Sneak Peek from OTHER BIRDS

GHOST STORY

Camille

Sometimes it feels like I’m almost gone. Weightless.  Floating.  It reminds me of the first time my brother John took me to Wildman Beach.  It was an hour’s walk, and he didn’t want his little sister tagging along and slowing him down.  All my young life I could smell the ocean from our house, which was smack-dab in the center of the island, tempting me like hot pie in an oven.  That, combined with the allure of doing something up until then only John had been allowed to do, made me full of brattiness.  When I pouted, watching John set out on dark summer mornings, my mama used to say, “Use your imagination and you can be there any time you want.”  But I didn’t want to imagine it. I wanted the real thing.  Turns out, the real thing almost killed me.  Mama finally made John take me when I was eight years old. John knew I couldn’t swim, but he still dragged me into the water that first time, saying the only way to learn was to go out as far as possible and make my own way back.  If you really want to come back, he said, you’ll fight it.

I nearly drowned.  John pulled me out and I had no breath and everyone thought I was dead.  But I did want back—to my old dog Goodnuff, to my beat-up baby doll Mosey, and to my mama and her cornbread, which was waiting on the kitchen table, just dry enough to crumble into a glass of milk.  I was a fat baby, so that feeling of weightlessness when I almost died was scary.  I was used to weight keeping me grounded, every step a comforting reverberation of the earth coming through my bare feet.

I don’t mind this weightlessness so much now, not like I did then.  I’m just waiting to finally be let go.  In a way, it’s nice to be remembered, nice that someone in the world still needs me, still needs at least the memory of who I was.  That’s what keeps me here.

My Macbaby keeps me here.

He was the biggest surprise of my life.  Because I never set out to keep any children until he showed up on my doorstep when I was near about eighty.  I never had any of my own and I was okay with that.  I had lots of brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews, so I’d seen too many births and I’d seen too much baby poop.  When I grew up, all I wanted was to leave that behind.  I liked children okay.  They could be cute and funny as all get-out.  But I didn’t like how they took so much of you.  I knew women who had too many mouths to feed because they couldn’t keep their husbands off of them.  And I knew childless women who faded away to nothing because they thought they were only worth something if they had a baby.  And all these women, they had pieces of them missing.  They’d be walking down the road and I could actually see holes in them where the sun shone through.  I never knew why they seemed so normal, so happy to have all those holes, until Mac.

He found my body after I died, and I wish to God I could have changed that.

I never wanted to put that burden on him.

I’d been cooking cornbread in my kitchen when I just slipped away.  As easy as can be.  I was ready this time.  Mac would come to check on me every few days after he moved out.  He would take me to the grocery store and all my doctors’ appointments.  That day he came in with all the fixings for a millionaire pie I told him I wanted to make for our Sunday dessert.  He found me on the floor, covered in cornmeal like snow.  I was gone, or so I thought, until I heard him cry, cry like I never heard him cry before, and that brought me right back to him, where I’ve been ever since.

One day he’ll be ready to let me go.  Until then, I’m here, weightless but not unhappy, waiting to be released like a wish or a balloon, floating up to that place where hope goes.

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