~2000 words, ~15 minutes reading time
Content Warnings: Implied sexual assault
Your ghosts drift around your feet, formless things like pale kittens, winding between your ankles as if they have the weight to make you trip. The sorrowful ones, you hear, taste like light lemon wafers, crisp like fresh snow between your teeth; joy like rich cream, running thick down your throat; and love like salt, like the drowning ocean.
You would not know. You find the idea of eating lost memories each morning ridiculous: a breakfast of the rest of your life, bloating your belly before a morsel of true breakfast, never knowing which to pick because by morning you’ve forgotten what each is. You check the semi-opaque cluster of soft white things at your feet the way you might check for hair fallen out on your pillow, which is to say not at all.
You do not care to mourn what you have lost. You adapt, instead, to the sore hollows left by their passage. Adaptation lets you move forward. No amount of ache can do that for you. You’ve tried.
#
Your mother ate her ghosts in the privacy of her bedroom, like putting on a suit of her self before she came to breakfast. This is one of the memories that does not yet crowd, mewling, to paw at your calves, so you could be eighteen still, sitting at the table eating cereal while you wait for her to pad down the hall in slippers so ragged they might as well be memories themselves. Or you could be thirty-two, seating yourself at the front row of her funeral, or thirty-five, listening to your father’s ritual finding and losing of her. He wakes up sometimes eight years old, sometimes fourteen, and he eats the past seventy or eighty years of his life.
Sometimes he loses her first and doesn’t understand until ten, maybe twenty ghosts down the line. Sometimes he finds her first and comes to you asking if you know Genevieve, who she is, where she is. Most times you say no. Once you ask if he even knows who you are yet, disgusted, as if he’d burst out of his room undressed.
He didn’t remember you. At least he had the decency to look ashamed.
#
A woman comes in when you’ve finished breakfast for the morning. To check on you, she says, make sure you’re still chugging along. She does not look at the ghosts that part like mist for her.
“Are you used to them?” you ask.
She tells you she’s known you enough years she supposes she ought to be. She says this with the patient air of having said this a thousand times and knowing she will say it a thousand more.
Or maybe not. When you looked in the mirror today, you felt ancient, withered.
“How old am I?” you ask.
She tells you, with that same patient air, that you’re a hundred and six. She tells you you’ll be a hundred and seven tomorrow and that she’ll bring your favorite cake.
“And what kind of cake is that?”
She winks and says you’ll just have to see.
#
You still remember your first ghost at twenty: a gentle little thing, soft white nudging its semi-opaque self at your ankle as you swung your feet out of bed. You were in your first apartment, a studio that was more like half a loft, and your covers were rumpled, your jaw aching like you’d been clenching your teeth in your sleep again.
You prodded around in your brain for your lost memory the way the tip of a tongue might quest for a lost tooth. But it’s the way everyone’s told you: it’s not as if there’s something missing, but as if it was never there in the first place. All your memories seem to interlock just as tightly as they always have.
When the little ghost nudged at you again, you supposed you should eat it for no reason other than it’s what you’ve been taught, what you’ve seen since birth.
Scooping it up was like holding living mist in your palms, cool and wet without leaving the damp behind on your skin. Placing it behind your teeth felt wrong the way eating a rescued kitten might. Like biting down into something vulnerable, something tender that hoped you might be the one to save it.
This is how you learned that trauma tastes like rosewater. You do not remember what happened. That belongs to one of the sweet, soft things that bumps and tumbles along with your little herd of mist, though you don’t know which it is. You do remember the covers, though. How the other side of your little double bed was rumpled. And a bruise you found on your jaw later, the one whose purple lasted a week.
#
A woman comes in when you’ve finished breakfast, and she has a little cake. You ask what it’s for and with patience she tells you you’re turning a hundred and seven today.
“A hundred and seven,” you say, and watch the little ghosts part to let her close to you. “Are you used to them?”
She tells you she’s known you enough years she supposes she ought to be.
#
Your mother disapproved of letting the little thing gambol about your feet.
“It isn’t right,” she told you. “Would you want your children to forget you? Your friends?”
“It wasn’t a friend,” you said, and with the rest of your face said drop it.
“So you’ve eaten it before?” she said, decidedly not dropping it.
“Yes.”
“And?”
“I don’t remember it now.”
“Tea!“
You will always remember your name that way, that exasperated way she said it when you were deliberately stubborn. You don’t know if you ever asked why she named you after a drink.
“It tasted like rosewater,” you said, and with the rest of your face said drop it, goddammit.
“Oh, honey,” she said, and her face didn’t soften. “We are all of our memories. Not just the ones we want.”
