Don't Tell Me the Lights Are Shining Any Place but There

By summer, Sparrow and I had buried two friends, and we knew we would bury at least one more. We broke into abandoned buildings and made plans. We would run away. We would stop talking to our mothers.

But this is a ghost story, so let’s begin this one here:

Deep in the St. Louis suburbs—a fungus spreading outward from the city—there is a lake named Creve Coeur, French for its shape, which is a heart ripped in half. It’s in a park with the same name, in a town with the same name—that is, a whole geography of sorrow.

When Mama went back to school to get her degree, before she and Fuckface divorced, I would go with her to the library and page through the reference books with their big color plates. I traced my fingers over the geology maps, followed how the Missouri River writhed through time like a snake, how Creve Coeur Lake formed when the snake chewed away a coil and left it flopping off the eastern bank.

Two centuries after Christopher Columbus got lost, French fur trappers built a trading post named for their king, some dick named Louie in a long line of dicks named Louie. According to legend, a beautiful girl fell in love with one of the furriers. Alas, he was just another fuckboy. Devastated, she climbed to the top of a rocky cliff that overlooked the lake and jumped to her death. The lake, in mourning, remembered its past life as a river and reshaped itself into a broken heart. The cliff wept; to this day, its rocks still drip with tears.

Mama said the legend was colonialist bullshit. Stories always have a deeper purpose, she told me. To make us love or fear certain things, or to let us see what we want in the mirror instead of our true selves. She learned all this stuff about mythology and culture when she tried to get her degree—before Fuckface kicked us out of the house, before we moved to South City, where I stayed with the nuns. But even though Mama said I was spending too much on gas, I kept driving back out to Creve Coeur anyway, to see Cam and Sparrow. And Emmy and Karina, until they were gone.

The ghost shit was Sparrow’s idea.

We were hanging at Cam’s pool like always that summer, neon fringe bikinis and our hair in thick braids, feeling the heaviness of our bodies in the humid air.

“You ever been to the Lemp mansion?” Sparrow asked, untying the top of her bikini and settling back against a pool chair. “My brother says it’s hella creepy.”

“Fuck no,” I said. “Isn’t that place haunted?”

Sparrow stretched her legs. On her neck in certain light I could still see the smudge of a callus left by years of violin, a hickey from Mozart or a thumbprint of his rage. She lit a bowl and took a hit.

“Yeah, babe. That’s the whole point.” She exhaled smoke. “This whole family killed themselves inside.”

Laughter from the pool made me glance up and for a second I saw them—Karina graceful and freckled, Emmy pug-nosed with long blonde hair—but then their faces shifted into girls I didn’t know, caught in the sun off the water. Pain sharpened behind my eyes. The air in my lungs grew thick. I saw them at keggers in Ladue, in the produce section at Schnucks, in all the city’s darkened corners. On Gravois Road a woman carrying an infant became Emmy, who used to wear her baby—a red-haired daughter—tied in a woven fabric across her back. A girl buying calla lilies at the Soulard Market was Karina, and I could hear her asking me if the plants were treated with bee-killing pesticides, because that was the kind of shit she worried about.

Then the suffocating dread when I remembered that they had died, just five weeks apart, in what I told Mama was a horrible coincidence of car accidents. Now just Sparrow and me were left. We clung to each other like we weren’t rocks dragging each other under.

“Anyway. My brother says you can stay overnight and take a ghost tour.”

“Where is this place?” I took a hit off the bowl and handed it back to Sparrow. I held the smoke until my throat burned.

“South City. Maybe they’re your neighbors. Ooo-oo-ooh.”

Cam, wet from the pool, slid onto my chair and kissed me. When his hair grew back, he vowed never to cut it again. Now tangled ringlets sprang out from underneath his Von Dutch hat. I liked to run my fingers through them, watch them bounce back into place.

A beach ball landed by my feet, and I threw it back to the pool. It was always a party at Cam’s. In the spring, his doctors told him his cancer had come back. Six months. Maybe less, depending on how long it took to reach something vital. His insides were a cave with dark spreading crystals.

So Cam went home with his parents and began an endless party. I remembered him from our high school—Parkway North—but hadn’t talked to him in years. Until my girls called me and said everyone was hanging at his place now. Each afternoon, his mother flitted around the patio, offering snacks and soda in Solo cups, trying to give her only baby a fun last summer, a send-off.

Most of the people who came were assholes from Parkway who never gave a shit about Cam. They thought hanging around someone dying made them special too. Or maybe they just hoped to steal his Oxy.

