Day of All Saints
(novella excerpt)
Patricia Grace King
Ghosts in the trees. Martín wants to rip them all down. If he could, he’d bury them deep in the flowerbed that he’s uprooting, or stomp them into the grass. Sure, these ghosts are small, even playful, made of white handkerchiefs and—what?—Ping-Pong or Styrofoam balls? But even so: ghosts. With little magic-markered-on ghost eyes and smiles. Like they’re a fun thing to have. Dangling from maples around the gringa’s front yard, the ghosts jig on their strings with each shift in the breeze. The gringa has not made an appearance all afternoon, and waiting for her sets Martín on edge.
He stands from the cold-blackened bed of begonias to steal a look at Diego, piling bags of leaves down by the curb, then up at the maple branch over his head, aflutter with a family of ghosts. Someone—the gringa?—must be having a joke, for these ghosts are made from bright-red bandanas. Like a host of mini-sized demons, they’ve waggled around Martín’s ears for the past hour until all he can think of is blood. The blood inside his work glove, for one thing, which is oozing again, though he won’t take off the glove for a look. To remove it might cause an eruption—geysers of blood. Today of all days, Martín can conceive of such things.
With his good hand, he lunges after the branch full of ghosts. But a fresh bout of dizziness clouts him straight down through his brainpan, and Martín falls to his heels with a lurch. His empty hand swipes the air.
Diego is on him again in five seconds, garden rake over his shoulder. “Buddy, don’t think about it.”
If he holds very still, Martín has learned, the sick hollow feeling will pass. Even so, he swings again at the nearest ghost and gives it a furious yank.
“Cálmate, vos,” says Diego. “These people don’t mean nothing by it.”
They’ve been arguing the point for a month, ever since plastic gravestones began to loom from these well-tended yards and zombies appeared on the porches. It’s just a warm-up for Christmas, Diego has said: more candy, more pretty lights. But Martín cannot make peace with this holiday, and this very morning, heading to work, he tried to kick over a coffin. Diego had to drag him away.
Now the red baby ghost, its string unbroken, stepdances madly across the gray air, and wooziness does Martín in. With a groan he sinks back to his knees.
“Vos, what’s wrong with you now?” says Diego. “Are you sick or something?”
Gently clasping his stomach, Martín shakes his head. It’s not entirely a lie.
“What is it, then?” Diego sets down his rake. “You still worrying after that girl?”
Martín stares at the dead grass between them. “She hasn’t come back,” he admits.
“Puchís, vos.” Diego lets out a whistle. “You must’ve pissed her off good.”
Exactly what Abby feels, Martín has tried but failed to imagine. A few weeks ago, she was still coming home every night from her college classes downtown, and he was still trusting himself—his new life—just enough to believe in it all: that they’d save each other from the things that were hard in their pasts, his and hers; that they’d work out the kinks once they married. Abby’s unhappiness has crept up on him. “I can’t breathe in this place,” she told him last week, the last night Martín ever saw her.
“You skipped one there, vos.” Diego kicks at a wilted begonia. “Did you try star 69?”
No one but Abby ever used the phone in their apartment; by dialing star 69, Diego had said, Martín might track where she’d gone. “I did.” Martín uproots the flower. “I dialed star 69 like you told me.”
“And who picked up? Whose number was it?”
“It wasn’t anyone,” says Martín bitterly. “No one picked up, because the phone line was dead.”
“What the hell, vos. You don’t pay your telephone bill?”
Martín stabs at the dirt with his spade. It wasn’t that he didn’t pay. Never having lived in a house with a phone line before, he just hadn’t kept it in mind. “I thought Abby was paying the bill.”
“You thought. Vos, it’s like you don’t know that muchacha at all. I’ve never met her, and I could’ve told you, she’s not the type to keep up with her bills.”
Abby’s wedding dress still hangs in their bedroom closet. They’d bought the dress in the Zona 1 market, their last month together in Guate. She would wear it, said Abby, with her red platform shoes—red, with red rosettes on the toes. The same shoes she wore when Martín took her out salsa dancing, or to try out their half-assed merengue, in the days when they used to dance. Their first heady week in Chicago, she had tried on the outfit for him: the embroidered white cotton dress, vaguely Mayan, the red shoes resplendent beneath. Martín had breathed in and out. “Estás linda,” he said. Beautiful. Abby whirled across their lumpy linoleum floor. “The justice of the peace won’t know what hit him,” she said.
