outside-logic

[outside-logic]

[outside-logic]

[outside-logic]

the ghost in the garden is haunting me

Years after Todd started haunting me, the garden was loud. The wind gripped the branches of my old oak and slammed them against each other, turned the leaves into drums. The gravel of the path crunching under my fight sounded like fireworks. The birds were screaming. It wasn’t as loud as it was the year Todd died, but it was more aggressive. The noises were angry.

I went to a group therapy session on the anniversary of Todd’s death. I couldn’t handle the noise. But it wasn’t any better there. All those other griefs were suffocating.

When I left the room, I saw three women outside the door. They could have been friends, or sisters, or a polyamorous trio. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter anyway. They were gripping each other desperately, their bodies so close together they were almost running together. If Todd was here I would hold him like that.

“You know, I used to be so angry at you,” Todd said. The blue button-up he wore was rumbled and stained, one collar standing straight up. There was a ragged hole on the left side of the shirt, and I knew that there was a matching hole on the back.

“Why?” I whispered. My therapist had told me not to talk to him over and over. My therapist had chipmunk-sized front teeth, and every time I had a session with her, I was transfixed by them. I stared at her teeth and ignored her advice.

“You named me Todd. It’s such a basic name. I wish you had chosen something more… creative.” As he grinned at me, a thin stream of blood dripped out of his ear. It made no sound as it hit the ground and soaked into the grass. “It’s okay, though. I know you were just doing your best.”

“Thank you, Todd,” I said, woodenly. I very determinedly did not look at his ear.

“I love you, mom. I’ve always loved you.” He said it in a very matter-of-fact voice. At some point, a piece of straw appeared in his mouth, and he chewed on it like a cowboy in one of the trashy Westerns he used to love.

“God, just stop. Please, stop talking. You sound like a Hallmark greeting card, you—just shut up.”

I felt my eyes watering, and took out the travel-sized tissue pack from my pocket. It was almost empty, but I pulled out the last two tissues and wiped my eyes. I’d been a continually leaking faucet for the last five years, and by that point tears were just an eventuality to plan for.

“Of course, mom,” he said. I closed my eyes to wipe them, pressed hard against my eyelids until red crept in from the sides and danced against my irises. When I opened them again, he was sitting on the grass, innocent as you please. In the space of a couple seconds, he had turned small and chubby, his only words indiscernible babbling. I laughed—well, I felt the laugh, deep down, but it dissolved in my stomach acid and was gone long before it got to my throat. It was such a Todd thing to do, obeying my order not to talk in the most absurd way possible.

Todd had been a cute baby when he was alive, and that didn’t change when he died. This hallucination or ghost or whatever it was impersonating my dead son had gotten him almost perfectly right, down to the little wisp of hair sticking up from his skull and the way he had sucked on his knuckles as a baby. But he was never this nice to me. He was seventeen when he died, and teenagers are not notorious for telling their parents about their love. Every time he appeared, every time he said something sweet, it broke the illusion that Todd, the real Todd, was waiting for me in the living room with his phone in one hand and a horrendously unhealthy snack in the other.

I was crying hard enough that my nose was blocked, and I was out of tissues again, so I blew my nose into the grass and went inside, leaving Todd to crawl around alone. By the time I passed the abandoned car stuck in the middle of my garden, he had disappeared.

I stuck my head under cold water until the redness in my eyes went away. I had gotten rather good at it over the last five years. Too long under the water and the cold irritates your eyes more, too short and the puffiness won’t go down.

“Tell me a story,” Todd said. He was eight or nine, that straw still stuck between his lips.

I ignored him.

“Or just talk to me. It doesn’t have to be a story.”

I left the faucet on and dried my hands on a towel.

“Hey, you can tell me about the car in the garden!”

My hands were dry, so I put them under the water again.

He was using his wheedling voice. “Come on, you love the garden!”

I rubbed the towel against my wrist until my skin was raw.

“Please please please please please please please ple—”

“Fine. ”

“... really?”

“Yes.” This Todd was the hardest to resist, all floppy-haired and puppy-eyed, wearing a minecraft shirt that was two sizes too small. “There is tree and and car in my garden.” I told him about raising the oak, 15 years old when I got it and still scrawny, guiding its trunk through a window and then out the sunroof. I talked about the flowers filling the seats and the floor, and the vines hanging down around the trunk. Throughout, he watched me intently, his gaze never moving away from my face.