“Hey,” said Sparrow, passing the bowl. “Want to stay at the Lemp Mansion with us? We’re gonna look for ghosts.”

“Seriously?” I said. “You’re asking a dude with cancer if he wants to go look for a bunch of old dead people?”

“It’s cool,” said Cam with a grin. “Might as well see what’s waiting for me.”

•

Pigeons were lining the rooftops when I got home that night to Cherokee Street. The trees were cut into Y shapes to clear the electric wires, their branches a shrug, or maybe surrender. The Arby’s sign on the corner blinked half lit, and phantom hands in the antique shops were flipping their window signs closed. Mama was broke after her divorce from Fuckface and rent here in South City was cheap. We moved into the second floor of a brick Victorian with a mansard roof and iron star anchors, their points bitten with rust.

I found her in the kitchen hunched over a calculator, crumpled bills accordioned across the table. She smoked and worked out figures on a notepad, trying to see what could be put off until the next month, and what would get disconnected if we didn’t pay up now. I kissed her cheek.

“How was work?” She reached up and ruffled my hair. I could still see how pretty she was.

“Sucky. This guy asked for a Western Double Steakburger and then when I brought it he said he had ordered a Royale instead and just flipped the fuck out.”

Mama tapped ash into the blue ceramic tray. I’d made it for her in third grade. Her eyes passed over my body, the cut-off shorts with pockets hanging out the bottom, the bikini top which, on one triangle, had a peekaboo heart.

“Where’s your uniform?”

“I changed. I hate smelling like Steak ’n Shake.”

I still felt her eyes on me as I opened the fridge. Day-old pizza, Mama’s probiotic yogurt.

“There’s $100 missing from my account,” Mama said.

“Are you sure? Maybe a check went through or something.” Mama turned in her chair and stared at me.

“I gave you my card to gas up the car, remember?”

“Yeah, and that’s all I did.”

“So the money just walked itself out of my bank account? Right after you happened to borrow my card?”

I grabbed my bag from the counter, the colored plastic tags on my keychain clicking—one month, two months, six months clean—and I slammed the door to my bedroom shut. Mama shouted something to me. I clicked the lock shut and pressed my head against the door. My fingers clutched the frame. The tags on my purse clicked and scolded and the wind picked up, out there among the disfigured trees.

Here’s another story:

The ground under St. Louis is honeycombed with caverns. No other city has so many caves below its streets. During floods, the river rushes them and leaves behind confessions. Sometimes they are a catfish’s chalky bones or the fossils of extinct animals still unknown. And sometimes the bones are human.

In 1842, a German named Johann Adam Lemp—fat hands, terrible facial hair—realized that the series of cool, shadowy caves were perfect for lagering beer. Lemp’s became the largest brewery in St. Louis. The vast factory complex spanned eleven blocks that overlooked the Mississippi. The family built a thirty-three-room mansion in South City. Soon Lemp brews got shipped around the globe.

Then the family fortune took a turn. Johann’s son shot himself in the head in the family mansion, just weeks before the 1904 World’s Fair. Prohibition devastated the business; the Lemps were forced to sell their factory for pennies on the dollar. Billy Lemp, Jr. took his life in the dining room in 1922. Elsa Lemp killed herself in a house across town. Charles Lemp brought his dog with him to the afterlife and left behind a note: In case I am found, blame no one but me.

As the century went on, conglomeration swallowed St. Louis’s industries and spit them out in other places. The interstate system slithered through downtown and suffocated whole neighborhoods. White people fled to the suburbs and the ones who stayed closed their streets with ornate iron gates. The Lemp mansion fell into disrepair. When finally reclaimed decades later and converted to an inn, workers heard the hooves of horses, saw doors locking and unlocking when no one was at the bolt. And the vast and abandoned factory still cast its shadow over South City.

•

We scaled the chain-link fence at the brewery, past the no trespassing signs. Cam brought a zombie survival kit. The box contained three glowsticks, one small hammer, nine energy bars, six water pouches, one mylar blanket, and first aid supplies. He had customized the lid with a Sharpie to read Zombie + Ghosts and Other Undead Things West of the Mississippi.

We started through the complex: weathered cobblestone and defunct trolley rails. The empty brick buildings were a dead city within the city, some still elegant in their decay, some boarded up, the faded green wood like blind eyes that still had a way of following you. A Schnucks bag in a tree ballooned like a bullfrog. By the colossal grain silos, a tower rose even higher, lemp written in large white letters on each of its four sides.

