When the afternoon sun finally poked through the clouds, I escaped outside. Mam was scrubbing the floors and there was that buzz around her, her lips turned down like the dried spaghetti noodle stuck to the wall above the stove. Impeccable, impeccable, she would crow after the bleach and polish were put away, but she never pried off that pasta. It reminded me of daddy. Mam pinched me whenever I said his name, but that pasta was still there.

The swing seat was wet. Rainwater soaked into my shorts and I cursed because I’d need to sneak past mam when I went in for dinner. Things were getting better for a little bit, but then the bugs came. We never saw them, but we knew they were there. They came at night, when we were sleeping, and in the morning our legs would be covered in millions more of the tiny, itchy bumps with hollowed out centers. For a full week, I tried to stay awake, ready with my flashlight, ready for battle, but I always dozed off right around dawn, when the light started creeping across the floorboards. Mam’s cleaning would wake me up and there’d be fresh dots, clustered together in a way that triggered my trypophobia. After clawing away a strip of flesh on my knee, I had taken to covering the bites with newspaper ads and comics, attaching them with scotch tape from the rusty dispenser in the pantry. Quality futons, read my right thigh. But then again, he was a real bozo, explained the vividly-inked, bespectacled, forty-something breaking down the fourth wall. My mam was forty-something, and I liked to pretend that I was, too. I was a lips-sealed confidante. The wise friend to all forty-somethings. I hear you, sister, I whispered as I plastered the comic to my ankle. I tilted my head and nodded sagely a few times before mam called down the hallway, Using lye today, stay in your room.

Pumping hard, trying to touch the overhead tree branch with my toes, my newspaper legs fluttered in the breezy, swinging motion. I am a pendulum, I sang in my outside voice, to the tune of Titanium by Sia. I admired Sia. She was brave to hide behind her wigs and hats and bows. Once, in the attic, I tried to hide in a pile of moldy teddy bears, but my mam found me and I paid for it. That was when Daddy was still around. Things were worse now. In a way. Before the bugs came, I was sleeping better without the late night thumping from their room, the guttural sounds that made my heart pound and my palms sweaty, the voice that sounded like my mam but not.

I am a pen-du-lum! My head was thrown back and my eyes closed, the momentum and speed quieting the fear that had been brewing in my stomach for the past couple months. Swinging was the only thing that brought me relief, keeping me from gnawing on the tips of my fingers until they bled. But today, through the whistling wind, I heard a groan. Dragging my feet through the blistered grass to slow down, I whipped my head to the right and saw, through the chain link fence, a glowing, blue specter at work.

Stay away from that yard, my mam told me time and time again. Stay away from that man. He’s not right in the head. The fence between our yards was higher than the ones I’d seen around the neighborhood, capped with curlicues of barbed wire. Sometimes, when I was swinging, I’d see him out back, staring at a bald spot on his lawn. He never looked my way.

But this ghost was new. I wasn’t afraid. My daddy once told me stories about the ghosts of Antarctica, the ones that would roam the aluminum corridors of the research center. He was a botanist and, one year, after the rest of the crew had departed, he stayed on a little longer. They were industrious, he told me. The work of the dead is just as important as the work of the living.

Soft, blue light cascaded off the specter next door as it pushed a giant boulder up an invisible hill. It looked like an old woman with pin tight curls and a long, loose nightgown. Her feet were bare and she grunted as she strained against gravity. From the way the thin fabric clung to her body in spots, I knew she was sweaty from the effort. Go, go, go, I whispered, not sure what my encouragement was for but feeling sanctimonious all the same. Old people scared me. But here I was showing support, and for a ghost to boot. I thought my daddy would be proud, then I stopped thinking about him because the pickling, vinegar feeling in my stomach started up again.

The old woman stretched herself out, pressing against the boulder with all her might, looking like her bones might snap, then she let out a cry that turned my body icy, and I watched the boulder slip through her body and roll all the way down that invisible hill.