“Thank you for telling me about that, mom,” He said solemnly.

“You’re welcome.” My smile was a small, sharp thing, but it was there and it was hard-won.

When Todd died, my garden died with him. His death filled it with thorns and weeds, left my oak dried and leaves. The last time I was in it was the night that Todd died. I gave the car that he died in to the garden, and the thorns grew up around it almost overnight. I got home from the hospital, and suddenly pricker bushes were taking over my lilies. Thorny vines choked out everything.

***

When Todd was a baby, his clothes were constantly getting dirty. I would come in from working outside to change him, and even if I scrubbed my hands for minutes before touching him, the dirt under my fingernails and in the crevices of my palm somehow found its way onto his skin.

When he got older, he helped me. No matter how much I told him that there wasn’t much difference, he always claimed that Lonicera Periclymenum was the sweetest of all the honeysuckle species. The honeysuckles were overwhelmed first. They were gone before I got back from the hospital.

In the hospital, there was a clean white bandage wrapped around his head, and not a drop of blood anywhere in sight. It was too clean. When the hospital called me and told me that my son was in a medically induced coma, in critical condition, I had not expected this. I had thought there would be bits of flesh everywhere, and the overpowering smell of rot. Instead, there were clean bandages and the faint smell of cleaning products.

Todd refused to go to sleep without a story until the age of ten, and he always insisted that we go out into the garden to read it.

I opened the storybook across my knees.

“There once was a girl who lived in a cave, deep underground. Her village was made of many rooms, all carved directly into the rock. It was always dark." I told him about the plants, the many plants that her people tended, and saw as holy. I told him about the tunnel, steep and pitted with traps, and the girl who went up the tunnel one day, when everyone was asleep. I thought he shifted when I described the top of the tunnel, and the man, far away, herding strange, skinny livestock. Alarms started beeping before I got to the end. Over the sounds of nurses moving around the room, I yelled about the animals scraping their teeth over the dirt, rocks crunching in their teeth. People started moving around the room. There was one nurse who held Todd’s hand as he looked over the machines, who was kind when he kicked me out of the room.

When a doctor came to see me forty-five minutes later, her face was carefully grave. She told me about Todd’s sudden drop in brain activity in a polite, professional voice. She spewed her scripted sympathy at me for far too long before she got the message and left me alone.

“She watched the man for a long time, but he just stood among his cattle, still as a corpse,” I whispered, standing in the hallway outside his room. I didn’t feel anything except for a vague disappointment that I hadn’t gotten to finish the story.

By the time I got home, the thorns were everywhere.

***

There car in my garden is covered in leaves and vines and earth. If you didn’t know what it was you would think it’s just a mound of dirt.

Todd leaned against the fence, a broad straw hat on his head to match the straw in his mouth. The blood had moved from his ear, pooling around the tear in his shirt and splattering across his cheeks. “Tell me a story, mom. Tell me about how that car got here.”

“You know what happened, Todd.”

“Then tell me again. Please, mom*.*”

“After you died, I drove it here and left it.” My voice didn’t waver on the word died, and I counted that as a personal victory.

Todd disappeared. He had gotten what he came for. I was thinking about it now. He just didn’t want me to forget.

I didn’t want to forget.

After Todd died, after all the doctors left and the only thing left to do was pick out a coffin, I went to find his van.

It looked the same from the back. The paint wasn’t so much as scratched. The windshield was shattered, but someone had cleaned the glass out of the inside. They said the accident was no one's fault. A piece of metal had cracked away from a building to the right. Inevitable, they said, with how much wind we’ve been having. That metal crashed through the windshield and right into Todd’s chest. Regrettable, they said, he was so young.

Most of the bloodstains were concentrated on the leather of the driver's seat and the dashboard. I got into the van and put my hand over a spot of blood on the steering wheel. I kept to the speed limit all the way home.

I turned down the gravel road that led to my house. I was driving the car one-handed, my fingers still clenched over the blood on the wheel. The needle on the speedometer strained further and further to the right. The end of the path was ahead, with my garden ahead, old growth trees lined around the edges of my yard. I didn’t slow down.

