[8. Tell about a time when you competed for something.]

In elementary school, we had this race between all the students in my grade. I was so excited for it because I managed to convince my mom to come and watch. I could tell that she didn’t really want to come, but I was going to win that race and she was going to be so proud of me.

That’s how it was supposed to go anyway. I got in second. Out of all the kids in my grade, I got second. That’s pretty good if you think about it, but I was completely devastated. Still, I tried to smile as I looked towards where my mom was. She wasn’t there. After what was probably an hour of searching while crying my eyes out, I found her outside the women’s toilet smoking a cigarette and drinking a can of beer.

I figured out later that she only came because I asked her in front of the neighbors.

~~~

That dream came again, the one showing me my mom’s delighted face at finding the lottery ticket. I see her turn to me, hear her say words through a thick filter like I’m underwater, and it takes me a second to understand what she says.

“I don’t need you anymore.” She waves the ticket at me. “I’ve got this instead.”

There’s the sound of cars tires screeching, and I’m suddenly standing outside a scene I’ve only ever heard about: my mom collapsed on the sidewalk, a car careened off to the side, and a crumpled body of a little boy left in its wake. A strange emotion fills me when I look at the scene.

“Give him back!” My mom’s desperate voice rips through the air, though it’s seemingly directed at no one. “You can’t just take him away from me! He’s my little boy!”

Then, I see what she’s talking to. It wasn’t there a second ago, but the ghoul stands hunched over her. In its right hand is the wispy form of my brother, the fingers stabbing through his chest creating a strange contrast with his broken body lying on the road behind it.

“Give him back to me!” my mom screams again with arms stretched out. The ghoul considers her for a few seconds, then lets the boy slide off its fingers to the ground in front of her. She immediately starts trying to pull him towards her, but her fingers go right through his dimming figure. She doesn’t notice the ghoul reach out and put long reaching fingers into her pregnant stomach.

A suffocating feeling assaults me as I notice the gleeful expression on my mom’s face. It’s followed by that awful tearing sensation. I can see the ghoul ripping my spirit out of my mom’s stomach.

The scene blackens, and the dim light of a computer screen slowly lights up the room. There’s the familiar, uncomfortable feeling of duct tape wrapped around my wrists. His face looms in my vision with empty eye sockets.

He leans close and whispers in my ear, “She doesn’t want you anymore. She never did.” Then to my horror, his face opens up, showing a gruesome mouth that takes up the whole of his head. He swallows me whole.

I wake up panting, covered in sweat, chilled in the freezing room. The fire’s gone out and the frost has slowly crept back in over the night. How long have I been asleep for? There’s no light coming from the sliding door, so it must be dark out.

What an awful dream. There was this mix of uncomfortable memories and disturbing imagination. At this point, I don’t know if I can tell what’s real and what’s fake, and that makes the dream so much worse than the one last night. Was it only last night that I had it? So many things have happened since then that it feels like forever ago. Heck, I even died. How messed up . . . I sigh and rub my face with my right hand. Or, at least, I try to.

It’s not there.

It’s not there.

It’s not there.

My hand is gone.

My arm is gone.

My shoulder is gone.

Everything that got eaten by the ghoul is just gone.

Even my sweatshirt--which is still laying on the floor--is missing those parts.

Why?

WHy?

WHY?

It was there yesterday. I had my arm. Why is it missing now? This is no good. Crap, I’m panicking. It’s almost worse that it doesn’t even hurt. It’s like there was nothing there in the first place.

But, it was there.

I was using it yesterday.

I’m not going crazy.

I used it to carry one of the scythes in.

I opened drawers with it.

If I didn’t have it, I would have probably killed myself just trying to shred that log.

So.

Why.

Isn’t.

It.

Here???

My breathing is erratic. I can’t think. I feel light headed. I need to calm down.

Plants. What are some random plants. Um. Um. Sugar maple. Boxelder. Ironwood. Blackberry. Jasmine. Sunflower. Scrub oak. Sword fern. I take a deep breath. I hold it. I let it out. Again. Breathe in. Hold. Out. I gulp, trying to swallow down the lump in my throat, and wipe off the tears that started streaming down my cheeks at some point. Let’s go to the garden. I need to be somewhere I can feel calm.

I stand up and walk to sliding door, opening it with my left hand and slipping through. It’s dark inside the garden, but it’s the sort of dark that you know will get lighter in a few minutes. Should be nearing sunrise in probably like half an hour. I lean against the wall of the house and stick my feet in the dirt, wiggling my toes as I do, letting out a breath that feels like it’s been stuck in my throat since back on Earth.

I think I need to get a bench for in here. Maybe plant some gardenias next to it. Gardenias smell nice. I might try and get some wind chimes too. There’s no wind though, I guess that wouldn’t work. Maybe a fountain or something instead. It’d improve the ambiance of this place by quite a few notches. I wonder what kind of plants I should plant in here. Do I want to go with pots just in the ground. In the ground would look better. I could do pots on shelves near the walls, or maybe even like a terrace planter. I wonder if the the paper lattice ceiling would allow me to do some hanging pots. That’d be nice.

Breath.

Okay. I think I’m ready to think about what just happened. That was a panic attack. Not my first, but definitely one of my more intense ones. Granted, I’ve been building up a lot of stress lately. A lot. Waking up with a arm missing past my shoulder blade sure help. My reaction, considering all the things that happened in the last 24 hours (probably), was pretty tame all things considered. I wonder how many people would have gone insane by now if they were in my place. I’m doing pretty good. A little shaky, a little freaked out, but pretty good.

Still, how am I going to deal with a missing arm? I look down at where it’s supposed to be, but quickly look away. It’s creepy to look at. There’s a gaping hole where my shoulder and part of my ribs once were. My bra’s staying up somehow despite missing part of its straps. It really shouldn’t be able to.

