The Soft Machine

By Mary Jane Elton

A short story about ghosts, memories, trauma, and seance as therapy

TW: Mention of child abuse and CSA

You expect what they don’t tell you about Ghosting.

No one at the Academy bothered to tell me that you would be intimate with people you hardly know, in a way that you’ve never been with anyone else. They fail to mention all the dreams of dead faces begging to be heard. The way you’ll never be able to go to a graveyard again. That you hurt so bad after a Grieving, you think you’ll break in half. They never mentioned any of that, but you expect all of it.

It’s the things they do tell you that’s what you could never imagine. That your body is forfeit during a Grieving. That you can feel what the ghost feels. That some ghosts aren’t ghosts at all, but trickster spirits trying to get into your mind.

When I learned all of that, I followed my doctor’s advice and started taking the damned depression pill. Even then, after I began to feel better, I wanted to quit taking it, admit to Dad that I’d never be anything—that he was right—and quit Ghosting, school altogether.

Whether it was pride or Prozac or habit that kept me in the Academy, I can’t say. But I finished. I got my piece of paper that certifies me to be of sound body and mind, enough to let ghosts joyride my body.

I can remember my last Grieving before everything changed, but barely. I was someone’s mother. James’s mother.

James—not his real name, mind you. Confidentiality, and all that—sat across from me in my office. He in a comfy love seat and me in a puffy chair, candles sprawled out in a square pattern on top of an intricate rosewood end table in front of both of us.

Flickering light caught in James’s eyes, on the edges of the grasping vines carved into the table. I asked James if he knew what participating in a Grieving meant.

“I’ve read the documentation.”

Did he understand that neither I nor my practice are responsible for what happens during the Grieving?

He chuckled a little, “Like I said—”

I stopped him. It was just policy; legal BS I have to get out of the way. He nodded, and I continued rattling off the rest.

Did he consent to my contacting his mother’s spirit?

“Yes.”

Does he understand that it will indeed be his mother doing the speaking, even though my lips will be the ones moving?

“Uhuh.”

I needed a “yes”.

“Yes.”

So, I began. I held my hands above the candles, high enough so they did not burn my skin, but I could still feel the steady, wet heat rising to meet my palms. I focused in, letting the heat guide my mind to the picture James provided: a Polaroid of a clutch of little kids, all crowded around a birthday cake, and a woman smiling behind the child who had his cheeks puffed up, ready to blow. That picture. That kind of picture. Call it a genre. I’ve seen ones like it so many times with so many different faces that I could draw any one of those photos from memory.

“Lucia? Lucia Ramos? Your son wants to talk to his mamá. He misses you. So much, Lucia. Are you there? Lucia, are you—”

A voice trickled into my mind. Syrupy and warped at first, but as more words came, it resolved.

“I can’t see you.”

“Do you see a light?”

“A little.”

“That’s my candles. Can you come to them?”

“Okay.”

When you feel a ghost, it’s not like anything else. Not like a cold breeze, not like a drop in the pit of your gut, not like anything a poet could sufficiently commit to words. But when Lucia Ramos entered the room, I knew it. Somehow detected her, probing around in all the little recesses of the room, through every stack of magazines, through the waxy fronds of all the indoor plants, and in my mind, leafing through the folds of my cerebrum.

“But this is—”

“It’s my mind. You can come in. It’s okay.”

Lucia didn’t speak for a few breaths. She mumbled a prayer I could barely hear.

“You’re sure? I can…”

“You can use my body. For a while.”

“Okay.” She didn’t sound sure, but she puffed out a breath, then… she was me. I was her.

