Brian Helt
Ghosts in the Room

Houseflies fight their way through the perforations in the screen door, darting aimless through the empty space of Wendy Hoffman's living room. They shift directions with each second that passes and every new angle slowly returns each one of them to their point of origin. They will spend the rest of their lives wondering if they will ever escape.

"You a ghost?" Wendy asks from behind the screen door.

"I'm looking for someone," I say.

"You're here to take me to Jesus Christ."

The door pops open and she leans out, holding a nearly empty bottle of Old Crow.

"Are you Wendy Hoffman?" I ask.

"Syracuse," she slurs.

"Wendy Syracuse?"

"Maiden name. He been gone for seven years, now."

The shapes of her words are muddled and soft.

"Your husband?" I ask.

She takes a breath.

"I was gonna be a singer in Los Angeles. Now I'm nobody."

Her stare sails into a horizon that is perfectly interrupted by the small buildings scattered across the depleted earth plate of the central valley.

"Seven years," she repeats. "Waiting."

Red dyed hair, nappy and uncleaned; her face is washed out, blue eyes bolted to the unbuttoned and aired out valley behind me. I want to ask her to take off her shirt so that I can see the Pangea like scar on her chest. To see if it matches mine.

"I think today's the day." She says.

"The day for what?"

She takes in a deep breath, wipes her face and slips back behind the door again. She vanishes into the house. The sound of water pouring out of a faucet and onto itself is so faint it's as if I have only imagined it.

Her tiny house fades into the landscape as I walk down the tiny dirt road of her property back to De La Vina, the main street that is marred by potholes and the Lichtenberg figures of compression fractures. It shoots deep along the empty valley that expands far out and forever, stretching towards the seam of the earth-sky and dividing this town into two halves, of which one is greater than the other and will eventually outlast its lesser opposite.

It follows me like a water-starved coyote; the night we ran away. I was in the kitchen, picking the pad lock with the bobby pin I had pulled out from the hair of a classmate that day. I imitated how I had seen it in the movies, jamming the two broken halves of the pin into the keyhole at wild and opposing angles. George's voice swam the boundaries of my mind and I could already hear his complaints and ridicule as he found the pins in the lock the following morning.

Between the sweaty digits of my fingers, the two halves of the bobby pin refused to move, fixed in immovable positions. I let go of the lock, letting it hang from the cupboard door. I lifted myself off from the floor and turned to go back to our bedroom when, from the kitchen table, it caught my eye.

A manila envelope, stamped and ready to mail, neatly placed as if I was supposed to find it. To be honest, before turning it over and seeing Family Unity of Sacramento addressed on the front, I had already known what was inside. I tore open the seal and pulled out the papers inside to find only my name, signed by George himself on the very last page of the adoption dissolution.

"Nora?"

The sound of her voice threw panic down my throat. I dropped the papers and whipped around to see my sister standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the entryway. Her chest rose and fell as she took deep gasping breaths. The surgery had left her with the smaller heart.

"What-are you-looking-at?" She asked.

"Nothing, Wendy. Go back to bed." I said through the knot in my throat, fighting down the tears that boiled out through my eyes from the fury inside of me.

"You-getting-food?"

"Tried. George locked the cupboards tonight." I replied.

"Are you-coming-back to bed?"

"Thinking about taking a walk. Wanna come with?"

"Where you going?" She asked.

"The old house."

"It's far."

"You don't have to come with me."

"I want to." Her voice waned.

"I'll meet you outside," I said as she stepped to the front door and into the chilled winter night. I turned around and folded the pages into quarters and slipped them into my back pocket. Stepping from the counter and through the doorway, I saw George's brown leather wallet on the secretary. I took it in my hand and opened it to both a ten and a five dollar bill wrinkled up inside. I took the money and slid it into my front pocket before putting his wallet back following Wendy out.

"So what was it?" He asks over honkytonk that wobbles out from the speakers of his truck. The sky, once replete with the ripened evening sun from Wendy Hoffman's house, has since been suppressed by the bruised and battered night.

"What was what?" I reply.

"What you're running from."

The tiny LED display from the instrument panel sculpts the contours of something young in his face.

"Not running from anything." I say to him.

"That why you travel the dead of night in cars with strangers?"

He chuckles to himself.

"What do you think?" I ask.

"You're just waiting for the world to devour you."

"That it?"

"Might've killed someone." As he says this, I notice a sharp glance in my direction.

"Murder." I reply.

"Maybe it's just your looks, I mean, no offense, but you look like you ain't eaten in weeks. Thought you were a ghost."

"I don't like most food."

In the distance, the lights of Kettleman - the truck stops and drive-thrus broadcast their whereabouts in a blinding haze that catches in the valley fog and supercharges it with an electricity that hangs in the vacant air. It glows with such fury that it feels almost alive. It defies itself.

"If you're stopping in Kettleman that works for me," I say.

He pulls up to a pump at the truck stop and pulls a notebook and pen from the visor, placing it in his lap before scribbling away at a fresh sheet.

"My sister." My words cut through the quiet.

"Your sister." He says, beckoning.

"My twin. I'm looking for her."

He nods to himself as though he's heard this before, as if he knows.

"We were young." I continue as hunger pangs echo in my stomach. "I didn't want us to be apart."

New silence leaves a ringing in my ears until his voice breaks through the film of stillness.

"What happened to her?" He asks.

The lukewarm desert night rushes in through the passenger door as I push it open. I step down onto the ground. At the far end of the gas station lot, a pay phone stands, barely lit and unnoticed by the scurrying travelers. I approach it with long and deliberate steps like an animal that operates on instinct rather than thought. Behind me, the trucker's voice echoes in the night.

"I hope you find her." His voice lilts and bends the words as though he does not believe that I can find her.

The pay phone stands forgotten on the corner of the sidewalk. The world has celebrated its rarity with swathes of illegible scribblings in the black ink from wide tipped sharpies. Names and initials, acutely angular and keen, compete with each other in a static battle of unremarkable notoriety. Across the key pad, a white paste is smeared and long since dried into an impregnable crust.

I pick up the receiver and put it to my ear. There is nothing to listen to. Green epoxy stuffed into the earpiece has set and dried and the mouthpiece has been broken off. A red wire peaks out from the cavity inside the handle and dangles loosely where the mouthpiece should be. The corrugated wire is my half of the umbilical taproot that ties me to her.

>> click to read: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

>> back to Issue 20, 2017