Ethiag the Ghost-Girl

This is a Sunday Scribbling. The prompt is "I carry. . ."

Ethiag the ghost-girl always carried a pair of chopsticks in the band of her hat. You never knew when you might want to lean across a table and steal an almond off somebody’s plate, or a diamond out of their earlobe. Once she had leaned in a train window just before it left the station, and she had reached out with her chopsticks and plucked the head off a little girl’s dolly.

She kept it on a spike and braided its hair sometimes when she was bored.

She carried a pair of scissors too. Scissors were for mustaches. Gentlemen were always waking up in hotels on Grand Street to find their mustache lying on the pillow beside them. Ethiag climbed inside their mirrors to watch and see what they would do. One gentleman had glued his back on with molasses, and then all morning he kept darting his tongue up to lick it.

Sometimes, when mustaches were abundant, she swapped them from face to face. That was funny.

She carried ashes from the fireplace to fill up coat pockets.

A candle and matches so she could drip wax in old lady’s mouths if they fell asleep before bedtime.

Finger bones to drop into tea cups. Splash. Sometimes beetles, but only if they were ugly. The pretty ones she kept. She put them in Anthony’s matchbox cars and pretended they could drive. Once, though, she put a nice green beetle in Ludwig’s mouth just as he kissed the French girl, so he thought it came from her. He spit it into her lap.

That was funny.

In the summer she broke thorns off roses and carried them around in a coin purse. Those were for shoes.

She was always putting things into the pots on the stove when cook turned her back, but it wasn’t much fun because no one ever noticed. Except, maybe, for the perfect fish skeleton right in the center of the cherry gelatin mould. That was funny. She’d put dice in its eye sockets. Lucky sixes.

A lot of things were funny.

And a lot weren’t. Anthony was always moving his matchbox cars around and even losing them in the pond, and Ludwig kept kissing girls. He took their hairpins out, and they let him. The chimney was not a nice place to sleep and there was almost always somebody in Ethiag's old bed, and no one even noticed when her cat Brontosaurus died.

Still, she carried on. She went down to breakfast every morning, even though she couldn’t taste anymore. Taste had faded away so slowly she had barely noticed. She was sorry about it. If she’d noticed, she would have appreciated it more. She would have licked molasses off that gentlemen’s mustache. She wondered if other things would fade too until there was nothing left of her.

Probably. She’d better have fun while she still could.

She put a beetle in a matchbox car with a diamond earring beside it on the seat, and she pretended it had just robbed a bank. It crashed making its getaway.

That was funny.

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That was fun! That was bliss! Really. Writing something so random, no expectations? That's what I loved about Scribblings when we started it. I haven't scribbled in a while because I am very busy being serious about Silksinger, and the reason I did scribble this week is actually because I really really wanted to try out Mr. Linky! How exciting is Mr. Linky? For me, it is very exciting!

On a random note, the name "Ethiag" was the word-verification word once when I was leaving a comment for the Disco Mermaids. I liked it and wrote it down, and here it is, reborn as a ghost girl with a creepy sense of humor. Funny.