Lucia’s memories mixed with mine. Hugs from a heavy-set woman—Mamma Pat—with her bright pink hair. Fishing trips down the Sacramento River with Daddy and Uncle Jimmy. The pain and confusion of adolescence coalescing into stability. Falling in love with a short Chicano man when I was… she was young. Luis, his smiling face, thick dad-mustache covering his upper lip, tattoos of his favorite flowers and bright alebrijes up and down his arms. Living in a little house by the ocean for years, so in love. Working, studying, finally getting a pre-med degree. Med-school, graduation, working the better part of a decade in a hospital, so many happy faces, sad faces, broken expressions, tangled bodies, exploded bone and blood, families gathered around old folks, little hairless children ringing bells. Then one month, missing a period. Giving birth. Missing another period, another birth (that time was a C-section). Bathing fussy toddlers, helping little ones figure out subtraction, crying, screaming at them when those little ones—so sweet before—turned mean and bitter, waiting for adolescence to wane and the tempers to cool, finding a new way to love them all over again, settling in, and dying. The gentle release.

We were one.

Then, as always, my mind caught fire. You can’t describe what it feels like when a ghost is in the room, but when one is in your head, you know. I felt… heavier, maybe. Like I’d suddenly gained weight without changing shape. Lucia inhaled, moved my fingers. Pain like wasp bites shot up my tendons, and it felt as if my lungs filled with smoke. In my mind, truly my own mind, I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth. Long practiced motions. The pain faded in and out with each exhale.

“James?” she said with my voice.

James said something and maybe stood up to meet his mother, but I had moved to the background. I let myself sink into the cool dark, a meditation. More like a coma.

I drifted in the dark, through my comfortable void. I was aware—somewhere in my muddled mind, all mixed with memories—of the sensation of a hug. Mostly, though, I fought off the pain, the wrongness in my skin. My body betraying me. It could be all right if I could only remove my bones and lie in a sensory deprivation tank.

Ten thousand breaths later, I began moving up. I was a pool noodle, carried to the bottom of a pool—the very deep end—at last released and allowed to float. I popped back up, broke the surface into James’s arms.

James shuddered, letting tears drip off the tip of his nose to roll down my back, blowing snot all over my sport coat.

I didn’t let go, and we cried together. My eyes were already primed, tear tracks streaking my face, my stomach roiling, tying itself in knots, my throat dry and full like I was swallowing a horse pill, my body still full of emotions that weren’t exactly mine.

When there were no more tears to be cried, we let go of each other. James said goodbye and a flurry of thank yous, then went across the hall for his talk therapy, still dribbling tears down the front of his shirt. I cleaned up my office while I waited.

After that, and I mean right after, it was my therapy time.

Ghosting is an opportunity to say goodbye, to let a loved one know you’re still thinking about them, that you still love them. But the experience can be difficult to process for the Ghoster and the client. So, when James was done with his session, I left my little office, slipped my charm around my neck, and crossed the hall to Zarka’s room. Dr. Zarka to anyone she didn’t like.

She was waiting for me, flipping through a novel. When I entered, she stood and had me sit on a love seat.

Zarka asked me how I was feeling, what happened that day, and how I dealt with the memories; did I get the Fear? And fifteen what-do-you-make-of-thats later, I was cleared for service. On my way out of the office, I must have booked an appointment for the following morning, but I can’t remember. Even now. I don’t remember taking the bus, walking out of my office building, anything. It was as if I’d stepped through a portal, out Zarka’s door, and through my apartment’s.

I walked through the door to my little studio, bewildered. I stepped around, opened and closed my door, half expecting Zarka to be in the hallway.

Standing still, I tried to remember.

Nothing.

So, I chalked it up to being tired. I must have walked home or whatever on autopilot, and soon enough, I was dealing with the history of my apartment building. A far more immediate worry than losing the memory of my thirty-minute commute.

Sour feelings swirled up around me, the long dead of this apartment building—the old folks who died sitting up in their recliners, the innumerable lonely people who died choking in their empty apartments, all those kids on the seventh floor from when the place was a tenement—they all knocked at my mind’s door. My charm vibrated around my neck. I tried to ignore them, but that night they were heavy in the air, and they made it hard to breathe, hard to eat, hard to sleep. And I forgot that I was forgetting.