The car hit the edge of the path and narrowly avoided hitting a tree. I didn't slow down. I was properly in my garden then, flowers splayed out over the windshield and vines trying to tangle around the wheels. The muddy ground made the car spin around, and I lost my momentum. I pushed the gas pedal down harder. But I was already at the other side of my garden, and the car was caught between two oaks, their trunks squeezing the hood on either side.

I got out of the car and walked back to the street, using the furrows of squished plants as a path.

***

Todd was better than me with tomatoes. I never knew when to pick them. They would end up on the table sour, or they would squish disgustingly between my fingers. He claimed it was all about the surface tension. He threw a tomato at me once, like a snowball. The surface tension of his perfectly ripe tomato kept it from breaking open, and it just bounced off my shirt.

The tomato I threw back at him was rotten and oozing. It splattered across his face, and of course after that he accused me of cheating. While he was doing that I threw another one at him. He got down off his cheating soapbox real quick to find an appropriately disgusting tomato for me.

***

At first, Todd was just a whisper at the back of my head. A comforting voice, telling me that everything was going to be okay. It wasn’t even him, at first. It was my voice, my subconscious, my fault. I believed that voice, at first. I believed that he would come back. But as the days went on and Todd stayed dead, and I stopped hoping, until one day Todd appeared in my kitchen and I didn’t care that he wasn’t real.

In the days before New Years Eve, the illusion stopped being enough. We lurked around each other, me and the illusion. I sat in the living room watching the old TV sputter along on its ramshackle shelf, and he watched me, and the silence pressed down as hard as it had in those first months.

My garden froze on New Year's Eve. The car lurked at the edge of the yard, as usual, except instead of being covered with a curtain of greenery, there were just skeletal branches and frozen leaves. Todd was sitting in the brown grass next to it.

“Why am I here, mom?” He sounded exhausted, and when he looked up at me, there was blood running down his face.

I was staring in shock at the destruction of my garden, but at his words I spun around and jabbed a finger at him. “You—I don’t want you here. You won’t go away.”

Todd was flickering between ages and outfits like an old lightbulb, and for long moments his muscles seemed to be woven together with vines. When he spoke, his voice sounded like mine. “I love you. Everything is going to be okay.”

When his face was overwhelmed by vines, and he stopped looking like Todd, I spoke. “I. Don’t. Believe. You.”

“I. Am. You.” His voice was almost mocking for a moment, before suddenly he pulled back together, into Todd as an eight-year old. “Tell me a story, mom.”

I closed my eyes and listened to the birds. They sounded very far away. In my head, my therapist ranted about healthy coping mechanisms through her chipmunk teeth.

“The trip back down to her cave was easy.” I whispered.

For a second, Todd flickered. There was an outline of a hospital gown, white bandages there and then gone. “The girl who lived beneath the world slid down the tunnel like a slide and soon ended up back home.” The story was old, almost forgotten, and I grasped the edges of it with difficulty. Todd’s straw left his mouth and was threaded between his fingers as I told him about the girl, who came home and wept in sadness for what she had seen in the world above. As she called her people to action, beseeched them to come above and help those on the surface, the wound in his chest leaked blood. I described the villagers digging up their plants, and making the long trek back to the surface. I couldn’t say when it happened, but the ground around us smelled like a hospital room. I could hear the quiet beeping and subdued chatter that had infiltrated Todd's final moments, and I told him the rest of the story. I narrated the grief of the girl as they had to leave some of their plants behind, and the difficult climb through the tunnel. When I described the awe the girl and her village felt at seeing the surface, Todd was no longer moving, and the vines had so enveloped him that it was hard to delineate him from the shrubbery around us. “The surface-dwellers helped the girl and her people dig below the hard crust into the good soil below. They put down their plants in neat rows, and no one had to live beneath the ground ever again.”

“Thank you for the story, mom,” he whispered in my head, his voice like the wind.

Todd faded into the undergrowth and was gone. I don't know if he was ever really there at all.

[outside-logic]

hey wanna know the darkest joke I've ever been told

"Are you Columbine? Because I want to shoot kids inside you."

It was told to me as a pick-up line by a very... interesting person.

I'm so sorry.

