The Ghost Carousel

When I was six, I started speaking Bulgarian all of a sudden. My parents didn’t realize it was Bulgarian. They thought it was just more nonsense. The way I was, you couldn’t just go believing the things I said. You had to investigate a little. “Sapphire, baby, what do mean Mr. Ozolin buries babies in his root cellar?” That sort of thing. They said I had one of those “imaginations” and Lord knew where I got it from -- certainly no one else in my family suffered any such affliction!

But it wasn’t my imagination. Really it wasn’t. I just repeated what I heard. When my mother asked who told me that about Mr. Ozolin’s root cellar, I confessed it was Buffoon.

“Oh, Buffoon. Is that right?” said she.

Buffoon was Mr. Ozolin’s black cat. He used to tell me a lot of things about Mr. Ozolin. Now that I’m older, I can pretty much guess that none of them were true. That cat just had it out for his owner. I think it was only partly hate, and the rest was plain boredom, like a housewife with no soap operas to watch who has to just gossip and make mischief to mark one day out from the rest. His favorite was to dream up the imaginary crimes of Leopold Ozolin, and he told them to me, since I was the only one who’d listen. That cat. He had the imagination! Once he told me that Mr. Ozolin snuck into people’s houses and stole nail clippings out of their bathroom trash cans and brewed them in his tea. I told you: imagination!

Buffoon vanished when I was eight, but he came back a few years later as a crow and told me he’d figured out the secret for changing species and how I should try it. I did try it, of course, but I got it wrong. Only my fingertips changed and became bird claws, and I had to stay home from school until it wore off, which took two whole days!

Anyway, it wasn’t Buffoon who taught me Bulgarian. That was Mr. Tervel, who’d lived in our house before us. He’d died in our house, not any bad way but just of plain oldness, with sons and daughters around petting him and telling him funny things and giving him little sips of wine out of their cups. He was the first ghost I ever knew and one of the nicest. He taught me how to lay curses on my enemies, even though I didn’t have any (“Yet,” he always said, wagging his finger), and he told me the secret for getting chickens to obey you, even though I didn’t have any of those either. I didn’t say he was useful, just nice.

As for my speaking Bulgarian, my parents found out it wasn’t nonsense when Mr. Tervel’s youngest son came by to pick cherries off the trees his father had planted fifty years ago. He came every year and always brought us something nice, like a cake from his wife to say thank you for the cherries. Well, the year I was six, he heard me say, in perfect Bulgarian, “It’s not so important that I am well, but that my neighbor is worse off than me,” and he dropped his basket of cherries and turned white.

“My father used to say that,” he whispered.

“Well, he still does,” I told him, hiding behind a cherry tree and peeking out. His father happened to be sitting up in the tree, swinging his legs.

“What do you mean?” Mr. Tervel’s son asked.

“Shut your eyes because I’m going to lie to you,” I said, which was another of Mr. Tervel’s favorite sayings.

After that the whole family started coming by and giving me messages for their father. “Why don’t you just tell him yourself?” I’d say. “He’s right there.” And I’d point at an empty chair and just laugh inside, because he wasn’t there at all. He’d be behind them, hugging them and laughing, but they never knew. The last thing he taught me to say was, “I love you, my pigeon,” and then he went away and I never saw him again.

Ghosts drift. They’re caught in some cosmic tide that the living can’t feel. It makes it hard to be friends with them -- when they’re gone they’re just gone. It’s not like with live friends. A ghost’ll never send you a postcard.

A little while after Mr. Tervel went away I met Nick Dark. He wasn’t nice. He hadn’t died so well as Mr. Tervel, you knew that right away. He was lonely, but you know how some people are lonely because they deserve it? He was one of those. Mean eyes, and he said little sharp things, so that after you’d talked to him you always stung like paper cuts. He told me I’d never grow up pretty because I was too skinny, and that I should just learn how to cook and hope to get somebody to marry me that way. He told me another trick for making somebody marry me, but it wasn’t nice and I won’t repeat it.

Nick Dark was a really good whistler; I tried to get him to teach me but he never would. He was too stingy to teach anyone anything, like it was giving away something he couldn’t get back. I don’t think it’s like that with teaching. It’s not like there’s a finite amount of whistles to be had in the world and I’d’ve been taking away his. But that was how he acted. I wasn’t sorry to see the last of him.

I always try to learn stuff from ghosts while I can. I bet I can spit cherry pits farther than anyone in America, and I can count to ten in sixteen languages, and I can float just a little ways off the ground for as long as I can hold my breath. A magician ghost taught me that. A little girl ghost named Agnes taught me skip-rope rhymes, and old Mrs. Zamoyski taught me to read palms. She said I was going to live to be a hundred and fifty, she’d never seen such a long life line, and she swore that before I was through I’d learn to fly. It was all on my palm! I liked Mrs. Zamoyski a lot. She also taught me how to make rugelach.

Lately I’ve been learning how to throw a knife and peel an apple in one twist. Brimstone’s teaching me; he’s the latest ghost to come through. He’s kind of my boyfriend, because he’s also teaching me how to kiss. Maybe Nick Dark told me I was too skinny to ever be pretty, but Brimstone says he likes skinny girls because they can climb fences like cats and that usually, for some reason he can’t figure out, they make the best knife-throwers. He says the only problem with being skinny is there isn’t much room for tattoos. Skinny girls can only have skinny tattoos. But I’m not allowed to get any, anyway. My mom would just fall over. Brimstone pretends to tattoo me, sometimes, tracing patterns on my arms and legs. I can’t feel it, but he says he can feel me, almost. He wanted to do my back too but I wouldn’t lift up my shirt so he got mad and huffed off.

He came back the next day though. I was asleep on the porch and I woke up to him kissing me on the shoulder. I couldn’t feel that either. I guess it’s not real kissing, but Brimstone’s so handsome I like to pretend he’s still alive. I imagine going to the Homecoming dance on his motorcycle, with a tattoo showing out the top of my dress, and then dancing real close. I bet while he was alive he smelled like leather and maybe a little bit like a dusty road but with that spicy boy smell underneath. He died on a motorcycle, so I guess I shouldn’t go wishing to ride with him on one. It’s kind of morbid.

This boy named Jackson from school asked me to the dance because he doesn’t know I have a ghost boyfriend. I was mad at Brimstone that day so I said yes. But then we made up, so I told Jackson I couldn’t go after all. He asked why, and you know what I said? I said, “Shut your eyes because I’m going to lie to you,” but I said it in Bulgarian so he didn't understand. On the night of the dance, I’ll play the radio under the cherry trees and dance with Brimstone. I’ll wear a strapless dress and let him pretend to tattoo my shoulders, and I’ll even let him kiss my neck. I won’t be able to feel any of it, and if anybody sees me they’ll think I’m by myself, and they’ll say, “Look at Sapphire, off in her own world, as usual.”

But it’s not my own. I’ve got lots of company -- a drifting tide of ghosts that the world brings past, like they’re on some giant carousel that circles the whole globe real, real slow. Don’t you like to think that after you die you get to see the world and know new people? I do. And when it’s me on that ghost carousel (in a hundred and thirty-five years, if Mrs. Zamoyski was right), I won’t be stingy. I’ll teach people whatever I know. And if I do learn how to fly before I die, I’ll teach folks that too.

[This is a Sunday Scribbling -- fiction, in case you're uncertain! For more writing about ghosts, go HERE.]