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Amy Holwerda is the co-founder and nonfic-
tion editor of shady side review. Her work has
appeared in Flash, Dash, Crash, and various
other journals whose names don‟t rhyme.
When she isn‟t reading or writing, she‟s
probably working in her family‟s greenhouse,
dirt caked into the cracks of her knees and
elbows. When people want to know more
about her, she points to a cascade of petunias,
or the spines of a freshly birthed fern, as if that
is the answer to everything.
“Amy Holwerda‟s The Grayest Ghost is an evocative and hypnotic col-lection of tiny stories, which explores grief, love, desire, and long-ing in their wildest frenzies.” - Sherrie Flick, author of I Call This Flirting and Reconsidering Happiness
“The Grayest Ghost is a prime example of an emerging Pittsburgh phenomenon: savvy, intelligent writing that doesn't eschew its own heart in pursuit of hipness. No time is wasted here on the mere idea of a person—Holwerda's going for the real thing.” - Adam Atkinson, Literary Editor of Open Thread
© Amy Holwerda 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or manual, without permission from the publisher.
Sleeping Lion Press
www.sleepinglionpress.com
5780 5th Avenue, Apt. 2A
Pittsburgh, PA 15232
Cover Art : Ivan Lopez. All rights reserved.
Author Photograph : Gareth Hinsley. All rights reserved.
Sleeping Lion Press Logo : FCIT. All rights reserved.
The Grayest Ghost is set in Perpetua, designed by Eric Gill in the
20th century. The title is set in Caligula Dodgy.
Front and back cover designed by Sarah Grubb.
Original cover art by Ivan Lopez.
Author photo courtesy of Gareth Hinsley.
The Grayest Ghost is printed on acid free paper.
A light breeze managed to cut its way through the thick dusty air
of their fishing cottage. Irene was in the kitchen, frying this morn-
ing‟s trout in butter and garlic, scraping her metal spatula under
the sizzling fish, waiting for the sides to brown.
In the bedroom, Earl gathered his anglers into a rucksack and
headed out the door. He knew no amount of fried home cooking
would satiate the hunger that gnawed inside him, quelled only by
the pull of the river and the tug of something living, fighting at
the end of his line.
“I want to paint you,” Earl said. Irene continued to stare blankly at
the television, then reached for a bottle of pills. “I‟m tired,” she
said, but Earl ignored her and set up his canvas. He sliced through
the white with slashes of slate gray, oyster blue, smoky silver. “I‟m
so tired,” Irene said, rising from the couch. Earl stared hard at the
shape of her neck, the way it curved to meet her shoulders. He
wanted to reach out and stroke it.
When she passed him, Earl shifted, fearing she might reach out
and tear the canvas with her hands. But she simply laid down on
the bed without bothering to close the door, without bothering to
note the shape of her body on the white canvas, crumpled like a
streak of ash, like a candle snuffed by a sudden, cold wind.
Earl watched the butcher wrap two filet mignons. He hoped he
could convince Irene to enjoy a dinner with him again. Start over,
try to make things right. Earl reached for his wallet while the
butcher wrapped the meat, and as he dropped a twenty on the
counter, blood dripped from the paper and splattered his white
shirt.
Back home, Earl heard the bathtub running. He called inside and
jiggled the doorknob. Finally, he slammed the door with his shoul-
der, freeing it from the lock. Irene sat naked in the bathtub, with-
out water. “I know,” she said, then reached for the tap. Earl
watched as his wife‟s body was overtaken by the rising water, the
meat heavy as corpses in his hands.
“Wash your hands,” Irene said. Her eyes were bloodshot, and she
held the baby on her hip, pacing. The baby was wrapped in blan-
kets, like a mummy, moaning. Irene wracked her free hand
through her sweaty hair. Earl reached for the baby.
“Wash your hands!” Irene shouted. “Wash „em good. Get under
the nails where the bacteria hides.” Earl bit his lip and turned the
faucet back on. He reached again for the baby. Irene backed
against the wall clutching the baby against her, wild as a cornered
animal. “Not with those hands, Earl,” she whispered. “Not with
those hands.”
