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Ghost Story

A Fiction Piece

By Aliza DubePublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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There’s a breeze coming in off the ocean. The fog is rolling in like ghosts, reminding me of the specter the man I slept beside last night will soon be. Gooseflesh coils up my arms like a forest fire. It’s the 8th day of counselor training, I walk into the dining hall some kind of seven am, red eyed, black coffee awful. I’m wearing a tasseled crop top, bleached booty shorts. My shoulder length hair is done up some kind of backwoods beauty queen. Discount mascara is painted over my infected eye. A mosquito bit me on my eyelid yesterday. The man from the night before told me that it’s because the insects thought my eyes were pretty too. He told me some things were too beautiful to resist. I’m more sunburnt than tan, my face looks like I’m always anime blushing, so when I walk in and the entire dining hall goes silent, none of the other counselors can see the blood rushing to my face. They stare anyways.

I pretend not to notice and go in search of a stained and chipped coffee cup. I rip open a hot chocolate packet with my teeth, as pornographically as I can manage, to give their bohring eyes a show. I pour sugar like cocaine snow and squeeze the last drop out of the coffee dispenser. I hum a love song that I stopped believing in long ago and swing my hips when I walk like Amy Winehouse.

Whispers stir around me as swift as the ocean breeze. It sounds like home. I no longer have to introduce myself myself. I no longer have to fumble over ice breakers. They know exactly who I am now. I’m the girl that had sex on the camp beach with a virtual stranger. I’m the girl that carried her bedding across camp this morning before the sun even came up. But she’s so quiet…. They will say there’s no way.

I sit next to Tina, an art student with a pixie cut and a fantastic ass. With my coffee clenched in my hungover fist, I can trace every vein in my hand, the roadmap of my blood swollen from dehydration.

“So how are you doing this morning, Lena?” Tina asks me with a familiarity we have never shared.

“Good,” I chirp, and little else. Last night is not something I want to cheapen by talking about it. It’s between me, a Jesus-looking dude, the tide and the stars. Until I talk about it, it belongs only to us. I want to keep this safe. But it is a small camp, a small town.

My guy walks in and a half hearted, half joking din of applause sprinkles over the dining hall. He sits across from me, smiles a grin that always looked more lupine than human. I’m reminded of the Nirvana tattoo I spotted on his right ass cheek. I’ve always had a thing for people who don’t take themselves too seriously. I’ve always known how to recognize salvation when I see it, and man the killers were wrong, he looks everything like Jesus.

We eat pancakes that somebody else has made. He laughs at my stories; drunken fumblings of a lost girl, who only wanted respect but made the mistake of searching for love instead. I steal glances of him over my coffee mug. I think about what Johnny Cash’s idea of heaven was, having coffee with her in the morning.

“Am I your heaven?” I will think to ask him later. But it will be week four of camp and he will be long gone, fucking other girls in other tents far from where I stake mine. He will leave nothing but a half drunk bottle of whiskey and a reputation for me as stubborn as a stain at the bottom of a coffee mug. I have stopped believing in men who look like redemption. I have started believing in ghosts.

literature
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About the Creator

Aliza Dube

I am a recent graduate of the BFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Maine at Farmington. I am currently living with my boyfriend and cat in Kansas, cause why not? I am currently seeking publication for a memoir manuscript.

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