[outside-logic]

The flesh yeearrnnns

Jane has always been a tactile person, even before we started dating. I met her in a hole-in-the-wall bar downtown, the sort that either gave you salmonella or alcohol poisoning, and by the end of the night she was drunk as hell and draped over me like a blanket. Jane was my first girlfriend, and during those initial months of our relationship, any public affection made me bitter and panicked. My parents claimed to be the hate the sin, love the sinner sort of Christian, but they never managed to get over my sin. 

“A lesbian,” my dad said, like it was a curse word. “You think you’re a lesbian. You’ll never find a husband if you say things like that.”

“Yeah, Dad,” I said. “That’s the point.” 

I left that house as soon as I turned eighteen, and I never looked back. Even so, holding her hand where others could see sent me spiraling, years of ingrained hatred blaring inside my head. I told her, over and over, that I needed more time. I couldn’t handle the thought of people staring at us, judging us, not so soon after leaving my parents. She always apologized, and promised to do better, but she never did. Touching was an instinct for her, something she barely seemed to notice herself doing.

Other than that, though, we were perfect for each other. She brought me paper mache flowers because I was allergic to real ones, and I made her favorite weird Russian dessert from scratch because she didn’t like how the store-bought ones tasted. I didn’t make fun of her for unironically loving childrens cartoons, and she tolerated my habit of spending way too much money on tiny cat statues. I got used to her public affection eventually, and I was more in love than I had ever been. 

Jane has always been a bit unaware of social niceties, a bit too rude and brusque, but the first truly weird thing happened after Jane had a bad day at work. She worked at a fancy coffee shop, and her days were far more likely to be bad than good, but this time it was especially awful. Apparently she had put too much foam in the cup, and a customer had spent a solid twenty minutes yelling at her. 

I made all the appropriate sympathetic noises that any good partner makes, and got her some cookies from the cupboard. I thought that was the end of it, but she had a strange request. 

“Can I give you a massage?” Jane asked, giving me her best puppy eyes. 

“You mean… you want me to give you a massage.” I opened up a new pack of cookies and burrowed further into my blanket cocoon. 

“No. I just like cuddling with you, seeing you happy. Please?” 

I was a bit confused, but I believed her when she said that it would help, and a massage sounded nice anyways. 

“Sure.” I wriggled until I was laying down on the couch, and took off my shirt at her direction. 

She’d obviously had experience. Her hands were quick and sure across my shoulders, working me quickly into a loose puddle and pressing every muscle into submission. She talked as she did it, too, quiet words that I never quite managed to hear but were comforting nonetheless. 

It happened when I was just on the edge of sleep, when everything was hazy. 

“Almost ready,” she said, and took her hands away from my back. I groaned at the thought of her leaving, but she quickly started touching me again. This time, though, it was deeper. It felt like she was reaching beneath my skin and kneading me like a piece of dough. She pressed down hard on my shoulder, and I felt it flatten down further than it should have been able to go, bones cracking softly. Worse than that was when she reached through my skin and wrapped her fingers around my spine. She tapped it once, twice, and then withdrew as easily as pulling her hand out of a bowl of water. The whole time, I was frozen, still half-asleep and caught between terror and an overwhelming sense of rightness. 

She continued her strange, invasive massage, and despite everything, I fell asleep. It was comforting, once I got past the weirdness, and I had barely ever been awake. 

When I woke up, I was refreshed. My back didn’t hurt for the first time in years, and every part of my body felt new. I found Jane in the kitchen, making scrambled eggs and humming along to a song playing on her phone. She smiled at me when I came in, gave me a kiss, and quickly gave my butt an appreciative squeeze. 

“What was that,” I asked, abruptly tired of her pretending that things were normal. 

She gave me a confused look. “Do you not want me to touch your ass? I thought you liked that.” 

“No, not—I meant last night! What the hell happened?” I wrapped my arms around myself and stepped away from her.

“Are you feeling alright?” Jane put down the spatula, stepping forward to put her hand on my forehead. 

I flinched away from her. “Yes, I’m fine, I just…what you did last night, I don’t understand what you did.”

She was concerned by then. “I gave you a massage, darling. Whatever else you’re thinking, I need you to tell me so that I can help you.” 

I sighed, letting my arms drop. Suddenly, I wasn’t sure of myself. I hadn’t exactly been thinking clearly, after all. It was probably just a dream.

 “Nevermind. It’s fine.” I sat down to eat the eggs, and after a moment, Jane joined me. 

