Cady Vishniac
Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: We’re big fans of ghost stories here at The Cincinnati Review; Assistant Editor Molly Reid explained that well in a blog post last fall, highlighting stories from issue 14.2 that fell into that category. Since then, we’ve also featured another sort of ghost story on miCRo, Katie Cortese’s “Neat Freak,” which describes a mother who’s lost a daughter. You could say that Cady Vishniac’s story is also about a mother who’s lost a daughter, but in both cases, that’s a bit too reductive: In Vishniac’s story, for example, the daughter-ghost is eerily alive, and the narrator-mother is a bit ghostly herself. The ambiguity is a useful one, and the story highlights how relationships can turn us into phantoms.
To hear Cady read her story, click below:
What a Ghost Can Do
A part of the ghost still dwells in the void around which the skin of my stomach wrinkles, breached like waves, plasma soft. She sleeps in my bed and worms her head toward my neck. My hair is thin on the pillow; the ghost’s hair is thick and curly.
She says I’m all she loves.
I say I feel the same.
She says, “Where’s Dad?”
I say, “Who?”
I should be grateful I have a friendly ghost. Another ghost would lose her patience with me, the way I pretend to forget things.
My ghost leans across the sheets to hug me, but her arms pass through my arms. All I feel is a chill, then goose bumps on every inch of my skin.
She flickers through walls. Back and forth to the kitchen, the television, the bus stop.
When she’s in class, I drift through hallways. Nobody can see me in the mirror. I use a phone for the first time since my marriage disappeared. I chew my nails. I even make howling noises to scare off intruders, but this time, the ghost must have come home when I wasn’t looking.
“Calm down, Mom. I can’t think when you’re like this.”
Glimmering from sweat. Pale from never leaving my house. I smell like soil and salt and am no longer sure what’s real. I know I haven’t paid our electric bill in a long time. I know I haven’t eaten.
I know every building in our neighborhood fills with centipedes this time of year; I’m reminded when the ghost picks one off her T-shirt.
“Don’t be scared of me,” she says. “I’m normal.”
She smells like yeast and formaldehyde, and has started to wear pink nail polish. I feel like she never gets older. I feel like I can’t rest without her father, like I need his help. The basement we blasted out with dynamite floods. The window we installed pops loose onto the highway we tried to ignore. The rattle and scream of traffic in my bedroom.
When I think about dying, the ghost interrupts me.
She snaps her fingers. “Mom? Mom Mom Mom Mom?”
I don’t usually answer. But the ghost has a trick up her sleeve. When she really wants to get my attention, she sinks a frosty hand deep into my chest. My ribs creak open for her like an old door, and then I have ice inside. It fills the space where my personhood used to live.
My lungs expand, crystalline. “Yes. Yes yes yes yes how are you?”
I’m talking, so I’m fixed. I’m fixed, so her hand retracts, nudging my ribs shut on her way out. She tells me about a boy at the bus stop, a new color of nail polish, or how much she loves snakes. Sometimes she even pats my head like I’m the baby.
We always pretend nothing happened, right up until the next time it does.
Cady Vishniac is an Endelman/Gitelman Fellow at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. Her stories have appeared most recently in New England Review and Glimmer Train, and she is the fiction editor of Reservoir. Her current project is a novel about American Jews and the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement.
For more miCRo pieces, CLICK HERE.
