In New Keegan, not one of the tombstones had writing you could still read.

 

 “Shaving cream,” my Dad told me. “Shaving cream or chalk. Goddamn fucking graveyard freaks.”

 

 He told how people who loved to study tombstones, to read a faint inscription worn away by time and acid rain, they’d wipe shaving cream across the face of the tombstone. They’d shave off the extra with a piece of cardboard, leaving just the white in the engraving. This made the words and dates easy to read and photograph. What sucked is, shaving cream contains stearic acid. The residue these people left would eat the stone. Other tombstone junkies, they’d rub chalk on a tombstone, coloring the whole surface so the faint, engraved epitaph would stand out as darker. This chalk dust was plaster of Paris or gypsum, and rubbing it worked the dust into the invisible cracks and fissures of the tombstone. The next time it rained . . . the gypsum dust would soak up water and swell to twice its original size. The same way ancient Egyptians used wood wedges to split stone blocks for the pyramids, the swollen chalk dust would slowly explode the whole front off a tombstone.

 

 All that stuff about stearic acid and gypsum and the Egyptian pyramids, it proves my dad wasn’t an idiot.

 

 He’d tell me, all these well-meaning cemetery folks, all they did was destroy what they claimed to love.

 

 Still, it was nice, that last, best day with my dad on that hillside that used to be New Keegan, Montana. The hot sunshine baking the dead grass. The kind of brown lizards that would leave their squirming tail behind if you caught one.

 

If we could’ve read the headstones, we’d see how almost the entire town had died in one month. The first cluster of what doctors would call the Keegan virus. Rapid-onset viral brain tumors.

 

 My dad sold that load of angels and lambs to a garden store in Denver. Driving home, he was already chewing aspirin and swerving the pickup truck all over the road. Him and my mom were both dead in the hospital before my grandma arrived.

 

 After that, life calmed down for ten years. Until Miss Frasure and her brain tumor the size of a lemon. Until my viral load built up to make me infectious.

 

 These days, the government can’t kill me and they can’t cure me. All they can do is damage control.

 

 That new boy, with the dick, he’s going to feel how I did when I first arrived: His family dead. Maybe half his school dead, if he was popular. Sitting alone in his room every day, he’ll be scared, but full of hope for the cure the navy promised.

 

I can show him the ropes. Calm him down. Help him adjust to life here at The Orphanage.

 

 That last good day of my life, my dad drove his pickup all the way from Montana to Denver, Colorado, where he knew a store that sold antique garden shit. Cast-iron deer and concrete birdbaths crusted with moss. Most of this stuff was stolen. This store guy gave him cash, and helped unload the angels off the truck. The store guy had a kid, a little boy who came out the back door of the store and stood in the alley to watch the work.

 

 Talking to Shirlee over the intercom, I would press the button and ask if this new resident . . . did he have curly red hair and brown eyes?

 

 Was he about my age? I’d ask if he was from Denver, and did his dead folks use to run a garden-antique store?

 

 

 

 

23.

 

 The ghost light is our only campfire left. Our last chance. The glaring-bare bulb on a tall stand, center stage. The safety valve made to keep old gaslight theaters from exploding, or the light always left on inside a new theater to keep any ghost from calling the place home.

 

 We’re sitting around the light, the circle of people still here, sitting on the stage, from where you can see only the gold-paint outline of each auditorium chair, the brass rail snaking along the front edge of each balcony, the cobweb clouds that hover across the dead electric-night sky.

 

 In the dark rooms behind rooms, the Matchmaker and the Missing Link are dead in the Italian Renaissance lounge. In the subbasement below the basement, Mr. Whittier and Comrade Snarky and Lady Baglady and the Duke of Vandals are rotting-dead. In their dressing rooms, backstage, are Miss America and Mrs. Clark. All of their cells digesting each other into runny yellow protein. The bacteria in their guts and lungs going wild with bloat.

 

 This leaving just eleven of us, sitting in our circle of light.

 

 Our world of only humans, a world without humanity.

 

 Agent Tattletale has been tiptoeing around, breaking lightbulbs. So have the Countess Foresight and Director Denial.

 

 Each of us, we were sure, the only one at work. Each of us wanting to make our world just a little more dark. None of us aware we all had this same plan. Victims of our low threshold for boredom. Victims of ourselves. Maybe it’s our being so hungry, some form of delusion, but here’s all we have left.

 

 This one lightbulb. The ghost light.

 

 Here is light without heat, so we’re bundled in pea coats and furs and bathrobes, our heads sagging under piled-up wigs and door-wide hats. All of us, ready.

 

 When that alley door opens, we’ll be famous. When we hear the lock turn, then the sliding rollers squeal, then the click-click and click-click of someone trying the light switch, then we’ll have our story ready to sell. Our death-camp cheekbones ready for our best-profile close-up.

 

 We’ll say how Mr. Whittier and Mrs. Clark fooled us into coming here. They trapped us and held us hostage. They bullied us to write books, poems, screenplays. And when we wouldn’t, they tortured us. They starved us.