In bed, as I drifted, I clutched my charm and felt a buzz from my nightstand. Between sleep and awareness, I picked up my phone. When I woke the next morning, it was a distant memory, so far gone it could have been the afterimages of a dream. But it was real.

I sat up in bed—my clock radio blaring the first few minutes of a morning zoo—and checked my phone. A single message sat at the top of my inbox. One line, no punctuation, from Dad.

“I have cancer,” the text said.

“So, is it real?” the man across the bus said.

That morning, I’d made the mistake of chatting with a stranger and letting him know what I did for a living. This falls under the category of “Things no one bothered to tell you in the Academy, but you expect, nonetheless.” Working in the afterlife industry, you get lots of questions about God. Big G, or otherwise. Usually, it’s best not to engage.

But against my better judgment, I sighed and asked the man what he believed in.

“Jesus, I guess. My mom was Catholic; Dad was a Baptist. That kind of beat religion out of me, but I still believe there’s something. Might as well be Jesus.”

I asked if he meant if Jesus was real, or someone else.

“Jesus.”

I told him I didn’t know.

“Well… What?” the man sputtered. “Do you know about any others?”

I told him the truth: no one did, about any religion.

“Then… Hold on. Why’d you ask me what religion I was?”

I told him that most people who ask for confirmation are normal, everyday, curious people. But if you ask them what they believe in and they go on a ten-minute diatribe about their faith… it’s better to lie.

“They don’t take too kind to ambiguity. So, you test the waters. I got ya…”

I nodded.

“So, what is it then? How are they… why can you talk to them? Ghosts, I mean.”

I shrugged.

A couple of mystified questions later, it was my stop. I stepped off the bus and went into my building, up to my office. The third floor of a little downtown high-rise. In the lobby, a little old woman named Patty ran reception. On either end of Patty’s desk, there were hallways with a few fluffy offices with a different be-candled altar in each. I banked right, toward my office, only to almost run face-first into that morning’s client.

She was a tall and muscular white woman with crinkle-cut French fry hair; not Arnold-Schwarzenegger-CrossFit-competition muscle, but protein-shake-triple-cheeseburger-three-hundred-fifty-squats kind of muscle.

I said sorry, introduced myself.

“I’m Abigail,” she said.

Right. Abigail. The name at least came back to me. And yes, that’s right, she wanted to speak to her grandfather.

I walked around her, fumbling with my keys, beckoning her to follow, asking if she was nervous.

“A little.” She crossed her arms.

I told her that’s natural, that the first time I participated in a Grieving, I couldn’t stop shaking, that I’d spoken to my mother.

“How did it go?” she said, standing behind me in the hall.

I dropped off my coat and my cell phone, turned around, and led Abigail across the hall to my office. I asked her when she decided to come here, why she wanted to hold a Grieving.

We stepped inside and made ourselves comfortable. She took a bean bag chair, and I sat in my usual puffy chair, the end table in front of me with half-burned candles all over it.

“Oh. It— It’s been a long time coming,” she said.

I asked her a few more boilerplate questions, then we prepared for the Grieving. I removed my charm and slipped it into my breast pocket. She gave me an old ball cap that smelled like bourbon and fish.

I asked her what she called him.

She looked at me, thought a moment, then said, “Steve.”

I asked her if Steve was all she called him (no Grampa, or Gramps, or Pappy?) and she said that it was, “Steve, just Steve.”

We got through the legal stuff, I lit candles, and Abigail gave curt answers. Yeses or nos or I don’t knows.

I began.

“Steve? Steve, are you there?” I prompted a few times, asked a few questions of a more specific nature. Still, I couldn’t connect to Steve’s spirit. Couldn’t get his attention. My eyes eased open, and I explained to Abigail that I couldn’t seem to find her grandfather. I would have to say something that would catch his ear, if he was there at all. Because sometimes—no one knows why, of course—spirits simply don’t show up.

