Flash Fiction Contest
First Prize
Childhood
Elizabeth Robinson

As a child, I lived in a haunted neighborhood, and the site of the haunting was me, my body. People thought a ghost lived in a shaggy house down the street, surrounded by high mounds of pampas grass, encircled by filthy windows, but that is ghost ventriloquism. Ghosts love that kind of stupidity, love to take the mundane and make you slip on it, the way kids in my neighborhood tried in vain to walk through the algae-ridden gutter without sliding onto their asses. That was the doing of the ghost too. I know it. Not gravity per se, but the slick effluent green of the gutter.

This ghost was a boy ghost, and he lived in me. In my right thigh, to be specific, and I knew this because of the line of coarse hair that grew down my leg, from groin to knee. Think of it as another kind of conduit or channel, the way we sometimes mark presence ironically as a draining away. He drew an arrow on my leg that pointed both inward to and outward from my gut.

I know little of the specifics of the ghost, he didn't reveal much by way of autobiography. This was in the sixties, at the cusp of the seventies, and I was in grade school where my teacher taught us that when one is speaking in the third person, that person is always registered, in proper grammar, as a 'he'. For instance, "When one purchases his movie ticket, he should always say thank you to the sales clerk." I was a girl, and so this initially made little sense to me. But then I remembered that I was inhabited by the ghost of a small male child, and I saw the logic. I assumed that other children also had ghostly infestations, but that this was, like lice, something that people knew to be pervasive but never discussed.

What I do know about him was that he was libidinous and feral. He would cause me to steal all the sandwich cookies from the bread drawer in the kitchen and gorge myself on them, even though I hated the bitter aftertaste of the cream filling inside them. He would have me before the bathroom mirror, crouched on the counter, trying in vain to find a penis on myself, pressing back the flesh of my early breasts. He was the one who caused me to take barbecue charcoal and rub it all over the fur of our pet dog who stood it passively, looking up with baleful eyes, now ringed in black.

In most ways I was a sincerely model child. I did my homework and set the table as requested. I, more than many children (given the circumstances) had reason to believe in the otherworldly and was frankly eager to say my bedtime prayers. "God bless mommy and daddy, and the president, and the astronauts," I'd say dutifully in my mother's hearing, "and protect me from evil," I'd whisper after the lights were out. Thus I knew, when one of my older brothers was collared in Sunday School for having written, "GOD IS BAD" on the wall in purple crayon, that it was somehow, indirectly, I who was the guilty party, though I silently let him bear the penalty.

As a sort of penance, I went home and sequestered myself in my bedroom, where I plucked the dark hairs from my thigh one at a time. This served as a kind of exorcism, and I developed an angry, lopsided rash on the right leg alone. Shortly thereafter, the neighborhood's rancid gutters cleared. Someone bought the old house down the street, demolished it, and built a new house, adding a swimming pool and diving board.

And there followed a series of strange nocturnal visions. A rank, white light would pervade the bedroom, beckoning me toward it. I'd want to go, but felt grave reservation, actually fear. I confided this to my friend Maya whose family was the only one in my suburban neighborhood who subscribed to New Age religiosity. "It's your spirit guide. That's righteous! You've got to walk right into it," she urged me.

But I didn't. I resisted. Then one night, I felt the ghost, bewildered and hurt, transmigrate from my thigh to my esophagus, where he lodged, stinging like heartburn. The white light suffused the room, urging me forward until suddenly, I coughed up the boy ghost like a glowing lozenge, and he dissolved grain by luminous grain, until he had gone to reside in some more eternal maw.

 

Author’s Note

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of 8 books of poetry, most recently Apostrophe (Apogee Press) and Under That Silky Roof (Burning Deck Press). She has been a winner of the National Poetry Series and the Fence Modern Poetry Prize. She is a co-editor of EtherDome Chapbooks and Instance Press.