Short Story Competition Finalists:
Who's Afraid of Ghosts?
2009-06-23
By Coryn Brown

The first time I got applause was in second grade. Mom was in her bedroom, at her closet, on her knees, frozen before the black hole in the wall with her broad back to me and her thick hair in a twist and a black sack beside her and her jeans ripped at her thighs and her pale strings hanging and her waistband squeezing her center and her belly spilt over the edge. She leaned into the black hole and pulled out a pair of brown shoes and put them in the black sack, on top of the other things, and no, they didn’t fit.  I hesitated. I asked her, I said, What are those? but I meant, What are you doing? This question made her jump. She dropped the shoes and they clunk-clunked on the floor. Wingtips, she said. Something I’d never heard before. Stop asking dumb questions, she said. Something I did a lot. For homework that night, I wrote a story about a man with wingtips who flew over apartment houses and dropped magic candy hearts into open windows for kids to make a wish on. Two days later, I was picked to read it out loud. Imaginative, read the red ink in the top right hand corner. Exclamation point. Good use of verbs. Period.

There’s a wail that begins as a scream on Stacy Ann’s side, the kind I hear in horror movies that play at 2 in the morning around the time when folks erect ghosts on their front lawn and string their trees in orange lights. It ends as a wheeze, a mad pull for oxygen, a gurgling of extra spit. Probably her mother.  I almost forgot there were others here, sitting behind me. Waiting. Now murmuring. Now building a wall around the silence suddenly left behind. The wailing is done. The wall is thick.

And I won’t turn around and risk seeing Marco’s not even here, which will either piss me off to tears or confirm that I don’t care. When the cops cornered his car, they cuffed both of us. In the back seat together, he didn’t speak a word, just leaned his bare arm against mine and I put my nose to it and my nostrils were lit by stale beer and body sweat and I wondered if he ever wanted to let his friends know about us and I wondered if I could get that smell in solid form and keep it around my neck like the fragrance tree on his rear view mirror. I’ve only spoken to my lawyer since. I want a chicken burrito. There’s a pitcher of water on my table but the water’s lukewarm and if I had a goldfish, I’d give her a home.

The courthouse is one full block. It is pillared and stout. It is gray and concrete. It is set on a hill. See the many, many stairs that unfold before it like bellows of an accordion? Where are the rails? Convicted as an adult, says the judge. Crazy thing is, I had apple juice this morning that I drank as a girl. Come lunch I’ll be something else. Maybe a woman? People applaud.

In criminal law, insanity is a defense that indicates the perpetrator was acting under a mental derangement. I think I’d know if I were insane. It’s one of those things people point out to you before you recognize it in yourself. My lawyer leans over to me buttoning his wrinkled blue blazer like we’d just felt each other up and I feel his hot breathe carve itself into my cheek. Don’t worry, we’ll appeal, he mumbles, probably out of habit. Then somebody shouts, Give her the death sentence, and even I know that isn’t done in this state and all I can think about is this damn chicken burrito, the ones they sell at that Mexican spot on Church Street and how I want to rip it apart with my teeth or just unwrap it and sink my face in the warm black beans.

Stacy Ann was such an angel. She didn’t want me sleeping on their couch or eating the last of her Raisin Bran. Her friends at school spread a lot of lies about me. She told me my mother has a new life in Washington, and with a new daughter. She provided an image. She went to church and loved to dance and flaunted her allowance like mixed girls do their hair.

They handcuff me and lead me on out where there’s a car waiting, but not the one I want. So I lower my head, power on my wingtips and fly over the reporters and the flashing lights. Trust me, though; it’s not that easy. It’d been years since I’ve flown! First I have to dig the shoes out from the black hole. Then I have to dust them off. Then I have to give them a start. I land in Marco’s ’89 Mazda. We make out and smoke and talk about stuff and I can be honest with him because he doesn’t care. The car’s so old and brown we could smoke the grass that’s growing out the dashboard. But what goes on in there is always good, and maybe today we can drive down to the edge of Long Island and peel our clothes off piece by piece and dive into the cold clear water of the Sound where you can see everything, even the colored stones deep in the bottom.

I never trusted my lawyer. He’s court appointed and looks like the type to have a commercial and in person his hair is gelled into spikes and he wears a gold chain with a cross on it. In the half hour that we meet, his green eyes rarely lock into mines and when they do, mines drop instantly which causes me to stare at the table when he suggests I plead insane to get a lesser sentence for stabbing my cousin 29 times before he even asks, Did you stab your cousin 29 times?

I don’t remember.

Did you take her sneakers and her mp3 player and the $12 dollars in her pockets after she ran through the living room, picked up the cat, threw it at your face, leapt over her science books, felt you in her back, darted through the kitchen, screamed “Mommy, help me!” even though nobody was there, felt you in her stomach, stumbled against the front door and slid her way down, her blood marking the door like the blood of the lamb?

When Mom left for the last time, I was 11. Days later the ceiling cracked. The outdoors leaked into my hair at night, while I slept, in the mornings, when I peed, into my skin, catching my lungs, filling me with catarrh. I dreamt of dry places and woke to sodden mattresses, soaked through to the springs. That needed to get fixed. So I left, stayed with family, then I left, stayed with family, then I left, stayed with family, then I left, stayed with family.

 

CORYN BROWN is one of five finalists in the 14th Gertrude Johnson Williams Short Story Competition sponsored by Johnson Publishing Company. This year’s crop of winners were selected by a team of nationally know writers including novelists Trey Ellis, Walter Mosley and Sandra Jackson-Opoku and Joy Bennett, Ebony senior writer.

Click here to listen to a narrated podcast of the contest winner, THE VENUS PEN, by Tanya Hodges.