Abigail pondered this. She crossed her legs, said, “Say exactly this: ‘Steve come and talk to Junebug, you old shit.’” She said it in an Upper Peninsula Wisconsin accent, a hair’s breadth away from an Albertan Canadian twang.

I blinked. Oh. So, this was one of those. I asked her if she had any ill will towards her grandfather.

“None at all,” she said, laughing. “We just had an… interesting relationship. More friends than family.” She smiled.

I took her at her word. Maybe she was convincing, maybe I was just out of my gourd.

“Steve, you old shit, Junebug wants to talk,” I said it hesitantly, unsure, but it worked.

A voice, like rocks in a gearbox, filtered in. But the voice did not clarify past the point of a lifelong smoker.

“What? What the fuck? What do you want?” I felt him grab and squeeze my mind like he was holding a dog by the scruff. “Oh. Huh…”

Before I could say anything else, Steve jammed his mind into my body. He dunked me in a frozen lake; I was one of those shivering seals on animal rights commercials, living out of holes in the ice, dodging pelt hunters and bigger seals with meaner teeth. Sensation took my body. I felt my stomach come alive, my heart going like strikes from a mallet. The Fear bubbled up.

One of the chief things they talk about in the Academy is the Fear. It will find you and take you and swallow you quicker than you can take a breath. Every Ghoster has seen the Fear, felt the Fear, feared the Fear.

A feeling like ten thousand little razors ran up my arms: down the road, not across the street. I expected to feel blood, to feel colder than I already was as my steaming essence poured out. Nothing happened but pain, though, and the Fear gripped me harder. In my mind, my internal mind, I began repeating over and over: No. A thousand times I said “No.” All my training–all the stuff from the Academy–and my experience leaked out my ears and I was left catatonic, repeating the same word.

This falls into the category of things they tell you in the Academy, but only in the way they teach chemistry students not to mix bleach and ammonia: If you do it on accident, you’re already dead before you realize you messed up. And I messed up. I allowed a spirit into my mind who wouldn’t let go, and I had the Fear.

Instead of a melding of the minds, Steve and I collided. Memories of Steve’s poured in.

Terrified, hiding under a rough wood kitchen table. The sensation of a slap, a switch, a belt. Unending pain in a dark room. Never being able to look his dad in the eye. Rage, pure, unfettered rage in a small-town high school. Black eyes upon broken arms upon wrecked cars. Working at a lumber mill. Back pain so intense, nothing else but oxy and booze would soothe it. So many nights with the world spinning, so many bottles of cheap plastic-jug bourbon, so many days spent laid up on the couch filling a popcorn bowl with vomit, so much time spent weeping. A one-night stand hardly remembered. A phone call that took away all the meager disability payments. Years gone by trying to connect with the kid, and finally being allowed into his life. Watching him grow up from a distance. Go to school. Get a job. Get a wife. Have a daughter. A blonde little girl. Then there was a fishing trip. A little girl, a hesitant father. A dark room. Flashes of something. White skin, dribbles of blood; an echo from Steve’s own childhood, only reversed. Then over and over and over… Weeping. So much crying you couldn’t imagine it. And worse, as Steve’s memories dumped into my mind, I felt him, Steve, rooting around in mine.

After a thousand more nos and enough memories of this sick man to make me woozy, I felt something. Not like anything normal I’ve ever felt while Ghosting: gentle nudges, warm squeezing, light fingers across my face or chest. This time I felt something. Something hard.

I popped back into my body on the floor. Nothing made sense; I was back in my own skin, and I had control, but the pain was still there. Hazy, I sat up, then fell, gripping my testicles where the epicenter of pain sat. As soon as my fingers brushed them through my khakis, pain like ice water shot up my vas deferens and relocated in the paunch of my stomach.