A thin layer of perspiration formed on my skin and I was suddenly aware of all my body odors: the dirty oils caking my hair; the armpit stench of maple syrup from the carrot and fenugreek soup that my mam made me eat for three days straight, to reverse bad luck, she said; the earthy, forest smell of my period, which had started the day after my daddy left. Why are you doing this to me, my mam yelled as she threw a box of pads across the room. Can’t you see I don’t have the capacity to deal with these changes? She was always talking about capacity and feelings — things that belonged to adults, things that kids like me had to tiptoe around. Whenever she yelled like that, she’d retreat to her room after. It was nice in there. A refuge. The walls were a dark, soothing purple, and there were framed botanicals on the walls, pencil sketches from my daddy’s field observations. My nose was trained to identify rose and patchouli, the essential oils that brought my mam the most comfort. I liked to sit outside her room when she was in these moods. It made me feel close to her, but in a way that was safe. There was the sound of her cards shuffling, slipping against each other as she “infused them with intention and meaning” before spreading them out like a broken map across her moss green duvet cover. She read my cards once, and I was dizzy with the privilege of being inside her space, sitting on the soft covers of her bed, surrounded by velvety throw pillows. There were naked people on the cards, and symbols I didn’t understand. I watched her face, meteorologist to her moods, as she looked for answers, but her expression was a prairie sky on a boring, summer day. She dusted up the cards without saying a word, then she asked me to leave her room.

Ma, the man next door yelled. What are you doing? Stop that.

I’d never heard a word from our neighbor, and I was surprised by the young in his voice. He sounded like my parents; he sounded like he was forty-something. Forty year-olds deal with a lot of changes and just need someone to listen to them. I congratulated my wisdom-beyond-years and pictured the book cover. 40? No Problem! Second Puberty Explained. In my author photo, I’d wear a navy blue blazer and my owl charm. If my mam wouldn’t buy me glasses from the drugstore, I’d photoshop.

Scratching my hip, I watched the man plead with the ghost. She ignored him, like moms do, or maybe like ghosts do. I’d asked my dad if the ghosts of Antarctica ever said hello, but he had just swallowed his coffee in a weird way, like he was expecting more from me.

I wanted to be of service but I didn’t know what to say. The specter was at it again, throwing all of her weight into that boulder.

Ma, he cried. You’ve made your point. Just let it rest.

Actually, I called out, she doesn’t really have a choice. I slid off the swing and walked over to the fence. I’m something of a Greek mythology expert, I told him. Have you heard of Sisyphus?

Sisy-who?

Sisyphus, I said with great patience. Doomed to an eternity of labor and futility. I dug my nails into my hip then, and pulled the waistband back. More dots. The bugs were traveling up at night, on from my legs in search of fresh meat. There was blood underneath my fingernails and the metallic smell mixed in with all of the other odors. I was a stew of living proof, all systems operational and running.

The old woman was nearing the apex when my mam screamed my name, causing our neighbor to flinch. She’s like that sometimes, I assured him, smiling bravely as my stomach twisted into itself. Good luck, I said to no one in particular, as an ad slid off my calf and into the mud.

 

Dinner was salmon and spring peas. Since daddy left, mam ordered all of the groceries through an app, and she liked to greet the couriers at the door and pretend they were foragers or fishermen. I hope the seas weren’t too rough today, she’d say. Or, The earth was generous with its bounty, dear gatherer. My job was to remove all of the packaging and present the groceries to her in a wicker basket, like food babies had floated downstream into our kitchen. I noticed that the floors were gleaming. The floors are gleaming, mama. I widened my eyes and beamed love out of the pupils. She scratched her leg and I tried not to look at the pockmarked flesh. I found some bites on my hip, mama. She sighed and took her dinner and a bag of gummy worms to the bedroom, closing the door. When I got up, there was blood on the chair, but I wasn’t sure if it was from my monthly or the bites. Through the dining room window, I could see that old blue specter rolling the boulder up, over and over and over, but her son had gone inside.

