"Ghosts In The Ash" by Yume Kitasei– from Planet Scumm Issue 15
All of Yume’s information can be found here.
We’re pleased to release Yume Kitasei’s story “Ghosts In The Ash” for your reading pleasure. Remember to follow Yume on Twitter, or else… Who knows what ghosts might follow you home?
You have been tailing a ghost since midnight, across a gray, rocky plain under a broken moon. As the ghost walks, it sheds pieces of joy like scales from a serpent. The ghost is a woman, and she is kicking up dust and humming to herself.
As you follow her across the cold lava field, remnants of old memories come back to you: the neighbors who helped you hide when the whole world wanted to kill you. Strange music in the dusk filtering up through the houses like a floral fragrance you couldn’t quite place. Food stuff, nearly inedible but still a salvation, left in boxes for you at the door. The texture of a soft curtain beneath your fingers as you peered out a window, willing yourself invisible, while the square filled with smoke from the burning of human things.
Your feet slip in the dust, and shards of basalt fill your socks and cut your toes. The woman stops in the trough of two hills where hot molten once flowed several hundred years ago. Her outline is bright with the setting moon. She searches for something with the toes of her boots. Then she kneels at the base of a small hillock and begins to dig.
You crouch and watch her and think about that bonfire in the square on that other planet where you were born, and a man, like you, whom they dragged out to it clutching a small blue ceramic bowl to his breast, as if it might keep him afloat in the sea rage. Who knows what the bowl meant to him? Your heart beat like a trapped bird as you watched them disassemble him. The flames consume his pieces, and his flesh peels from his bones, and his clothes turn to char.
You could only hope that the people who were hiding you would not be inspired to turn you out. One of them was out there in the square, watching, their strange, carapace-covered face bent in an expression you knew to mean anger, and all you had then was that frayed strand of faith in the instinct of life to protect other life, same species or not. You heard the collective cry as a vibration in that pane of glass beneath your palm.
You were born human on a lush violet planet, child of a people brought in to mine the soft minerals out of narrow tunnels in the cave. At school, the other children liked to watch you manipulate clay into small flowers and insects. What they liked were your little, dexterous fingers and your double-knuckle opposable thumb. You were shorter than all of them. They had to bring in a separate set of furniture just for you and your crude, bipedal form. As a child, you were treated kindly. The people of the violet planet prized children above all, and that is what saved you later from the Extinction.
The ghost is digging frantically, now, in the loose dirt. The thing she wants is not there. She rises and crosses to the other side of the shallow dip in the field and begins to dig again. You can hear her voice saying, “No, no, no,” and your heart squeezes with synchronous anxiety out of habit.
There was a vote by the High Council that year, that humans were no longer desired for mining. Mining, in fact, was evil. It defiled the ground and clogged the air. And the humans who did it were dirty and sly and destructive. The humans must be expelled. For weeks, traffic to the shuttleport clogged the sky. All humans with means were trying to leave. Your family had no money, and so you were still there when the new law came the following year that, as humans were no longer productive members of society, it would be best to eliminate those that remained.
You remember sitting between your parents on the mattress and hearing this over the public link, and the tears that ran down your parents’ faces as they pressed you close and kissed your head. That night, they bundled you into a large pot with a heavy lid, and they delivered you to your neighbors’ house—the one with a human-style garden in the back with flowers and tomatoes that would soon be torn up to diffuse any suspicion. That was the last time you saw your parents.
The ghost sits panting in the dust. At last, she sees you. “Who are you?” she asks, her skin a shadow in the cool starlight.
“No one important,” you say. “I live in town just back there. I saw you out my window as I was going to bed.”
“I’ve never seen you before,” she says, eyes narrowing.
She comes closer, closer to you, reaches out and touches your face with her skin-covered fingers, and at the same moment you both realize the other is alive and real. You so rarely see other humans these days, even though it is not a crime. She smiles in wonder, and you feel your face respond with unfamiliar muscles. You feel suddenly buoyant. You are glad you came.
There was one close call, when police came and searched the house, so soon after a previous inspection that you were not hidden in the eaves. The child of the family hiding you came running in and pushed you roughly down and rolled you up in a piece of cloth like the cigarettes your parents used to smoke. You heard the heavy clacking on the stairs. The child kicked you, so you rolled back against the wall and had to bite your lip against the pain of it. You did not know whether their child understood how soft and breakable you were, or if the injuries were punishment for the ever-present fear that hung over their home. The child never played with you, or even seemed to like you much.
The police came into the room and began to question the child. They began breaking things loudly, and you were amazed the child did not make that high-pitched hum that meant sorrow and regret. All the while you lay there, practically in plain view, glad that their hearing was not as good as yours, because your breathing was louder than an orchestra in your ears. At last, the police left, and the child unrolled you. “We are safe,” they said. And you thought, was that a mistake? We? Because you had never been referred to as one of them, and it filled some hole in your chest you did not know was there but also somehow made you more afraid. You wanted to hug them then, but you knew better than to impose such a human gesture on a person all bent limbs and shell and sharp edges. All you could do was hug yourself.
You do not know this woman, but you help her anyway, dig in the dust for hours. She is looking for a box of contraband seeds that her parents hid out here. They need not have. On this planet, homes are not searched regularly by the police. And now she has lost her heirloom: the hope of curling vines of squash, fragrant lemon trees, and blueberries on the bush. You would like her to find these things, but there is nothing in the great field of ash that gives away its secrets. The box could be anywhere, and the sun will be rising soon. “It’s all right,” she says. “I found you at least.” She smiles again.
It took five years for the Extinction to end. Two years before that, you managed to leave the planet and come to another one that still hated you, but hated you less. You learned how to sew their clothes with a machine, and the way the scissors sounded as you snipped cheap fabric into pieces made you feel whole. You thought of those people who did, in the end, love you, not <i>you</i>, but the sacred possibility of you and who you could be in another place.
When the sun rises, you and the woman agree to give up. You clasp hands a moment, and then walk back across the powder fields as the heat of the day begins to rise. You return to the small apartment you rent near the main street. You can hear the soft rumble of shopkeepers greeting each other as they set up their displays. You set a pot of water on the stove and sprinkle it with dried herbs for a tea. You shut your eyes and feel the light through the open window begin to fill you up. The pot begins to bubble, and the smell of it fills your nose, bitter and deep. That is how you know you are you, and here, still here.
If you liked this story, read the transcript of our interview with Yume Kitasei to learn more about her inspirations!