“I hope you’re fucking happy! Fucking piece of shit! I hate you; I always fucking hated you!” Abigail was doubled over, screaming into my face. “I would have pulled your plug myself, if I had the chance!”

I said her name. “Abigail.”

Her eyes went like moon pies. She collapsed backward, joining me on the floor.

“I… I—” Tears flowed from the corners of her eyes. The moment the tears hit her cheeks, they fizzled into air.

I told her it was okay, that I was fine.

“It happened so many times… I… eleven years old.” Her voice was strong now. Resolute after her little revenge. Matter of fact. She even smiled a little. I’d seen the look before. Knew it. Seen it on my face.

I told her she didn’t have to say another thing. That we could keep this between us. That I understood. I’ve been through what she had too.

She looked down, met my eyes. “Thank—”

Then the next thing… I don’t know. I can’t even remember now.

It was like the day before. I woke up in my apartment, key in the door, sour feelings swirling around me. I stopped. Looked at the keys hanging from the knob, swinging, clicking as they jangled together, keeping 4/4 time.

I was walking in a crosswalk. The little white man made of LEDs blinked. Trucks and buses rumbled, shook the very blacktop I walked on. I felt my teeth chatter. I stood still. Looked around for street names, landmarks. I was downtown but… 7th Street. Okay. I knew some of 7th. Okay. I wanted to walk, but when I tried, I couldn’t. A truck sounded its horn, shook the bones in my skull, and a moment later, I was twenty blocks down, staring at a street sign.

In my front pocket, my phone buzzed, and I had the vague impression it had been doing that for a while.

It was Dad.

“Why won’t you talk to me?” the most recent message said. I scrolled up, reading them in reverse order.

“I miss you, kiddo. Can we talk?”

“Hello???????”

“I shouldn’t have asked?”

“Please.”

“Talk to me.”

“I think it would be good for me.”

“I don’t care what she said last time.”

“I want to talk to Mom.”

“I have cancer.”

My lungs filled with air, then they emptied. Ten more times. Hyperventilating. I was hyperventilating…

“I’m sorry, baby.” My mother’s voice.

I cried out for her.

“Hey, ah… Are you good?” the barista said. “You looking for your mom?”

Turning around revealed that I was in a coffee shop. Everyone looked up from their books, their newspapers, their laptops.

“I never wanted this to happen. I only…” Mom’s voice again from… somewhere.

I looked around, called for her, took off running through the door, smashed the paper cup I didn’t know I was holding against the glass, milky coffee going everywhere.

Out in the street, buildings looming above, I called for Mom.

“I said such nasty things. I was so mad. So confused. I didn’t want you to remember me, baby. Not… like that.” Mom’s voice was cool and soothing through my panic.

I was walking again. No. Pacing. Pacing back and forth in my apartment like a cat in a cage. Sour ghosts swirled around me. I felt a few touches in my mind, unsure.

My charm wasn’t around my neck; it was sitting on my coffee table.

As quick as I could, I crossed to the table, reached out my hand, grasping. A shot of pain jumped through my body. I felt my legs seize up, my mind race, the Fear trickle in.

“They found me after ten days,” a long-dead voice said. “Do you remember the smell?”

I did. Remember the smell.

I was in my office. All the lights off, darkness outside my window. I stared into nothing. Waiting. But after a few calming breaths, nothing happened. I stayed planted in my chair. I uncurled my toes, let my jaw go slack. Closing my eyes, I breathed deep and long.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

In.

I opened my eyes.

Out.

And I was in my office, candles lit on the altar, a notebook open on my lap. I felt for my pen and found it in my breast pocket, set it on the end table along with my charm.

Of course, this was it.

“Mom,” I said. “Mom, are you there?”

Because hadn’t this—the holes in my memories—hadn’t this started a long time ago? Could I ever remember my first Grieving? The one where I spoke to Mom for the first time since I was eleven. Where… something happened.