 

My legs started oozing and bites covered my stomach. Between the blood and the pus, I no longer needed tape and just dabbed torn up bits of newspaper onto my skin, the bio fluids acting as glue. I kept layering on fresh, bright strips and the papers hardened into a cast over time, forcing me to walk like a robot. It wasn’t comfortable to sit, so I stood at the kitchen counter and ate my cold cereal while staring at the spaghetti noodle. Teach me something scientific, Daddy. Scientific? How about this — I’m going to throw this noodle at the wall, and if it sticks, it’s ready to be eaten.

Ma! You need to stop. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. Is this what you wanted? You won. You won!

After papering my belly (the comfort of home; and we laughed for days!) I went outside and stood next to the fence. Mam was still sleeping but I whispered anyway.

Sir, I don’t think she can stop.

My neighbor turned to look at me for the first time and he jumped a little, like he’d seen a ghost. Which was weird because the actual ghost of his ma was in his yard. Are you…in costume?

We’re dealing with some bugs.

His eyes glazed over as he nodded, and it reminded me of how my daddy used to look when I shared all the thoughts and questions in my head. Did the ghosts wear clothes? Could you see through them? Could you see their insides? He’d pat my head and say, Settle, little one, before heading down to the basement, a dark, dank land that I crossed into only once. He was growing plants down there, Whole Contained Ecosystems, he said once, and it required a lot of his time.

My neighbor sighed. I once heard the phrase, “sigh of contentment,” and I knew it to be a lie. The sighs of adults are heavy and full of negative things.

She did this my whole life, he said. And now she’s come back to haunt me.

She pushed boulders? In my mind, I drained the blue away and replaced it with the technicolor blast of the 1930’s. I pictured the specter younger, still with tight curls, clad in a unitard and winning strongwoman competitions.

No, no. This martyr shit. Stuff, I mean. Look at my sacrifice. See how much I’ve given up for you, blah, blah.

I nodded like I knew what he was talking about and we spent some minutes observing the specter-cle.

I know why she’s doing this. She never felt appreciated when she was alive, you know? My pop had affairs. Friends, I mean. He had lots of other friends and not enough time for her. She raised me by herself and I treated her like garbage.

Aarrrgghhhheeeiiii, cried the ghost. The three of us watched the boulder roll back down.

It was a relief when she died, my neighbor said. Then he looked at my legs for a long time. I shouldn’t have said that. How old are you?

Old enough, I said.

I just want her to be at peace. Ma! You can stop now. I see you. I’m grateful for all you’ve done.

A lightbulb clicked above my head as my Language Arts class finally paid off. Maybe this is a metaphor, I said.

A metaphor?

Let me give this some thought. It’s like a riddle that poets use and normal people have to figure out. If we can figure out the metaphor, maybe we can help her.

I know what a metaphor is, he said, kicking a small rock that went sailing through his ma’s bent knees.

 

Mam had pulled down the curtains and was scrubbing all of the bedding, even mine. While the washing machine agitated, she bent over the bathroom tub filled with chemicals that stung my nostrils.

Thank you for your service, mama, I said from the doorway. I appreciate you.

She grunted and I resisted the urge to dig my nails through the bites on her legs. The grid of open sores and scabs were glossy with ointment and my nose picked up a faint whiff of camphor.

While mam was busy, I leafed through the newspaper. There was an ad for pinatas in vibrant, tropical colors, and a blindfolded child braced himself, ready to give the papier-mâché llama a candy-gushing walloping. He was smiling with so much joy that he looked radiant, he looked ethereal. Those were words mam used to describe her angels. His aura was strong. Once, mam told me my aura was dark and I cried all morning, until Daddy gave me lemonade and pushed me on the swing. I felt sure I sparkled then. Now, I fingered the stiff newsprint stuck to my thigh. What good things were inside of me, ready to be bust out?

For dinner, Mam made a mushroom stroganoff. I cleaned the dirt off the mushrooms with a brush and picked the thyme leaves, making sure to scour my hands before prep. I scrubbed under the fingernails and washed until the skin was a different color from the rest of my sticky flesh. After she ladled gravy onto the egg noodles, avoiding the neat pile of broccoli on her plate, I crab-shuffled closer to her. Mam leaned away as I gave her my best smile. Do you think I could eat in the bedroom with you tonight, I asked.