I had almost managed to convince myself that I had imagined the whole thing. Weeks had gone past with nothing out of the ordinary, and the memory of that night faded. Really, though, I couldn’t have fooled myself forever. 

We always took our time with sex. It was more about being together, for us, than the physical pleasure, although of course the orgasms were nice. On that day, we’d just gotten a new dildo, bigger than any we’d had before. It was halfway inside me, and I was already panting, about five seconds away from tapping out. 

“Jane,” I whimpered. “Jane, I think we should have gotten a smaller size.” 

She looked up from where she was sitting between my legs. “Nah,” she said. “You got this.” 

She pushed it another inch, and it was like something in my body gave way. It wasn’t natural. It was like my whole lower body had become putty. Everything felt soft, my legs, my uterus, my abdomen, and Jane slid it the rest of the way with no resistance at all. Then it all stopped, like a rubber band releasing. Everything snapped back together. 

I shoved backwards with a gasp and sat up on my forearms. “I knew,” I said. “I knew.” 

“Why are you being so weird today?" she snapped, stepping back and crossing her arms. 

"I can't. I need to leave." I got dressed quickly, and was gone within a minute. Jane never tried to stop me. She just stood there with an unhappy look on her face and watched me go. 

Jane started texting me as soon as I left, saying that she was sorry. That she didn't know what was wrong, but she'd be better.

I dreamt of her that night, sleeping on the couch at my friend Sam's apartment. In the dream, she stood over me, melted me into a puddle and then swam inside me. She told me that she loved me, that she'd never had a home as wonderful as me. I woke up screaming. 

It was four in the morning, but I knew that I wasn't going to be able to go back to sleep. There was cereal in the kitchen, but no milk, so I ate dry Cinnamon Toast Crunch and tried to ignore the calls from Jane that came every hour. 

I think Sam was worried about me. She was a good friend, and told me I could stay as long as I needed, but she kept side-eyeing me whenever I flinched because of my phone going off. 

 "Did you guys have an argument?" San asked hesitantly. 

 I sighed and put my head down on the table, next to my cereal. "I think there's something really wrong with her."

 "What did she do?"

"I'll tell you later." I got up to wash my plate, and didn't pay attention to Sam staring holes into my back.  

The calls had stopped coming by nightfall, and I took that as a sign that Jane had given up. 

Sam told me to watch some television and relax, but I couldn't focus on it. Sam was upstairs, long asleep, and I was playing some mindless word game on my phone.

The text alert came before I saw the message, but there wasn't enough time to throw the phone away from me. The message was simple. 

I'm outside :)

The door was locked. I knew it was locked, I had watched Sam do it. But still, the knob turned slowly, and Jane stepped into the house, hunched over. All the lights were on, because I had seen monsters in every shadow, so I got a perfect view of her. She was kneeling in front of the door, her tongue stuck into the keyhole. She turned to face me, pulling her tongue out. It was still in the shape of a key. 

 I tried to speak, to call Sam for help, to tell her to stop, and she blurred across the room faster thanI could see and pinched my lips together. They grew into each other, sealing my mouth shut. I still spoke, though, mumbling through my own flesh. She moved away, just a little, and I took my chance. I kept up and sprinted for the door, all of my thoughts focused on getting away. 

I only made it a step before she melted my legs together, leaving me floundering. 

I'm a mermaid, I thought hysterically. 

She walked over to me slowly, a predator in every movement. 

"Thank you," she whispered. "I'm so lucky to have you."

She pressed her tongue against my thigh, and my bones twisted around themselves. When she bent her head down to kiss me, her lips fused into mine and my protests were muffled by her tongue. She pulled back slightly, our noses still stuck together, and breathed my air. 

“I love you,” she whispered. “I just want to be with you forever.” 

She moved forward again, draped herself over me like she had when we met at the bar. I was paralyzed, expectant. Our muscles melted together, our bones splintered and then reformed as one. She nestled herself in every bit of fat and tendon. Jane fell into me, and we wore the same skin. 

I can feel her in me, even now. I'll never be alone again, even if I desperately want to be. 

[outside-logic]

I've known someone for a year

It's been a year. I talk to them all the time. And yet, I was still under the impression that their name was Valerie. It was not Valerie. It was Mallory. I don't think I'm ever going to recover from this.