“If you’re there, I’m sorry… Or I forgive you… Or… Whatever. I’m scared, Mom.”

A small feeling. A tingling. The lightest touch.

A smell. The lingering scent of a long-dead magazine insert. Perfume.

“Mom?”

“Hey, baby.”

“Mom… What’s…”

“I’m so sorry. I— I didn’t want you to hurt, to remember me… like that.”

“Mom. What did you do?”

I could hear her expression change. That half-smirk, half-grimace she wore whenever she had to admit anything.

Then I felt something. Something that nobody at the Academy told me about, but I never expected either.

A warmth. An oil radiator glow in the center of my skull: an anti-pain, the opposite of the Fear.

And I saw it. Remembered it all at once.

One of the first classes you take as a training Ghoster is called Observational Lab I. It’s meant, like all good first-year classes, to weed out the prospective students who are simply not cut out for the program. But there’s always one class that goes a little too far, a real motherfucker of a class, that pushes first years to their breaking point. In medicine, this class is Organic Chemistry. In engineering, this class is Physics. In biology, this class is Calculus. In Ghosting, this class is Observational Lab I.

Observational Lab I consists of five weeks of lectures on the theory of Ghosting and various techniques that can be taught in a classroom. This is where I learned how to meditate, how to breathe away anxiety and the inevitable pain of a ghost hijacking your synapses. The next four weeks are spent sitting in on Grievings. Watching old pros give up their bodies and snap back. This made the student certain that it was possible to come back. That the ghost would not—could not—take hold and not let go; not if you listened to your mentors and did your damned homework.

The final week, on Monday, you hold a Grieving with a Ghoster.

Everyone has someone. Even people who think they don’t, they eventually think of some uncle or cousin or childhood friend who’s gone now.

I can still remember that morning. It’s so clear in my mind, I can call up the memory like an on-demand video. I can remember what I ate (eggs on dry toast), what I drank (horrible but cheap coffee), what the weather was like (drizzly with a little bit of sun poking through).

I woke when it was still cold, the automatic heater still chugging and trying to bring the temperature of my room up to an acceptable level. It was early. I never ever got up early, but that morning, when I forced my eyes open and wiped the crud out of them, it was still dark outside.

The bed was warm, so I stayed there until the heater had time to fill the room with hot air that smelled like when you overheat a saucepan. The floor was cool; I almost retreated to bed, but I forced myself out and into the shower.

On the way to my Grieving–my first Grieving as a participant–wind and rain bit at my nose as I called up all my training, all that I’d learned in those past nine weeks.

Keep breathing.

Shut your eyes if you need to.

It’s okay if you need to stop the Grieving early.

If you contact a spirit new to Ghosting, they may be agitated.

Breathe damnit.

At the building, the little satellite campus crammed into an old brownstone, it stopped raining. I ascended the stairs. I would have taken the rickety old elevator if I hadn’t been so nervous.

My Ghoster was a young guy, around my age, a senior in his own Ghosting degree (I’d entered the Academy a little later than most). He was good. I remember him always, try to model myself after his example.

“I want to talk to my mom,” I said. And this… this next part, the Grieving, I couldn’t remember until this moment. But it’s here now, as I write this it’s clear as crystal, as is the rest of that day.

“What’s her name? What do you call her?”

That little detail, the present tense. It shook me, and I took a moment to collect myself.

“Nina,” I said. “Mumma when I was little, and Mom… after…”

The Ghoster nodded then began a procedure that is now in my bones. I dream about it. I find myself mouthing the practiced words while I’m cooking or lying in bed trying to sleep. But then I was fresh, and those words were new to me. The whole affair was new. Befuddling.

The Ghoster finished the legal spiel, then placed his hands on the altar, candles flickering. He shifted a little, more jerked, his entire body spasming for the length of a single blink.

“Bu— Baby? What’s—” the Ghoster’s mouth said it, but it was Mom. Every syllable, every breath, every minute facial manipulation was Mom.