Sparrow shouldered a door, and it creaked into darkness. The air was musty. Cam coughed and opened one of the zombie kit’s water pouches. When my eyes adjusted, a huge space appeared—a floor littered with jagged pieces of wood, broken glass, torn clothes, old Bud Lights, and a ceiling twenty feet high with rusty crossbeams, arched windows on the opposite wall with panes the color of beer.

“This place is fire,” I whispered.

“Come on,” said Sparrow.

Cam and I followed, through the rubble of wood and broken glass. We climbed a spiral metal staircase. As I went above him Cam squeezed my ass. We crept through dusty and cavernous rooms, past signs warning of high voltage and unstable structures. We found a pile of barrels, then a tangle of old bicycle parts, then a thicket of weeds where the ceiling had collapsed and let in the sky. In another hallway, discarded shoes. An antique baby carriage, yellowed with age, was parked by one window. I touched the wood, felt a mother’s cold handprint.

Cam slid a large rusty door along its track and a sunlit room with towering windows opened up. The Gateway Arch in the distance was a little metal staple fixing the city to the earth. To the east, the river curled against the land like a lover. We sat on the floor and passed around energy bars from Cam’s kit. Sparrow said she had to pee and wandered off. Cam pulled me onto his lap. He slid his hands under the back of my shirt, and moaned into my neck while I unbuttoned his jeans and it was hot up there, so hot I had to peel myself from the humid air as I moved on top of him. Our hands were slick with sweat. We would probably get lockjaw fooling around on those floors. But Cam and me didn’t care.

Sparrow came back with glassy eyes and for a while we all just lay on the floor. From above, we would have looked like spokes on a wheel. From our vantage point, looking up at those windows and the specks of dust turning in the air, I imagined the room was a palace. When we stood up, it became a ruin once more.

On the way back, we took a wrong turn or went down the twisty metal stairs a level too far, and found ourselves in a darkness that shrouded our bodies and clung to our eyes. It was cold down there, much colder than the rooms at the top of the factory. We fumbled for our phones, screens flicking on together. I aimed my flashlight into the darkness.

We were balanced on a ledge over a vast basement that spanned farther than my light could reach. Rows of peeling columns disappeared into the darkness. The walls were solid slabs of unfinished rock, icicled with quartz and limestone, not built by the Lemps but here long before them.

The floor glimmered and rippled. I had a moment of confusion before understanding that it was flooded—an uncharted lake. Mama once told me that many cultures believed caves were portals to the underworld, and I could see now that they were right. We stood just at the boundary.

“Can we go?” Cam said, his voice thin in a way I hadn’t heard before, not in all these weeks of illness and waiting.

I took his hand and said to Sparrow, “We’re leaving.”

She stood at the edge of the water. Something in her flashlight beam moved below the surface of the lake. She followed the motion and fish with milk-glass scales and marbled organs swirled near the surface, sealed flesh where their eyes had been. They passed through the light before disappearing, never seeing where they swam.

“The Lavender Suite.” The desk clerk at the Lemp Mansion Inn took Cam’s credit card. “Named for Lillian Handlan Lemp, famous in St. Louis society for dressing exclusively in lavender.”

“Gross, I’d rather kill myself,” said Sparrow. She covered her mouth and burst into giggles. “Oh my god, did she kill herself?”

The clerk shot us a look and handed Cam one of the jangly old-timey keys.

“Just so you know,” the clerk said to me, “we don’t have a pool here.”

The house felt like a skull. The outside white, the inside darkly lit and smothered in wallpaper, each room damp and consumptive. A storm came in as we went up to the room; wind lashed the house, knocks and footsteps tap dancing furiously on the roof.

In the bedroom—sickly purple as promised—Sparrow collapsed into herself like a sinkhole. Cam dropped wearily into the other bed, apologizing to me.

I undressed him. The clothes slipped off more easily than a month ago, and his skin in the tempest light looked translucent, his ribs countable. He said, “Promise you’ll go back to school.” And I said I would, and maybe even believed it. I kissed the salty skin below his ear.

I woke up hours later, my nose still wet, and I thought rain had fallen on Cam’s cheeks until I realized he was crying in his sleep. I whispered his name, but he was lost in that heavy Oxy slumber. In a way, I was relieved. I didn’t want to know what he had dreamt about.

In the morning I would be better. Better for him, better for Mama. I would walk with Cam in the gloom and carve out the bruises on my heart because the rest was still good, wasn’t it? And I would clasp Sparrow’s hollow arms and pull her from where eyeless fish churned in wait.