When the baby died, Irene couldn‟t bring herself to attend the
funeral. She rocked in the nursery, wrapping the baby‟s ruffled
bloomers around her fists. She stared into the crib and swore she
saw the blankets breathing. Somewhere buried beneath the wrin-
kled sheets, she heard her daughter coughing, moaning. In a
frenzy, she tore the blankets from the bed, threw the pillows
against the wall, and flipped the mattress, searching.
She clawed her way along the walls to the kitchen, tearing open
cupboards, throwing open the refrigerator door, mindless of the
eggs that smacked against the linoleum floor. She crawled to the
bathroom and steadied herself against the mirror, not recognizing
the old woman staring back at her, gray as a ghost.
When he was young, Earl saw the world in painted colors. Morn-
ings, the sun rose like a canary taking flight. At night, moon
poured into the sky like a bowl of fresh cream. When he met
Irene for the first time, Earl‟s heart sirened like a fire engine in his
neck and spilled from his mouth in ruby-encrusted words.
Although he had been painting the girl for six months now, Earl
thought he could still travel the emotions of the paint, still trace
the path of colors with his hands. His heart surged as he picked up
the splattered brush for the last time but found that inspiration
had tangled his veins like a ball of forgotten fishing twine. When
he stared at the girl‟s body on the floor he saw nothing, just the
dull gray of granite stacked against his chest.
On the day of the wedding, two boys escaped the ceremony and
found the church bell‟s rope. Earl‟s promise to love Irene “for
richer and poorer, in sickness and in health,” was interrupted by a
rowdy clanging. The preacher joked that now, when bells rang it
would be a reminder of the couple‟s marriage vows. Irene blushed
and clenched Earl‟s newly ringed hand with her own.
Years later, Irene trolled the grounds like a spirit with a scythe
threatening to slice all music from the sky. In a fit, she took off her
ring and hurled it at the church‟s brick walls. She plugged her ears
and screamed so as not to hear the clink of metal touching
ground, choosing instead to imagine that promise circling the
chiming of the bells for all eternity, never finding rest, vaporous
as smoke.
On the day he buried his daughter, Earl wore a new black suit that
felt too tight to sit down in. He was distracted by the way the
sleeves pinched at his elbows and the creases puckered at his
knees.
When they wheeled in the tiny wooden casket, Earl felt the black
hole inside him spreading, threatening to eviscerate him right
there in the chair. If it weren‟t for the strain of fabric at his shoul-
ders holding him in place, Earl thought he might just disappear.
Even though he wasn‟t hungry, Earl‟s stomach gnawed where it
had been hollowed out. He wondered if he would ever feel full
again.
Germs live in the shadows, behind the curtains, underneath the
window sills. They stowaway in the plastic nipple of the aban-
doned baby bottle and the grit of Earl‟s boots. They‟re crawling
through the electric sockets and sneaking back up the drains
where she tried to bleach them away.
Earl looks at her with tired eyes and says, “Irene, far as I can see
we ain‟t got no infestation.” But he can‟t see the germs slithering
on his own skin, dripping down the walls, spreading like endless
rows of tiny ants marching toward her. Steady from the nest.
The woman behind the counter took a drag from her cigarette
and said, “The jacket‟s ready now, but we need more time on that
white sweater.”
Irene fumbled for the cash in her wallet. “White sweater?”
The woman halfheartedly stubbed the butt in the ashtray and said,
“Even though the paint was just watercolor, we don‟t want to ruin
the fur collar.”
Irene swallowed hard. “That‟ll be fine,” she said, and dropped a
twenty on the counter. In her car, Irene buried her face in the fab-
ric of the freshly cleaned jacket and found the smell of smoke lin-
gering there like the warning of fire.
On frosty mornings, Irene woke as if from a deep sleep, sur-
rounded by tombstones. She clutched a bottle of bleach and a rag,
as if planning to scrub the names from the granite markers. As the
breath pooled like smoke from her lips, Irene wondered if she had
driven herself to this place. Forgotten putting the key in the igni-
tion, or revving the engine.
She wondered if she might have walked instead of drove, some-
how managing to tread through knee-deep snow while keeping
her stocking feet dry. And then as she gazed at the army of gray
stones around her, she wondered if it was possible she floated
here, hovering above the ground, already haunting what felt like
someone else‟s memories.