“Mom.”

“I… I don’t understand baby.”

“Mom… I love you. I miss you. I…”

“Why am I here? What’s—what’s happening to me? I’ve been here, been around… someplace but…”

“You’re— it’s okay. You’re safe. It’s called Ghosting. You’re dead, Mom.”

“What? You. You did this?” She was frantic, clawing for words. “It’s all… It was so dark. I… It’s like. Like before I was born, except sometimes… sometimes I can hear voices and… You!”

“Mom? What are you—”

“This isn’t real. You. You’re the devil. I’m supposed to be heaven with Jesus, and… You! What are you? You’re not… No. Can’t be. Get out of my son. You did this to me. I was in darkness for so long… You. YOU!”

“Mom…” My voice was tiny.

“How could you? I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”

I said nothing.

She stared at me with the Ghoster’s eyes, felt at his face, stood up, sat down. “This…”

“This is real, Mom. You died. I was eleven and… You stopped remembering. You didn’t remember me… And then… The crash. I love you, Mom.”

“No.” She said it with no more venom, no more hatred, no more fear. “No. This… This isn’t it.” A choked sob dribbled out and a cry that made my spine buckle, my ears bleed; I’ll never forget it now. “Why am I not with Jesus?”

I was still sitting, still gaping at her when she left the Ghoster’s body. He shuddered, and his body bucked and rocked, and in the time he took to recover, something happened.

This memory is still hard to recall, but it’s there now. It’s all there.

A tickling, like a slow drip of water on your palm, only this drip was on the underside of my brain, streaking up my brainstem in rivulets. A sharp coolness cut into me, and I yelped. But a moment later, I was… Fine. As if my mother had not just had a post-mortem nervous breakdown and called me a demon.

The memory of the Grieving was gone.

It’s odd to recall now, knowing how the Grieving went in reality and the incongruity of my subsequent actions.

“How do you feel?” my Ghoster asked me.

“Good,” I said, and it wasn’t a lie. I couldn’t remember what had happened.

After that was therapy for me and the Ghoster.

The remaining week of Observational Lab I was essentially aftercare. We watched Muppet Treasure Island. We talked about our experiences, and I lied to my therapist for the first time.

I told Dad that Mom didn’t want to talk because that was easier than admitting I didn’t remember our meeting. Now I know that it was true, that she didn’t want to talk then, but in the moment I thought it was a lie. Dad and I fought. We didn’t talk for a long time and then my memory started blanking and…

“So, I took it. That memory.” Mom is telling me this in my mind. She’s helping me remember. Writing this story with me.

This falls into the category of, “Nobody taught you it in the Academy and you never expected it because it wasn’t thought possible.” You know, due to the laws of physics and such.

I’m writing as fast as I can remember, and Mom is in my mind, messing about with neurons, reconnecting old paths.

My training is exclusively in therapy. I’m not a science person; I barely passed most of my classes. But I can see that this will change everything for medicine, for physics, philosophy, religion. Ghosts can rewire neurons, fix and sever connections despite not being able to interact with the corporeal world. Are neuronal signaling pathways partially spiritual? What does that even mean?

Before she leaves, before she says she’s sorry and she loves me, before everything and the whole damned field of Ghosting changes, I invite her into my mind. I tell her to call Dad. And after I wake up, I’ll have another text from Dad, and I’ll talk to him too, I’m sure I will now.

But in this moment now, she’s entering my mind. I’m her and she’s me. And I can remember Granpa when he had hair, high school, college, meeting Dad, working at “the office,” the truly gut rending time there, giving birth to me, having a miscarriage, raising me without a little sister, then the accident that took Mom’s memory, the second accident that took her life. And as I fall back into my void, as I’m falling now, still moving the pen, I feel the wasp bites crawl up my tendons and I think, “I love you, Mom.”

And I’ll never forget again.