She turned the full force of her gaze on me and I crumpled a little inside. Her eyes had that glassy, wandering quality, like they were turned around and she was looking only inside her own head. Like she didn’t see me at all. I’d seen that look before, when daddy left the first time. She’d pulled out her eyelashes and there were patches missing from her eyebrows, and it scared me — that bare look of surprise. Never mind, I said, hurrying over to the snack cupboard, my stiff paper legs popping and cracking. Here, take these, I said, and I handed her a bag of gummy worms. Her favorite “guilty pleasure.” Wasn’t all pleasure guilty, I thought. Isn’t that the very nature of pleasure? Maybe the ghosts had answers to these hard questions, but as far as I knew, they wouldn’t talk to us.

Mam forgot to put my sheets in the dryer. They were in a sopping pile at the bottom of the tub so I lay spread eagled on my stained mattress for awhile, until I began to shiver. She didn’t like me to leave my room after 7pm, so I tiptoed down the hallway to the closet with the musty, moth-nibbled blankets. Through mam’s closed door, I could hear my daddy’s voice and I froze, skin prickling and a low simmer of excitement heating in my belly until I realized his words had a tinny quality. She didn’t like to hold the phone up to her ear and would only talk on speakerphone, fearing the radiation would bore holes through her consciousness and block her third eye. Mam and daddy were talking at the same time and it was hard to make sense of the jabber at first. She was crying and saying, I can’t do this anymore, come back, come back, and he was saying, you wanted this, you wanted her, what was the point, I can’t function around the two of you, I can’t do my work, she has your sickness, your mom’s sickness, your grandmother’s sickness, why did you want to pass this on. Heart racing, I burst through the door, yelling, I see them too, daddy. The ghosts, there’s one next door, she’s pushing a boulder! I see them too, like you, like your ghosts in Antarctica, I’m like you.

There was silence then. Mam’s mouth was a big O and I saw the pile of gummy worms on her plate, slithering around in the brown sauce. The silence stretched and I thought my daddy had left, but then he said, That was just a made up story, little one. Remember? Your friend came over for a sleepover and wanted to hear a ghost story.

 

I did remember. I’d never had a friend over before. Daddy set up the tent in the backyard and taught us knots, and mam made cabbage rolls. I didn’t know what to say to the girl, so I just picked at my skin until she said she was bored and went inside. Daddy ushered her back out, carrying a flashlight and a bag of marshmallows, and told us about the ghosts of Antarctica.

In winter, the sun never rises in Antarctica. Ghosts, you know, create their own light. It’s a beautiful shade of blue, like the ultramarine pigment painters made from ground lapis lazuli stones, and it’s sufficient for them to find their way around. Ghosts don’t have scotopic vision like is commonly assumed, and they can be just as scared of the dark as the living.

I worked as a botanist at one of the research centers in Antarctica, and one year, when summer was coming to an end and the other scientists had left, I decided to stay on for a few more months. Alone. The endless night began and that was the cue for the ghosts to arrive. They roamed the halls at all hours. They moved with purpose. I stopped using the lights at the center, conserving energy, so luminous were the specters. Their light reflected off the aluminum walls and it was almost too dazzling to behold.

Were you scared, I asked.

No, these ghosts felt very peaceful, just haunted by mistakes they’d made in their lives. They were going through motions that would rectify the wrongs they’d committed and seeking forgiveness from the people they’d hurt. It was like a pantomime. They were industrious. The work of the dead is just as important as the work of the living.

I’m bored, my friend said. This isn’t scary.

Daddy popped a marshmallow in his mouth and shrugged. It’s the best I’ve got. Should I continue?

Yes, I said.

No, she said, yawning. I think I want to go to sleep now.

I made my face as fierce as my heart and yelled, I’m not tired, and she gasped and shrunk into herself while my daddy picked me up and put me in a ten minute time out.

When I went back out, she was pretending to sleep, so I kicked her. Hard. I wanted to hear the rest of the story, I snarled. I wanted to hear about the ghosts.