But she’s left the white dress behind. The first several nights of her disappearance, Martín found himself in the closet, lifting that dress from among other clothes: jeans she’d grown too thin to wear; the woolly gray sweater from their first class together in January, when Guatemala City mornings were cold. Abby’s concert T-shirts with slogans he’d once found intriguing, which now strike a sinister note: Jesus and Mary Chain. Smells like Teen Spirit. Lilith Fair. All this, she’s left behind. But the pretty red shoes, Abby’s old dancing shoes, have vanished with her, and Martín has spent too much time worrying about them this week. Is she wearing those red shoes right now, someplace else, with some dress that he’s never seen?
At his side, Diego jerks to attention. “Aguas, vos. Here she comes.”
Martín turns to see a blonde woman drift onto the porch, beneath another branch full of ghosts. Her lips pull back to show them her small, clean square teeth. “Diego here I know,” she announces. “But you there—you’re new.”
“Your papers, vos,” says Diego.
Forgetting his wounded hand, Martín slaps his front pocket, and a white bolt of pain sears his arm. He scrambles to the foot of the porch, where the woman, still smiling, awaits him. He opens his passport and watches her match the small photo inside to his own upturned face. In Guatemala, Martín knows how he looks. His wide-set dark eyes and broad, high-arched nose are generally held to be handsome. In Guatemala, he was a language school teacher. But here in this cold flat yard that he’s taking care of for her, how does he look to this woman?
“Are you old enough to be here on your own?” The woman looks Martín up and down. “You must be a teenager still.”
Martín wills himself to fill out his clothes—so loose now, they make him look smaller. He says stiffly, “I am almost nineteen.”
“And a fiancé visa, my goodness. That’s a new one on me. Well, felicidades.” She pronounces the word carefully. “Felicidades—isn’t that right?”
Martín starts to nod, but a dark blot appears on the page he holds open. As he watches, transfixed, the splotch thickens and beads; it rolls red down the crease of his passport. He retracts his arm, horrified, just as the woman skips backward, and the passport slaps onto the porch. Blood trickles from under his work glove: it slides down his wrist like warm oil.
Then Diego’s got him by the back of his shirt, pulling him down from the porch. “Jesus Christ, dude, is that all coming out of your hand? ¿Qué diablos did you do to yourself?”
He had hurled Abby’s angel-fish bowl to the floor. He still thought of the fish bowl as hers, though when the angel-fish died in September, Abby flushed it away down the toilet. Meanwhile the fish bowl has stayed on her plank-and-cinderblock bookcase like a large stranded bauble, increasingly mossy inside, a sad plastic mermaid affixed to the bottom of it. This morning, after his star-69 call ended in silence, Martín wanted to murder that mermaid—to see something break, really break—but the bowl merely cracked when it struck the linoleum, so he’d pounded it into the bookcase till the glass shattered and sliced through the flesh between his forefinger and thumb, then gouged a track into his palm. He’d patched himself up with a boxful of Band-Aids. He had hoped they would hold through the day.
“You ought to see a doctor for that,” the woman calls from the porch, where an infant ghost grazes her head. “That cut should have stitches, I’m sure.”
“Straighten up, vos,” Diego says under his breath. “You’re not looking too hot these days.” He adds more loudly, looking up at the house, “Don’t worry about this one, señora.” He pounds Martín’s back, too heartily, and Martín fights the urge to be sick. “He’ll be off on his honeymoon soon.”
“That’s a good thing,” says the woman. She brings Martín’s passport, clutched in a big wad of Kleenex, down into the yard. “That visa’s about to expire.” She shakes his passport out over the grass, making a small bright-red rain. “Well, you be careful, Martín Silva de Choc. You’re a long way from home.”
Winner of the 2017 Miami University Novella Prize
Excerpted with permission from Miami University Press, 2017
Patricia Grace King grew up in North Carolina and has since lived in Atlanta, Chicago, and Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, as well as in Spain, Guatemala, and the UK. Her first book, Day of All Saints, won the 2017 Miami University Novella Prize. Her two chapbooks, Rubia and The Death of Carrie Bradshaw, respectively won The Florida Review’s Jeanne Leiby Memorial Contest and the Kore Press Short Fiction Award.
Her short stories have been published by Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Narrative Magazine, Nimrod, and other journals. She was the 2013-2014 Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and now lives in Durham, England, where she is finishing a novel as well as a story collection.
Éphémère is a concept; two visions of the same sphere. Both are multidisciplinary Mauritian artists—designers and illustrators—influenced by nature and culture. They attempt to convey a part of their dream-like, somewhat playful world through their art and products. (Photo credits: Céliliphotographies)