I realized we had forgotten about the midnight tour. A lacy curtain fluttered by a closed window. The despair of all the Lemp women, weeping for husbands and babies lost in childbirth—and of girls who ironed their hair and danced in the valleys of great rivers—had seeped into the house. It called me. I belonged to it.

I dug through Sparrow’s bag. I climbed into her bed and lay with my body pressed against hers like we were one Janus-faced girl.

Cam coughed in his sleep all night. In the morning we checked out. We left behind a shoe, a lighter, and, on Cam’s pillow, a rosette of pulmonary blood.

My house was a small cold darkness in the bright hot day. I found Mama smoking in the kitchen, a moka pot on the stove. Her voice simmered when she spoke.

“Where were you last night?”

“I crashed at Sparrow’s,” I said. “My phone died so I couldn’t call.”

“I called the police, the hospitals. Oh, I called Steak ’n Shake too. Guess what they told me? They fired you a month ago.”

The coffeemaker rattled. Foam flowed down the sides. Mama moved across the room and turned the heat off, her steps slow and tender. She probably needed me to take her for her back injections.

“This is why I didn’t want to tell you, okay? I knew you’d be pissed.”

“You want to tell me where you’ve been going all these days?”

“I’ve been looking for another job.”

I dug around in my bag for a cigarette, patted my pockets for my lighter. When I couldn’t find it, I used Mama’s from the table.

“And when you get one, you can pay me back for my camera that’s missing. Did you pawn it?”

“Seriously? I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

She took a sip of coffee and spat it back into the mug, then dumped it all in the sink.

“I think you know.”

“All you do is accuse me of shit.”

“Can you blame me?” said Mama. “I’ve bent over backwards to help you. I had to call in favors just to get you into St. Mary’s House. And this is what I get? You steal the only nice things I have. And then lie about it to my face.”

“For the last time, I didn’t steal your camera.”

Mama rubbed her eyes, ash smoldering at the end of her cigarette.

“I’m so tired of doing this.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll get another job and pay for the fucking camera anyway. Okay? Happy?”

“Listen,” said Mama. “I want you home every day, except when you’re looking for a job. I want to know where you are at all times.”

“I’m a grown-ass adult. You can’t imprison me in the house.”

“No more hanging out with that Sparrow girl, either. You think I don’t know about her? And her record?”

“You don’t know anything about her.”

“I know everything. I know how girls like her end up. I don’t want that for my baby.”

I snatched the keys off the counter and slung my bag over my shoulder, the tags click-clicking. Mama grabbed my arm. I jerked it away. I’d done the programs and listened to the nuns, and what the fuck good had it done? She called my name again and added if I was leaving I shouldn’t bother to come back. I left her, standing there with the ceramic tray, its blue glaze under the tidy soft pile of ashes.

When I was a kid, Mama and I would drive down Lindell Boulevard to look at the fancy mansions. We’d pick favorites and imagine our glamorous lives. They’d been built to house dignitaries visiting the 1904 World’s Fair. She talked about the fair as if she’d been there herself. How they cleared trees from Forest Park and built palaces out of gypsum plaster; how dazzling the midway was, all lit up at night. There was a walk through an aviary of exotic birds. Plus an exhibit of live babies in incubators.

At the center of the fair shone a giant Ferris wheel. It was supposed to be an architectural innovation to rival the Eiffel Tower and restore American prestige. Its axle weighed 89,000 pounds. It carried thirty-six cars and 3,000 Edison bulbs that were themselves a marvel. It was brought to St. Louis on 142 flatbed rail cars.

No one knew what to do with this ailing metal beast in the years after the fair, and finally the decision was made to solve it with dynamite. But the wheel did not go gently. After the second explosion it careened around the field, burning everything in its path. Spectators fled in terror. At last it began to melt, the axle crushing the smaller tarsals. Finally it collapsed in a dying tangle. Local legend says the remains were buried in Forest Park. But a team of Wash U archaeologists equipped with ground-penetrating radar found no traces of its steel bones, except for a few huge lug nuts.

I always wondered what happened to the incubator babies. Because when I was in my mother’s belly, my placenta grew wrong. Instead of snuggling against the womb, my placenta sent tiny fingers curling deep inside Mama. One day, she began to bleed. The nurses in the emergency room heard sheets of blood splashing onto the linoleum floor. The doctors cut me out ten weeks early and put me in a glass box like the ones at the fair. They said I might be blind from being born too soon. They scooped out her uterus and carved away the tendrils of placenta from her body and threw it all in a bucket like they were gutting a pumpkin. Mama always wanted four children, but instead she just got me.

