1
I, GHOST GIRL EXTRAORDINAIRE
幽女情懷
Across the restaurant from me, a man in a cheap suit wines and dines a pretty brunette.
The usual scene unfolds—he jokes, and she laughs; he touches her knees beneath the table, and she blushes to her ears. A rom-com meet-cute, except for the fist-sized incubus sitting cross-legged on the man’s shoulder, with its stinger embedded in the nape of his neck. The creature combs its braided hair with spindly fingers, and occasionally strokes its distended blue abdomen.
I watch the scene. A salad fork hangs, forgotten, between my teeth.
Janet snaps her fingers in front of my face. “Seeing fairies again, Tam?” she asks. A hint of mockery.
I blush and shake my head. “There’s an incubus. It’s feeding on that man across from us, with the shiny watch and too much hair gel.”
Janet looks over her shoulder. Her glossed lips curl up, and a dimple wells into her left cheek. “The Suit?”
“Yeah, but the incubus’s color is off,” I say. “It’s too blue.”
We watch from behind wine glasses and heavy napkins, speculating in hushed voices. When the brunette excuses herself to the washroom, we see the suited man slip a sleeve of powder into her drink. He folds the sleeve small and palms it, settling back in his booth to watch the waitresses. By the time the brunette returns, all smiles and damp lemon-soap fingers, his powder scuds have dissolved in her velvet Italian red.
“Well,” Janet breathes, “That’s probably not tannin powder he added to her glass. What do you want to do?”
Besides give the Suit a tender nudge to the groin with a steel-toed hiking boot? I kind of wish I’d never come to this restaurant, to Angela’s on the hip of the city. I wish the incubus hadn’t fluttered in and settled on the grease-slicked neck of a terrible man, drawing my eyes to his table. I just wanted a proper date: my first in years.
I ask, “If you take the girl aside and warn her, do you think she’ll believe you?”
Janet winks, dabs au jus from her lips with her napkin, and stands. Her heels flash as she clips across the restaurant. She is a sharp-eared woman. Next to the pretty, dolled-up brunette, every thread on Janet verges on inappropriate. Her hair is uncombed and asymmetrical around her long face. The red of her lips clashes against her freckles. Her skirt is a finger too short for polite crowds, and my eyes linger where fabric meets leggings.
Janet takes the brunette’s glass by the long stem and flings the contents onto the Suit’s face.
The Suit sputters, and the incubus on his neck pulses mustard yellow. The brunette half-stands. “What’s wrong with you?” she shrieks.
Janet slides a finger into wine residue and flicks red droplets across the table. “Still
need chemicals to nail your dates?” she sneers, loudly enough that half of the diners turn their heads. From the corner of my eye, I see one of the waitresses shuffle onto the scene. “It’s good you bought her the cheap shit, Supercuts,” Janet says. “You might need to lawyer up.”
The brunette, wide-eyed, goes very still.
“I don’t even know you!” the Suit snaps.
“I get it,” Janet says, voice dripping saccharine sympathy. “Hard to keep track of names if you only get it up for comatose women. All my other dates tell me I’m fucking unforgettable.” She glances back at me and blows a kiss through her French-tipped fingers.
I put my hands over my mouth and laugh. For just one moment, I forget the fairies and monsters, the incubus still perched like an ominous Christmas light against the Suit’s neck. There is just Janet, with her dyed-firetruck-hair and freckles, in the orange restaurant light.
• • •
It is busy for an October night in the City of Calgary. Cars huff along the street outside Angela’s. Throngs of loud drunks shamble past, with half-disguised glances in our direction. Their red jerseys make their shoulders look bigger and their shadows crawl like long cats. Streetlights flood the pavement, attracting snowy moths that leave white flecks against the dark asphalt.
Janet tries to hold my hand, her fingers warm. I shy away, wiping sweat and tingles into the seams of my jeans.
“Um . . . it’s busy tonight,” I say.
Janet looks at the crowds passing us and wrinkles her nose. “Is it the hockey junkies? If you care so much about their opinions, how the hell did you survive high school?”
I hang my head. I’d parked Mama’s blue minivan far away and crossed the span of the lot, hoping Janet would walk me to my car, but her rusted hell-trap is backed into the stall by the door. She thumbs something in her pocket, and the heavy pop of her car lock signals the night’s end.
