Body Down

Marguerite Alley

What is the world if not a miasma of ghosts, we often think now. The dead a glaucous chorus of light through which the living now move. Guidelines established: stay indoors when possible. Answer when the doorbell rings. Give the ghosts what they ask, if you can spare it. Let them rest on the stoop while they eat or drink the proffered snacks; they do not seem to want to come in, and they do not speak. They do not seem to have connections to the houses at which they arrive. Featureless and formless as they are, no one has recognized a returning dead loved one among them. They eat, and they will be on their way shortly. Others are behind them—hence the importance of staying home, answering the bell promptly, to prevent a queue from forming.

We stand at the windows and look down into the street. We take a crack at cooking a roast in the crockpot to pass the time, distribute the warm bowls of meat and root vegetables to whomever rings the doorbell next. Our roommates learn to knit. Our roommates listen to lectures on river ecology. Our roommates consider whether or not to apply to grad school. Hunched over a phone, we order our groceries for the week.

“The Cheez-Its were a hit with the ghosts,” our roommates say. “We should stock up on a few boxes of those.”

We are unable to add this item to our cart due to an error message that apologizes for a supply chain disruption. “Do you think they’d like the off-brand version?” we ask. We congratulate ourselves on making do.

When we do venture outside, there are protocols. Though the boundaries are often difficult to discern, it is considered good form to walk around the ghosts when we encounter them in the street. A separation is necessary—a last attempt to maintain the bleeding line between living and dead. Also whatever the ghosts are made of stains clothes.

The light is different now, neither dimmer or brighter but somehow altered. Photons tipped sideways, all of them picked up and moved a few centimeters to the left. The streets are thick with quiet, a kind of liquid through which we can swim. We grow unused to faces, are more comfortable with the nebulous shapes of ghosts, the empty spaces where expressions may once have been. The mouth persists, but only as a portal through which foods disappear, moving from existence into nonexistence without mediation. Fruits consumed in one bite, unpeeled. Tall glasses of water full in one moment and then empty the next. A handful of popcorn is not consumed piecemeal but vanishes as a collective, in one motion. How neat they all are. How insatiable.

“Do you think they’ll be hungry forever?” ask our roommates.

“What happens if we don’t feed them?” ask our roommates.

“If I quit my job will you cover me for rent this month until I get another?” ask our roommates.

There is a theory, difficult to fathom, that the ghosts are divorced from time—not the recent dead, but plucked from the past, the shades of all the many thousands who have walked the earth before us. The divisions between generations dissolved, a compression of souls into the present day. History like a build up of dirt beneath a nail. Stripped of their own time, they return to what they know best: consumption, and gentle companionship while they do it. The hope of charity with each rung bell. So polite, we often think, and stand on the stoop with them while they finish a sandwich of leftover chuck roast on a dinner roll. We think: do you remember them? The sandwiches you ate when alive? Did you know sandwiches in your time? Of course you did, we say, watching the mouth open wide.

Marguerite Alley (she/they) is a writer from Durham, North Carolina whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, Nimrod, New Ohio Review, The Louisville Review, Chautauqua, Pigeon Pages, and elsewhere. She is at work on a novel.