The doctors were wrong about my eyes. I see perfectly. In the city, even the stars rust and crumble.

Sparrow and her boyfriend picked me up at the Arby’s down the block. The boyfriend had pinched eyes behind wire-framed glasses. He was the kind where the neighbors would say, But he always seemed so nice.

“You can crash with us for a few days,” Sparrow said.

“Don’t fuck with any of my shit,” the boyfriend added. He wouldn’t be playing the good neighbor with me.

I spent the next few days binge-watching on their couch. Her boyfriend was always on his phone; a parade of people flowed through that apartment. When no one was around, Sparrow and her boyfriend stayed in their bedroom behind a door that concealed very little, although sometimes I couldn’t tell if he was hitting her or fucking her. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I walked to the Schnucks across the street, checked my dwindling numbers on the ATM screen, and ate pastries I couldn’t afford.

By the end of the week Sparrow said, “Kevin says you gotta get your own place. I mean, I’ll talk to him. But you have to figure this shit out.”

“Let’s get an apartment,” I said. “Remember when we stayed together on that class trip to Hannibal? That was so fun.”

“Yeah, sure, Becky Thatcher. Look, he’ll let you stay if you’re earning your keep.”

I woke up in the middle of the night and, thinking I was back home, wanted to climb in bed with Mama. When I pulled my phone out to call her, I got the recording of a woman directing me to the financial services department.

Sparrow got some cash from her boyfriend and we took his car to the county fair. We rode the painted horses and pulled apart puffs of cotton candy and let them melt on our tongues. We had our faces painted like butterflies and stumbled through the crowd, arm in arm, laughing at things no one else saw.

When the sun set, we bought rockets and Roman candles and set them up in an empty field.

“For Emmy and Karina,” I said, flicking open a lighter.

“Fly high, beautiful girls,” said Sparrow.

The fireworks burst above us, white and purple streaks. Sparrow, her fingers smudged with color from the sparkles, cradled my face in her hands, and I saw in her that girl who played violin and held my hand in the Hannibal caves, who tried on gowns with me in a fancy department store and forked the house of the boy in ninth grade who told everyone I was a slut after I lost my virginity to him.

“Sparrow, let’s get the fuck out of here,” I said. “I mean, St. Louis.” And as soon as I said it, I knew it was our only chance, and I grabbed her hand and squeezed so hard I thought my own fingers would break. She didn’t pull away.

“I can’t, babe. You know that.”

And I tugged on her arm, told her she could, that we could start over and be like normal people. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, makeup and face paint smudging, a discord of glitter and hues, and she chewed on her bottom lip like she did when she was scared of thinking. We could go someplace with an ocean, I told her. Live near the beach and tan.

After a moment, she nodded.

“I can get some money,” she said slowly. “But we’ll have to bail, like, right away. And not tell anyone where we’re going.”

I thought of Mama, what she would feel if I was just gone. But I told Sparrow there was something I had to do before we left and she said me too. I thought she wanted to see her parents, and maybe things would have turned out differently if she hadn’t said what she said next.

She wanted to find the ghost of Creve Coeur Lake.

Cam texted me the first few days I was at Sparrow’s, then gave up when I didn’t answer. First because I didn’t want him to know what was going on, and then because my phone was cut off. After that I was afraid of the silence.

But when Sparrow and I showed up at his house, we found him still alive, sucking air out of a breathing machine. His mother eyed us disdainfully through clumpy mascara, no Solo cups offered. He stepped out onto the porch with us, closing off the house behind him.

“The fuck have you been?” he said to me. Hurt glittered in his eyes like unswept glass. “I thought you were ghosting me.”

“Ooo-oo-ooh ghosts,” Sparrow said, bursting into a fit of giggles. “Come on, we’re going ghost hunting, motherfucker.”

“Creve Coeur Lake,” I said.

“No thanks,” said Cam. But even though he was tired and angry, he glanced behind us at the car, then back in the window at his mother, and when Sparrow said, You only live once, in a voice like a song, it was in poor enough taste to convince him.

•

We crept along the path between the lake and the woods. There was no moon, and we soon left behind any streetlamps, but didn’t dare use the lights on our phone, in case a park ranger saw us. The lake was a black pit even darker than the sky. On the far end of the water, red and white ribboned across the interstate bridge. They were impossibly distant and high in the air, all those cars full of people with their own thoughts and deeds, whole worlds that turned without us.

