In the kitchen, Naomi cracks three eggs into a bowl and cranks a whisk. She slides butter around a hot pan, the fat sizzling with little bits of garlic and chili flake. She lowers the heat and pours the eggs in slowly and watches as their edges begin to firm from transparent to opaque, and for a moment, the eggs are the same consistency as the woman peering over the countertop into the pan. Deb inhales deeply.
“I feel like I can almost smell them,” she says. She leans further over until her face hovers in midair over the pan and the garlic-infused steam wafts and mixes with her own cloudiness.
Naomi takes a startled step back. “Whoa,” she says. “I’m only starting to get comfortable with this whole…” she gestures between the two of them. “Whatever this is.”
Deb slips back onto a stool and considers. “It’s not like I really asked to be here. So maybe it’s less a haunting and more a kidnapping. Or jail.”
Naomi rolls her eyes.
Deb smiles. Her face is young and imprecise. That age when a girl is suddenly a woman. Eighteen? Nineteen? Maisie had started to look a little like that—at fifteen, her cheekbones had started to lift, the baby fat of childhood melted away.
“What are you smiling at?” Deb asks. But the way she is looking at Naomi—and the fact that Deb can psychically read Naomi like a book—means she already knows.
“You remind me of my daughter,” Naomi says, spooning hot dollops of egg into her mouth. She swallows painfully. Hot! Too hot—the temperature and the chili.
“Yowza,” Deb says. She touches her fingers to her lips. “I can feel that!”
“What do you mean?” Naomi asks as she fills a glass of water.
“I mean, my lips are tingling.”
“Interesting,” Naomi says. Is it because of their psychic link? What if Naomi stabs herself with a knife—would Deb feel that, too? Naomi makes a mental note to come back to that later then drains the glass of water in three gulps. “Better?”
“Better.”
The kitchen is silent while Naomi finishes her plate of eggs, scraping her fork along the porcelain to grab every last eggy bite then sopping up the butter with some bread. She wipes her mouth on a napkin and regards Deb who is absentmindedly touching and licking her lips.
“I have more questions,” Naomi says.
“I have answers. But fewer than you’ll like,” Deb replies.
“Let’s start with what you do know then. Tell me about yourself.”
“What do you want to know?” She sits back in the stool and looks so much like Maisie who’d sit in that same spot and chat with her dad while he made dinner.
“Your appearance. You didn’t die looking like that.”
Deb nods. “True.”
“Why do you look like that, then? And how? And why this age and not one of the other iterations you’ve appeared as already?”
“The how part I couldn’t tell you. Sometimes I have control over it and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes my form matches with a psychic signature—your psychic signature, in this case. It’s why I kept getting younger and younger as I appeared to you earlier. Because you’re much less fearful of a little girl than some creepy old crone in the corner of your room. My form got tugged along with the power of your fear.”
“Huh,” Naomi says, eyes narrowed. Her hands itch for a pencil and her notebook. She wants to note every fine detail: the vagueness of Deb’s ghostly form with the sharp angles of a young woman’s face, the way she sparkles brighter in the lamp light, the theories of psychic connection that Deb has enumerated so far. The chili flake and sharp heat that translate to a tingling numbness on Deb’s lips and how Deb seems to have no control of her physical faculties when Naomi has no control over her emotional ones. She makes a note to create an experiment that tests this theory—one that hopefully doesn’t involve a knife in the back of Naomi’s hand. “This is all…just…fascinating. Has it happened to you before? Have you ever had another…um…hauntee?”
Deb shakes her head. “Never.”
“Well you seem to have stabilized. Your age I mean. You haven’t gotten any younger for hours.” Naomi glances at the clock, and she startles. It’s past eleven. She hadn’t thought about bed until now. Where will she sleep? Here? Sal’s?
Between the adrenaline and spicy eggs and her mind working overtime, she feels like she’ll never sleep again.
A problem for future Naomi, then.
“Like I said, sometimes—most of the time, actually—I’m in control of my form.”
“Meaning you’re choosing to appear as you are right now.”
“Correct.”
“Eighteen?”
Deb smiles. “Seventeen.”
“Why seventeen?”
“Why tell you,” she says, reaching a hand toward Naomi and wiggling her fingers, “when I can show you?”
Without warning, Deb touches Naomi’s arm and instantly, Naomi’s vision goes black. Her ears fill with the sound of wind and rasping whispers and the murmurations of a billion black shadows flocking and reflocking around her until she can’t tell where she ends and the shadows begin. She tries to scream but when she opens her mouth, the shadows fill her throat, fill her lungs, she is drenched with darkness, choked by it, drowning in it—drowning, she’s drowning!
Just as suddenly as the shadows started, they stop. Silence fills the void. For a moment, all is still. When Naomi opens her eyes, she’s in a kitchen still—but it isn’t hers.
This is fantastic and you are an incredibly engaging and visionary writer. Thank you for this!
I cannot wait until lunch to read this; I already know it’s worth the wait!