The Ghost Woman

Everyone can still see her, and she still goes to work every day, has to figure out what to eat every night. No one can tell that she’s a ghost, even though she knows it somewhere in the pit where her stomach was. She practices trying to do ghost-related activities like walking through walls, but just ends up chipping her tooth and paying too much to go to the dentist, who also doesn’t know she’s a ghost.

Sometimes she brings lovers home, people that feel shimmeringly and painfully alive, the kind that bite lips when they kiss and might grind out a cigarette barefooted. Usually, the ghost-woman asks them to hurt her — they create safe words she never uses, tie her down, suck at her skin to make bruises where her body would be. Sometimes these people will try to be tender with her, will reach to cup her cheek and kiss her gently, try to stroke her skin softly or lovingly. It is then that she will watch their faces contort from lust to shock as they realize there is nothing there. It is only then that the ghost woman is satisfied, when the truth has been confirmed.

 Finally, she has been seen for what she knows she is: nothing.

When they leave, sometimes in the morning but almost always still at night, the ghost-woman often follows and watches them from the street outside her house. She tries to feel the earth breathe against her skin. It doesn’t work, because she doesn’t have any, of course.