languid and slow, kneading the chasm that belongs to him, only him. I shutter my isolated, disinfectant-scented room, shunning the living ghosts who wander the street. Xae’s presence curls in my lap and I sit with him, stroking the sleek back of my thoughts with a sensitive palm.

In the darkness, he is a comfort. A deep purr rising from the emptiness between myself and the world. We sit face-to-face in our Purgatory, neither wanting to break the silence. I spin the near-empty teacup in clockwise motions, methodic and hard, jagged little eclipses of clumped tea leaves sloshing up the sides. There are no coffee grounds here.

No answers are brewed in this cup. Nothing manifests from my spirt-board tongue. But it doesn’t need to. I don’t want him to move on just yet, because while the fountaining of grief burns my throat, it tastes like honey.

I’d rather sit with him in the silent in-between.

With Jack, I could map out the tragedy. Newspapers and memorials traced his life in bylines and lily flowers. And while I can never know the Everything, I do know the Aftermath.

Ma was wrong. That girl flew again.

Xae is too nestled in my chest to draw in his entirety. Staring at his whole is like staring into a migraine, a sea of stars dying so fast their supernova blasts leave you blistered. My mouth tastes like pencil lead.

And the Aftermath is not complete. It is not an unraveling. The threads of him knot together, creating a cat’s cradle that goes on and on. I just wait for the ensnaring snap.

I thought it’d come at his graveside.

He doesn’t have a headstone, just a plastic stand preserving a portrait of his smiling face and name. Head leaning into fabric sunflowers and faux-red daisies, he is draped in decadent violets and blushing-mouth tulips. Glimmering blue fingers dance from a stained-glass heart across the prayer stones, dressing the gravesite in costume jewelry. Gaudy rainbow weaves dance in the gray light.

Despite its rainbow façade, it feels incomplete. Bare except the jewelry. I did not feel the slow pull of the fall nor the lightning jolt of the dance nor the need to sing-scream into a drizzling sky nor even the need for a cup of coffee. Feeling in-between, on the verge of ugly sobs but only managing an involuntary trickle to fill his little cup.

You’re supposed to reminisce on sweet moments and throw handfuls of dirt, aren’t you? Mingle in your skin and fingernails and a slurry of blood with the descending wood and flesh, creating a sickly-sweet mixture of yourselves in search of resurrection.

We are a sickly-sweet mix, but it’s walking here on earth. It drips from my fingers like calligraphy ink and sketches our frames. It drips down my back, giving me sweet shivers that taste like gas station milkshakes. It sounds like old jazz music and a rag dance on stage.

He rises in my throat to sing, and we sing together, mopping hardwood floors and dancing with my sister. When the prying hands erupt from my cavernous stomach and drag me into the bed, we fall together, contorting bodies clinging to each other. Ghostly hands puppeteer my body with memory strings but I smile at the reassuring pressure.

Even if I don’t fuck with witchcraft, the magic rises in me. Spirits grace faceless places, possessing the curves of my mind. We are haunted but we are haunted together, fingers sketching charcoal outlines of our cemetery stones, one at a time at a time at a time and those stones twist up suspiciously like people.