She reaches for my arm and leans in as a particularly large crowd crosses the avenue toward us.
I catch a whiff of her heat and spicy deodorant, and step back. “It’s good we stopped him.”
Janet snorts. “Good night, ghost girl. Don’t let the brownies bite.”
Brownies don’t bite; they are thin-boned women with rat-furred mantles, who dance in the shadows of old houses. Rowdy, and the pitter-patter of their tiny paws echo in my dreams, but they don’t bite. I open my mouth, “Brownies don’t . . .”
Janet slides into her car and lets the door shut.
“Good
night,” I say as her screeching monstrosity scatters moths on its way out of the parking lot.
I stand there for a time, marinating in giddy memories and rubbing at the smile on my lips. It is a good night.
Behind me, the Suit steps out. The pretty brunette had long since fled into the October evening, and the Suit is alone. The incubus clings to his neck, gossamer wings fluttering. White replaces the blue hues of its abdomen, as the man’s cocktail of lust and paranoia turns into something else.
“Hey,” he says. Not loud, but he is a well-dressed man with shoulders to fill out an American suit. He draws too close. Looms, even though he is not a big man.
I shrink, with shoulders pulled up to my neck, and hasten across the parking lot.
“Hey!” The Suit follows me. His footsteps slap against asphalt, and my heartbeat is loud. I can smell his hair gel.
I fumble for keys, but the man is on my heels. He puts a hand against Mama’s car and presses in. His voice licks against my neck. Sour wine fogs around me. My stomach twists, like there are worms in my gut, pressing their blunt heads against my sternum from the inside. In my panic, I can’t tell if the worms are real. My ears ring.
“See,” the man whispers against me. The heat of his crotch presses into my thigh. “Your kind can date each other all you like. In the end, this is what you cunts get wet for.”
He pulls away. I don’t breathe until his vehicle door closes and he blares past me onto the street. The night swings, and I cling to the car door. I can’t fall. The ground is covered in gum and beer and moth droppings. I can’t fall here. I’m wearing nice jeans, and all the crowds with red jerseys and drunk-loud cheers are somewhere close behind.
I crawl behind the wheel and lock the car door behind me. I blindly feel behind the driver’s seat to make sure the Suit isn’t somehow hiding there. And I breathe raggedly until I can no longer feel worms.
After tapas with Janet, with her freckles and shark grin, her garish skirt and knock-off handbag, and the lipstick she reapplied after every few bites . . . all I can think of is the man in the suit. I wish I’d never left the house. My fingers swipe out a garbled message across my phone, but I don’t hit send. I don’t call Mama.
Eventually, after my breathing settles and I stop shaking, I see the incubus.
It writhes, belly-up
against my windshield. It’s a small thing, probably born from a wild summer romance. It has the face and body of a child, with braided hair the colors of a Persian rug, and enormous eyes like streetlights through glass shards. Only its hooked stinger and distended abdomen undermine the harmless visage. Its mouth opens, and it screeches as it tries to expel yellow fear and white anger from its body. Its wings splay.
In high school, I’d seen swarms of incubi flutter through the hallways in spring. I wore high collars in the summers so they couldn’t smell me. I had hit a few with Mama’s blue Toyota and felt good.
But the incubus didn’t put roofies in the Suit’s pocket. It didn’t make him threaten girls half his age in dark parking lots.
I wipe sweat from my hairline, the back of my neck, and my upper lip. Then, I carefully clean the salt from my fingers with a wet nap from Angela’s. I exit the car and pick up the incubus by its wings. It recoils at the scent of me, teeth bared, but then, after a moment, twitches its small nose.
“You can sniff all you like,” I say, “but it’s been a while since the last time I was laid.”
The incubus twists to perch on my fingers and tests its stinger against the back of my hand. It drinks from my capillaries. Pulsars of yellow fade from its abdomen until it is a young, valentine pink. Its eyes turn violet, and its wings catch moonlight between them. It withdraws, leaving a raised mosquito pimple. The incubus strokes my thumb, and the shy grin it gives me is blinding.
My breath catches. The incubus likes me. The implications are heady.
Janet. Freckles and green eyes and very wide smiles. Her deodorant and the heat of her dry, rough fingers. The incubus likes my blood because . . . against all odds, despite the man in the suit and how awful the night turned, I, ghost girl extraordinaire, am in love. ...
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