Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day(20)
“I grew up on a farm, eating dirt and sexing chickens,” says Brenda. “It’ll take more than a little cat hair to do me in.”
“Okay,” I say, uncertainly. I’ve never had a houseguest before, not in all the time that I’ve been renting this apartment. I’ve certainly never come home with a witch. For all I know, Brenda has a mirror of her own tucked into the bottom of that bag, something come from Mill Hollow and destined to be my final resting place.
But no. She’s had plenty of opportunity to ambush me, and not just tonight; stretching all the way back to the night we met, years and miles ago. She had no reason to tell me about the missing ghosts, to take me to see Sophie, if she just wanted to take me captive. I have to trust someone, and Brenda seems like the best candidate for the position. She doesn’t have a mirror. She isn’t here to hurt me.
“The couch is fine,” she says. “I’ve slept on worse, and I like cats. As long as there’s running water in the bathroom, I won’t have any problems.”
“Delia keeps the place up to code,” I say. I don’t bathe—going insubstantial for hours every night keeps me clean—and I only have to use the toilet if I drink coffee or eat pie, but since I do both those things just about every day, running water is important to me, too. And then there are the cats to consider. Cats require water to live.
“Good,” says Brenda. She walks to the couch and plops down on the central cushion, between a geriatric calico and a black cat whose eyesight failed long before he came to me. She puts her backpack between her feet and begins stroking one of them with each hand. “I’m sorry to impose.”
“No, no, it’s fine,” I say. If my mama could see me now, offering a guest a couch with no sheets, in a house with no food . . . “You, um. You know that once I go to bed, I won’t be here anymore, right? Not for a few hours, anyway.”
“I know about going to grave,” says Brenda solemnly, and while I’ve never heard it called that before, the words are exactly right. I’m going to grave: I’m going where the good ghosts go, when they still belong here, in this world. “I’ll see you in the morning, and we’ll figure out what to do next.”
Break a lot of mirrors; free a lot of ghosts. All we have to do is find them. “Good night,” I say, and walk the floor, checking my cats before I slip into my bedroom and slip out of my skin, back into my burial shroud. Then I slip into the bed, and the world is gone, replaced by silence and the absence of time. For those few hours, I am truly dead.
What Brenda does while I’m gone is effectively a secret, because I’m not there. I have never been there. For the first few hours after I go to “sleep,” there’s nothing that can rouse me before my time is done.
My gone-time transitions into more ordinary slumber, and ends with sunlight slanting colorlessly through the window like beams of dusty silver, and the washed-out smell of bacon sizzling on a distant stove. Scents, like colors, are mostly stripped away by the state of being insubstantial; they haunt me, the way I normally haunt the world. I roll out of bed, set feet to the air just above the floor, and will myself toward solidity. Bit by bit, the sunlight turns golden, and the smell of bacon turns rich and fatty and nostalgic, like waking up back at home, Patty curled sleeping on her half of the bed, the morning chorus chirping and trilling in the tree outside our window. Scent is very much a part of memory, and memory is a form of time travel. It takes us back, whether or not we want to go.
Brenda is at the stove when I walk, barefoot and wrapped in my sleeping shroud, out into the front of the apartment, where the kitchen and living room flow together like water. The floor around her is a sea of cats, wolfing down their canned food with a gusto that I haven’t seen from some of them in months, if ever. I give her a quizzical look.
“You died in what, the mid-seventies?” asks Brenda neutrally, flipping the sizzling bacon in the pan.
“Early,” I say. “Seventy-two.” That was the last year I walked the world in skin and flesh and bone; the last year the world contained my sister, pretty Patty, who should have been the one to endure, if either of us was going to.
“So you probably missed the trick,” says Brenda. She begins scooping bacon from the pan to a nearby plate, where half a dozen slices are already cooling, fatty and delicious. “I’m a corn witch. I’ve told you that. I left Indiana because I missed Bill, and because the field was too tempting. Witches can only go out into things that have life of their own. Remember that, when whatever comes next turns taxing: a witch can never go into a ghost, or a corpse, or a bone. They can go into stones and gems and the like, but that’s because the earth has a sort of life, and that’s getting very metaphysical. Bacon?”
“Do I smell coffee?” I ask, in a small voice. I didn’t expect to start my day with a witch waxing poetic about things that are and aren’t dead. I may not sleep in the traditional way, but I’m still groggy and unsettled when I get up, and this is more than I’m equipped to handle right now.
“You do smell coffee, and pancakes,” says Brenda. “Delia will be down with more eggs in a moment. She’s a charming woman, your landlady. If I were twenty years younger, and she were interested in the living, I’d offer her more than a free breakfast, if you take my meaning.”
“If I don’t want it, can I put it down?” I ask, horrified.