“Earl,” the doctor scolded. “You shouldn‟t bring her here so of-
ten.”
Earl listened as the doctor scratched a note in Irene‟s file. “We‟ll
admit her overnight,” he continued, “but I can‟t keep her any
longer.” He rested one hand half-heartedly on Earl‟s shoulder. “We
all have to pull our weight here, Earl,” he said.
When the doctor was gone, Earl listened for his wife struggling
against the admittance, but he heard nothing, just the monotonous
rhythm of his heart thrumming in the sterile silence of the exami-
nation room.
On the way home from the hospital, Irene chatted idly about her
new medications, the times she should take them, their side ef-
fects. She had written everything down in a little notebook and
leaned over to show Earl. “See,” she said. “No more episodes.”
Hearing this, Earl pulled the car over to the shoulder. Unable to
meet Irene‟s puzzled gaze, he stared out the window.
“I forgot how gorgeous a sunset can be,” Irene said, reaching to
rest a hand on Earl‟s rigid arm. Outside, the warm yellow of the
sun was beginning to fade. Earl watched as daylight slipped away,
and he couldn‟t help but feel overwhelmed by the sight of the
pooling red that spread like blood from a wound in the sky.
When the trout were spawning, Earl could buy himself a whole
weekend away. He always came home with a rainbow‟s worth of
fish in the cooler and Irene fried a few for dinner. This year, she
stared cold, stoic into the frying pan. “These fish don‟t look like
the ones from the river,” she said. Earl looked away from her, fo-
cusing his gaze on the garlic and butter that hissed and spat in the
pan.
That night, while Irene slept, Earl crept back to the cooler. With
steady hands, he ground the bodies one by one in the kitchen dis-
posal. When he was finished, he scrubbed his hands with soap and
ground the peels of lemon against his skin, but even then, he
couldn‟t wash the smell of death from his hands.
Some days Earl met the girl in her tiny, cluttered apartment.
Other days he paid her extra to meet him at the fishing cottage,
where he captured her naked body in a sketch pad, flushing her
skin with the watercolor dripping from his brush.
Earl knew he was escaping something in the body of this young
girl, and at every meeting, he said it was the last time. But while
the girl was lying there, exposed on the hardwood floor, Earl felt
his heart snare, and he foolishly thought he saw something more
in the canvas splattered red, streaked with the dirt from his hands.
In the mornings, Earl rose and lined Irene‟s pills like punctuation
on the countertop. He set out a glass of water, brewed a mug of
coffee. He drove to the baker and bought fresh doughnuts, re-
questing extra apple fritters, Irene‟s favorite. He hoped that
somehow this sweetness would make up for the way his skin
crawled when she reached for him in the night.
When she was sure Earl had left for work, Irene dragged her
heavy legs out of bed, ignoring the fritter laid out on a napkin.
Bracing herself against the countertop, she grabbed a handful of
pills and swallowed them without water, but they stuck to the
sides of her throat, battling her.
Irene chose the milk-fed veal for its creamy, pink texture. She
prepared a glaze with lemon juice and thyme, wanting to prove
that she could prepare a decent meal, that the medicine was
working. As she peeled the meat from the butcher paper, the loin
felt impossibly heavy in her hands. She glanced down at the label.
Nine pounds, it read. $56.00.
When Earl found her two hours later, smoke poured from the
open oven set to self-clean. Irene raised a hand to silence him.
“Shh,” she whispered, rocking the lamb in her arms. “No one can
sleep if you shout.” Irene smiled at her husband. “We‟ve all been
tired for so long,” she said.
“My god,” Earl breathed. “You‟re just a baby.”
“I‟m twenty-three,” the girl said. “That‟s very grown up.” Earl
forced a smile. “What‟s the big deal,” the girl said. “We‟re both
consenting adults.” Earl hadn‟t been intimate in over a year, not
since before the baby‟s funeral. “Hey mister,” the girl said. “Is eve-
rything okay?”
Earl stared at the girl lying naked on the bed and doubled over
laughing. She stared back in confused silence as Earl laughed until
the breath left him. He laughed until it sounded like tears, or the
sobbing of a lost child.