By the time we reached Dripping Springs, Cam was coughing and air whistled from his lungs. I sat him on a log and helped with his inhaler, opened a bag of water from what was left of his ghost-hunting kit. Then we climbed the stony cliff, Cam reaching his hand to help me but mostly needing help instead. Sparrow climbed up behind us, and her phone slipped from her pocket and splashed somewhere below. Fuck, she said a bunch of times. But there was nothing to be done.

We stood at the top of Dripping Springs in silence. Water trickled down the rock. Cicadas buzzed like soft serve machines. Spread out around us, the impenetrable woods and the glassy lake below, a black and still-broken heart. I wiped my nose, smelled pond and lichen on my skin. Pain clawed my gut.

“I don’t think she’s here,” said Sparrow at last, her eyes an incandescent blue even in the night, and though I didn’t believe there was a phantom girl in the lake, I didn’t not believe it either. And suddenly I was overcome with the need to see this wasn’t all there was, this quick and jagged life and then nothing.

I’d always rolled my eyes at the nuns when they talked about things like souls and being saved, but Sparrow and me needed something, even if it was just a long-dead girl. And then I understood that the story was wrong. She didn’t jump because of some French fuckboy, but because of the need to save herself, to escape the body that with pleasure and grief had betrayed her. She had jumped to become the lake.

Cam had taken my arm.

“Wait, I’m seeing, like, really weird things,” he said. “Like dancing lights.”

Sparrow asked if he saw the shape of a girl. Wonder passed through his eyes. For a moment I could see the midway lights too. Then his face screwed up in pain, and he clawed at his head.

“Take me home,” he said, voice rising in panic. “Take me home.”

I caught him as his knees buckled. I screamed for Sparrow, and we pulled Cam away from the spring’s edge. He was paper light and all at once too heavy to hold.

“Give me your phone,” I said to Sparrow. She reminded me that she had dropped it in the water. I went to get Cam’s from his pocket. She caught my wrist.

“We’re trespassing,” she said. “I can’t fucking get arrested again. What about our plan?”

Cam had stopped seizing, but he was still on the ground and unresponsive. His breaths came in raspy moans. I wedged my hand in his pocket and closed on a plastic cylinder that rattled as I tossed it to the ground. Sparrow picked it up.

“Just to clear our heads,” she said. “Then we’ll get him out of here ourselves, okay? We’ll get him to the car and take him to the hospital.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

Before the summer heat broke, Sparrow would be found on the floor of an Olivette motel room, cold and blue, a pendant of foam hanging from her lips. Cam would die of a brain hemorrhage in the ICU of Barnes-Jewish Hospital, in a room overlooking Forest Park, as a storm rolled in from the west. At Cam’s funeral, the procession stretched for blocks. His parents wrote a long Post-Dispatch obituary and people donated thousands of dollars to a cancer charity. For Sparrow, only a private graveside service.

This is the last story—a story of girls who died of a longing that consumed them, even their marrow. They became a cautionary tale, their names bitter on the tongue of a mother, or nervous in a daughter’s mouth. They don’t have a lake or a mansion to haunt. Because ghosts don’t really linger politely in place. They stroll; the world is the fairground. They are everywhere, everywhere.

I snapped one of the glow sticks from the zombie survival kit so we could see better. I took out the hammer. On the lid, I lined up the pills for me and for Sparrow, and smashed them into powder.

The suffocating sweetness settled over me. I breathed honey like it was air. I drank the milk of paradise and let that fill my lungs. The ground turned sideways. I dug into the dirt and found the Ferris wheel, immense and all lit, and I pulled it from the earth. I climbed the chassis, passed my father in one of the seats. It’s nice to see you, he said, but really I can’t stay. I kept climbing. A lapis-blue pigeon with a crown of jeweled feathers pecked my arm. A cottonmouth slithered from the Mississippi. At the top of the wheel, I found the other girls—Emmy in diamond earrings that belonged to my mother, Karina holding a camera. Their eyes the same nacreous green. On the bench lay a stack of antique negative plates with finely dressed women trapped in the glass, emulsion curling off, erasing their faces in silver halide spirals. Like a cat, Karina dropped them one by one from the side of the car and watched them shatter below. I love you, baby girl, she said to me.

åThe Ferris wheel bulbs flickered. The wheel lurched. It dropped me to the dirt. Next to me, Cam and Sparrow were at broken angles, and in the trees, the girls, the babies, the aviary birds blinked their green eyes in these dark and spectral woods. And then just the light of the glow stick remained, as brief and infinite as we were.