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Which is why the second time I cut myself, it was intentional—and the third, and the fourth, each time a little deeper: A nail from my pinkie, shed to win a wan maternal smile; the top joint of my index finger, to extort one more sympathetic word. Each a sacrifice spent on the altar of Mom’s absent attention. Each gaining me just a hint of response, before she slips right back into the fog.

Lost and groping, over and over. And over.

But hey, I can wait. I still have both my eyes left to give, after all. My breath. My name.

“Ethan—”

“I’m Monica, Mom.”

“Yes, Ethan. I know.”

Well, she does talk to me, now; that’s got to count for something.

Or so I struggle, mountingly, to reassure myself.

* * *

Because: In a city full of real dead children, it’s me, my friends, the whole pathetic Ghoster subculture who’ve ceased to register—born on, around or after Parade Day, shoved aside under the shadow of a generation lost. Doomed, always, to make room for our parents’ grief, to step aside for one more gulp of a far more precious sibling’s enduring but elusive scent. To catch the waft of their hair—a passing, spectral caress—as they slip by.

We’re memory’s exiles, mere brief flesh. How can we possibly hope to compete?

Days like these, between dressing up and posing all weekend and working like a neutered dog all week (nose to the keyboard, bent almost double to peer blankly at the readout of my cubicle computer’s screen), I swear I start to feel as though I already am what I only try so hard to seem: An unlaid ghost, eternally left behind—

—and not even my ghost, either.

It’s on days like these that I feel the urge to cut myself rise up, and bite it back down so hard blood salts my mouth. Remember how good it once felt to be loved—me, for me alone—and then wonder, in turn, if what I think I remember is anything more than plain old wishful thinking.

At which point I cast my mind back even further, to my precocious high school days, reminding myself how—in Old English—the word “ghost” is the same as the word for “anger.”

I plan out my own final gesture, on days like these—something far too grand to ignore, far too big to overlook. Dream absently of how I’m going to make my mother watch as I act it through, and practice the speech I’ll make for the occasion—the one that goes, and I quote:

“Look, Mom, look. So—how you like me now? Better . . . ”

. . . or . . . worse?

Because—when I pretend that I’m dead, like the rest of my Ghoster friends, that’s when she likes me best; when I cut myself, scar myself, slash over my half-healed scars and let them form again, keloiding the wounds ‘til they puff like pastry. When I pepper my skin with fresh flesh flowers on her uninterested behalf, blood-blister-bruised and purple with relevance—always just one more, freely given, payment in pain for pain. One more for each of my mother’s ceaseless, careless tears . . . the current of her mourning, washing me away piece by piece by piece: Tide to my rock, wave to my sand . . .

Yeah, she likes me “dead,” because it makes me more like Ethan. And the more I’m like Ethan, well—the more I’m like him, the more I count. Just a little.

And one day, maybe—one of these Infested Toronto days, when there’s nothing left of me to cut away—I’ll find the strength, at long, long last . . .

—to finally stop pretending.

No Darkness But Ours

We will pull down the mountains

And devour the stars

And there will be no darkness but ours.

RHODAJEAN SOKOLUK WALKS with steady steps up the dark highway, toward a blurred mass of thoughts the signs on her path name Toronto. It’s 3:35 on a Thursday morning, late November—though since Arjay’s watch broke eighty miles back, she wouldn’t know. Mickey Mouse’s tiny hands hang loose beneath cracked glass, describing spastic arcs with the jolt of each new stride.

The night presses down on her with palpable weight, unbroken by headlights, unscarred by neon. A fine mist rises to cover her tracks.

Somewhere above, a 747 screams.

Look at her now. Thirteen years old, five feet seven inches. She wears a baggy grey sweatshirt over a brown-and-yellow plaid kilt whose hem barely brushes her knees. Across her flat chest, in pale mauve letters, the legend SACRED HEART OF JESUS BLEEDS FOR YOU may be dimly made out. Her arms swing limp at her sides; slender fingers, meant for a piano’s keys or a guitar’s strings, now tipped by splintered nails and caked with mud. She walks quickly, her eyes never leaving the unseen horizon. It’s cold, but Arjay doesn’t mind.