You left her in the cafe the two of you met in. You watched your ghost bump along beside you and remembered the covers, the bruise, the girlfriend who never texted you back when you woke up with the ghost beside you for the second time and said I’ve got my first ghost and I think it’s a bad one.
It was two weeks before you spoke to your mother again. Because like hell do you need to eat trauma for breakfast every morning to be whole.
#
The woman in your kitchen takes the noisy plastic lid off her container and tells you it’s your favorite cake. You ask what that might be under all that pretty white frosting, and she says you’ve had it for fifty-some birthdays before this, don’t you remember?
You tell her you suppose the ghosts must.
#
You never had children to forget you, so your mother never got that one on you. And you never ate a ghost again.
You weren’t the only person that didn’t eat their ghosts, but there are few enough of those for you to be strange. Your nephews asked why you didn’t want to remember. You told them you weren’t afraid to be alone, that being alone was natural.
Your brother called to admonish you for that later, after they’d asked him why he was afraid.
You wonder sometimes if that’s why you no longer speak or if he’s dead.
#
This woman is very pretty, you think, as she cuts you a slice of this white-frosted cake. Thick black hair, russet skin, brown eyes that blaze when she walks through a sunbeam to fetch you a plate.
“How old am I?” you ask.
She tells you you’re a hundred and eight.
She tells you, smiling, to find out what your favorite cake is, and there is something about her face you cannot refuse, so you pick up your fork and cut into your slice and you bite.
#
The last day you ate cake, your favorite, fluffy white chiffon with light lemon frosting, was the day before your wife died.
She bullied you around the kitchen because she couldn’t do it to her own aching body, failing as it was.
You did everything she said because you couldn’t help but do otherwise.
When she told you to stop being so damn obedient, you did that, too. You splashed extra vanilla in the frosting. You got whipped cream in her hair when you kissed her. You took her to bed and you did not get some goddamn rest, Tea, you’re going to need it. You stayed awake and listened to her breathing and when the sun peeked through the curtains you turned over and let her think she woke you, and when she said it was time you drove her to the hospital and carried her in. Asked, over her protests, if she wanted you to be obedient or not.
“If you’re going to be disobedient, then I get to protest,” she said, and that was the last smile of hers you saw.
#
There is a ghost nudging your ankle after you finish the first, the one hidden in your favorite cake, lemon sorrow whisked into lemon frosting. You are angry. You are distraught. You had a wife and you want more of her and you do not want to eat more ghosts, risk the rosewater that’ll wash over your tongue before–
“You told me to be disobedient,” the woman in your kitchen says. “Before you forgot me.”
You level your gaze at her and wonder what a mess your face must be. Whether you’re going to tell her to get out.
The ghost nudges your ankle again, mist without damp.
“That was well before you forgot her,” the woman says. Quieter now.
“How did you know what this one would be?” you ask.
“It comes to me now. It knows I’m going to help.”
She has done this before.
She has known you for years and she has done this before.
You had a wife.
When the ghost nudges at your ankle again, you pick it up.
#
It tastes of rosewater.
#
And so does the next.
#
You went back to the girlfriend who didn’t text you back after that first ghost. You didn’t remember her and there were more bad mornings, more bruises, and you didn’t get out until you saw all your ghosts and prodded at your mind and found that there was a great empty space that began just where she did.
#
There are years of rosewater and months of lemon and then you see her and there is the barest trickle of cream, the mouth watering that comes at the first few grains of salt.
Your wife arrives and you learn that her name is Connie as you are swept away again by that drowning ocean. You are not afraid, like your mother was, or desperate the way your father grew to be, needing the ghosts that held your mother to keep him together. You eat your ghosts slowly, savoring, and when you are finished with the last of your salt, you look at your great niece, the granddaughter of Connie’s brother, the woman who couldn’t be Connie’s twin but shares her soft sweetness, and you know you cannot do this every day. Shouldn’t. But once in a while.
“Next year?” you say, and Jeanetta’s smile is the ghost of Connie’s.
#
When you go down for breakfast, your ghosts bumbling about your feet, there is cake in your refrigerator, a little one with a single slice cut out. You decide it can’t hurt to have something sweet for breakfast.
The cake is light, fluffy chiffon, the frosting white and gently flavored with lemon. It’s good stuff, you think. Something you could get used to, if you tried.
Leah Ning lives in northern Virginia with her husband and their adorable fluffy overlords. Some of the uncomfortable things she writes can be found in Apex Magazine, PodCastle, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and The Dark Magazine. You can find her on Twitter and Bluesky @LeahNing and on her website, leahning.com.