That’s normal compared to what’s in the hole, though. There’s no ribs, no cross section of meat and bone, no nothing. Instead it’s a literal hole, like the sort you’d find if you broke open a porcelain doll, only it’s filled with a milky white gas that swirls and eddies like dry ice. I’m pretty sure that’s what was seeping out of the place Jerkface stabbed me yesterday. It’s not seeping out of my shoulder, though.

I’m not exactly human any more, am I? Not with this kind of body. Are all ghosts like this? I wasn’t really paying attention with Jerkface, but I did break a hole in his ribs pretty easily, so maybe. He was a human when he was alive, and if he’s got a body sort of like mine, I’m still human, then, right? At least a bonafide human ghost.

Though, are ghosts of humans still considered human? All the creepies I’ve seen seen certainly don’t look totally human anymore. Will I start looking like that? Turning into an insane horror movie monster? I really hope not, but if so, how long does it take for that to happen?

Hopefully, it’s as long as I’m still sane. I’m sane right? Compared to them anyway. Let’s face it, I probably have ptsd now, after everything. I doubt this place will make it any better. I have that stupid feeling that Jerkface isn’t the last creepy I’ll see in this place. It’s a feeling that this whole planet may be a planet filled with ghosts. Where did all the people go? There obviously used to be people here, what with the houses and Jerkface’s memories, but I can’t shake the illogical but absolute certainty that there are no living people left in the whole world. Is it a ghost sense thing? How accurate is it? And if it’s right, did an apocalypse happen or something? I guess I’ll have to see when I go out. I’ll need to go out at some point. Probably today, actually, just to get it over with. If I don’t, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to go out. My fear will get the better of me.

Speaking of plans, what am I supposed to do from now on, anyway? I’m stuck here. I’ll probably lose my sanity soon enough from having no one to talk to except creepies. Don’t people go crazy from isolation? What can I do to keep from going insane? Um. If only I had my books. Or my plants. Maybe there’ll be some books or seeds in the other houses. Hopefully. Maybe even some warmer clothes (can I wear them, though?).

Alright, I’m psyched now. Just like a survival game. I can do it. I’m going to go out and loot some houses. One tinsy tiny little problem, though. I still don’t have an arm. I mean, I can’t imagine properly fighting off any creepies I might meet with one arm. And before even thinking about going out, I need to make the scythes into better weapons. I have an idea I could try for that, but I need both my hands for it.

Ug, what am I going to do?

I pause my train of thought and just stare at the brightening light shining through the paper lattice, feeling it start to warm up my skin. I feel like a cat. It’d be so nice to just laze in the sun all day. I arch my back and reach my arm up to the ceiling. Mmm. Feels nice.

Did my shoulder just twitch? My right one? It moved, right? I look down at the gaping hole where my right shoulder was. The mist inside is swirling chaotically like someone stirred it with a spoon. It’s also slightly bulging out. Gross. Oh. It went back in.

Did I just move it? Hey, hey, bulge out again. It’s doing it, right? It’s totally sticking out again. I just moved it! I just moved it like telepathically! Or something. I feel like I really should be more freaked out by this sudden revelation that I can freely move the creepy mist inside my body around, but somehow, I just feel relieved.

But man, ghost bodies are weird. Nothing like I expected them to be. You’d think I’d be an expert considering just how often I see them (and that I beat one to death yesterday). It’s so weird, though! It’s a little like learning one day I can wiggle my ears. Like “Alright Devin, your specially talent is to move the stuff in your body! Congratulations!” kind of thing.

What do I do with this, though? It’s not like I can just use the weird fog in my body to just grow an arm or anything like that.

Grow an arm . . .

Am I weird thinking that might actually be possible? It might not actually be that implausible. Consider this. What exactly is this suspicious fog hanging out in the suspiciously empty cavity of my body? Really, the only thing I can think of is, well, ghost cells. Hear me out. Ghost are known to be immaterial. They can go through walls. Anything you throw at them will go right through them. And so on. You get the picture. Also, ghosts are people’s spirits in the shape of their former bodies, a sort of memory bundle of when they were alive, except as they go on, their memory probably gets a little messed up, and they turn all creepy and that, is my guess.

Let’s say a fresh ghost has a perfect memory of everything they were the moment before they died (right before their spirit leaves their body). A sort of snapshot moment, with everything down to the last skin cell all in spirit form.. Cells are living things. Which means people are composite beings made up of tens of thousands of living things. I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that cells can have memory.

That means you’d end up with a person made up cells who each have their own memories of when they were alive. Only cells don’t have brains, so their memories would probably degrade very fast. They’re probably even forgetting what type of cells they are, so no difference now between bone cells and blood cells, ect. Add that to the fact that they are no longer constrained by any physical boundaries and what you’re left with is a ghostly soup of cells with alzheimer's.

So, conclusion, all this white stuff swirling around me is just the ghosts of my cells, and my strong mental image of what I looked like when I was alive which is forming a sort of, I don’t know, ectoplasmic shell to keep it all from seeping out? I’d say it fits pretty well. I guess that’s why my clothes are a dubious in-between, a part of me but not, because I died in them. They’re a strong part of my mental image, which, in addition, keeps getting affected by my memory of being chomped on, hence the missing arm and sleeve. Then again, I think I seriously lost some of my ghostly mass during that exchange, so it’s not all in my head, which would explain why doing this makes me feel like I’m going to puke.