It was a made up story, she said. Your daddy’s never been to Antarctica.

Yes, he has, I yelled. You take that back or shut your mouth.

It was the smirk that got me, her smugness really made my blood boil. Your daddy doesn’t even know how to tell a good ghost story.

Daddy left his flashlight and I picked it up then and swung with all my might into her head. It was a heavy duty metal one and I heard her skull crack as blood splattered the nylon walls. She slumped over and I poked her a few times before stuffing marshmallows, one by one, down her throat until I couldn’t hear her breathe anymore. When I saw her at school a month later, she told everyone about the flashlight, but she didn’t remember the marshmallows.

Later that night, I found mam and daddy downstairs in the basement even though she always said she hated it down there. There were two empty wine glasses on a table and the room was purple from the terrarium lights. They were wrestling on the floor, and I watched them awhile before my daddy saw me. What did you do, he asked, with a face like I’d told the scariest ghost story of all. I looked into a tank before my daddy dragged me upstairs, and there I saw tiny, dark shapes scuttling through the leaves.

 

But you never finished the story, I said to speakerphone daddy. And now there’s a ghost next door. It’s our neighbor’s ma and she’s been pantomiming a metaphor for us to solve. If you just come back, daddy, you’ll see her, too, just like me, and we can figure out how to help her and set her free.

There was a long pause and I looked at my mam. She’d curled into herself like a ball python. A gummy worm dangled between her lips and her eyes were screwed shut. Then, my daddy sounded so tired, as tired as a ghost working the night shift, pushing a boulder with a mind of its own. I’m not coming back, he said. And he hung up.

 

The bites were up to my shoulders now and I didn’t bother putting on clothes. Every inch of me, from my collarbones to my ankles, was covered with sticky newsprint, and I smelled like sweet, rotting fruit. I ate gummy worms until my teeth hurt, not fearing my mam’s reaction since she never came out of her room anymore.

The neighbor didn’t come out so much anymore either. I saw him, sometimes in the morning, standing with his hands on his hips, watching his ma push that boulder, acting the martyr. I looked the word up in the big red dictionary that my daddy gave me:

 

1: a person who voluntarily suffers death as the penalty of witnessing to and refusing to renounce a religion

2: a person who sacrifices something of great value and especially life itself for the sake of principle

3: victim

especially : a great or constant sufferer

 

Then I used the matching blue encyclopedia to look at images of martyrs. I liked the dead ones that dangled. They looked at peace. It struck me — ma’s metaphor. Sisyphus was doomed to an eternity of rolling that boulder up a hill, never reaching the top, then watching it tumble down. It wasn’t just Sisyphus, though, it was life. Ma was pantomiming life. Life was suffering. Life was agony. Having children was agony. Why would anyone want to pass it on?

I mummy-walked to the backyard and found a good, sturdy stick from the tree by the swing set. It was getting dark but the light from the blue specter illuminated both of our yards. Uuuunnnngggghhhh, she moaned. I wish you well, I said, and I thank you for your sacrifice and your metaphor.

Wrapped up as I was, it was hard to write the note, but I managed. I found a long cable in the box of odds and ends in the pantry, then I slipped the note under mam’s door. I thought I heard her stirring in there, but I couldn’t be sure. I stuffed a handful of gummy worms in my mouth then tottered outside.

It took me awhile to decide where to prop the stick, so mam would see it, then I climbed onto the swing and cast the cable over the beam, tying a figure eight knot to secure it and a slip knot at the end.

I heard a door slam, and our neighbor’s voice. Kid? Kid! But my head went through the loop and I kicked off the swing. Now, my aura was bright, ultramarine blue, and my light combined with Ma Sisyphus until we lit up the whole block with our beautiful martyr glow.

 

The night of the sleepover, I saw bugs in daddy’s tanks. Did they escape? Maybe they miss him too. Maybe biting us is their way of showing it. I filled my insides with gummy worms for you, mama. Pretend I’m a piñata and whack me ’til I break apart. I hope you feel better soon. I love you, mama.