 

 Sitting cross-legged in our circle on the wood boards of the stage, we can’t move in the layers of velvet and quilted tweed keeping us warm. It takes all our energy to repeat our story to each other: How Mrs. Clark ripped the unborn baby from Miss America and stewed it in front of its dying mother. How Mr. Whittier wrestled the Matchmaker to the floor and hacked off his penis. Then how Whittier stabbed Mrs. Clark and choked down so much of her thigh he split open. Us, we’re practicing the wordperitonitis.Under our breath, we practiceinguinal hernia.We saycheveu-cut potatoes.

 

 That’s how both villains died, leaving us behind to starve.

 

 It’s been a lot of marks on the wall with Saint Gut-Free’s pencil. Those hash marks, his only masterpiece. The landlord or rental agent or someone should be coming to check. Maybe a man from the power company coming to shut off the service for unpaid bills.

 

 In the quiet, any flip of a switch will sound gunshot-loud.

 

 A click makes us turn. The clatter of metal on metal turns our heads to look in the same direction. Toward the wings and, beyond that, the alley door.

 

 There’s a squeal, and the dark explodes.

 

 In light this bright, after so long in the dark, everything we can see is only black and white. Only glaring shape-outlines we have to blink against.

 

 The light is bolder, eye-shutting stronger than any lightbulb.

 

 It’s not the alley door. The stage explodes into daylight-bright, a solid fat beam of sunrise from somewhere overhead. The light so bright we squint and cup hands into shields to block it. This new day so sunny it throws our shadows out long behind us. Our shadows hunched and cowering against the brown water stains on the movie screen behind us.

 

 Outlined on the movie screen, you can see our tilted wigs. Our bodies look so spidery thin, Comrade Snarky would tell us we could wearanything.

 

 It’s the movie projector with no film, the projector’s bulb shining on us, a huge spotlight. Bright as a lighthouse. This sun shines from almost midnight on the rear wall of the theater.

 

 None of us can stand yet. All we can do is duck our heads and look away.

 

 The projector is so bright the ghost light looks burned out. Dim as a birthday candle on a summer day.

 

 “Our ghost, again,” says the Baroness Frostbite.

 

 Saint Gut-Free’s two-headed baby.

 

 The Countess Foresight’s antiques dealer.

 

 Agent Tattletale’s gassed and hammered private detective.

 

 Miss Sneezy yawns, saying, “Another good scene for our story.”

 

 Like the popcorn. And the furnace being fixed. Our clothes getting washed and folded. Everything paranormal, every miracle is just another special effect.

 

 Saint Gut-Free turns to Mother Nature and says, “Now that we’re a romantic subplot . . . how about you give me that foot job?”

 

 Agent Tattletale says, “After we’re outside, I’m staying high for a month . . .”

 

 The Reverend Godless says, “I’m burning every church I find . . .”

 

 Each of us, just a lump of fabric, fur, and hair.

 

 Director Denial says, “I’m buying Cora Reynolds a headstone . . .”

 

 Back from the walls beyond the bright light, the place it hurts to look, from that far away, echo back the words “. . . headstone . . . headstone . . .”

 

 All of us, still trying to get the last word. Rewinding his tape recorder, the Earl of Slander plays the words “headstone . . . headstone . . .” And the recorded echo, it echoes. An echo of an echo of an echo.

 

 Echoing, until a voice from far away, from behind the sun, says, “You’re playing to an empty house.”

 

 It’s a voice from beyond the grave. It’s the same as our story about Comrade Snarky coming back from the dead, staggering down the lobby stairs to beg for a bite of her own rose tattoo. Against the bright light, nobody sees our ghost come down the center aisle of the auditorium. Nobody hears him walking down toward the stage on the black carpet. Nobody can tell what’s coming closer in the bright glare until the voice says, again, “You’re playing to an empty house . . .”

 

 It’s old trembling, teenaged Mr. Whittier. Our dying skater punk. Our spotted little devil.

 

 Walking. A cadaver in tennis shoes. A stereo headset looped around the back of his withered neck.

 

 “Listen to yourselves,” he says. Shaking his head, his few hairs swinging, he says, “You’re so busy telling your stories to each other. You’re always turning the past into a story to make yourselves right.”

 

 What Sister Vigilante would call ourculture of blame.

 

 It never changes, he says. The other group he brought here, it ended this same way. People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.

 

 Some stories, you tell them and you use them up. Other stories . . . and Whittier gestures at our skin and bones.

 

 “Telling a story is how we digest what happens to us,” Mr. Whittier says. “It’s how we digest our lives. Our experience.”

 

 Mr. Whittier would say. This little boy dying of old age.

 

 For a ghost he looks good. His spotted scalp, combed. His necktie knotted under his chin. His fingernails clean, shaky white half-moons. So very much the grown-up.

 

 “You digest and absorb your life by turning it into stories,” he says, “the same way this theater seems to digest people.” With one hand, he points to a carpet stain, this dark stain sticky and growing mold, branched with arms and legs.

 

 Other events—the ones you can’t digest—they poison you. Those worst parts of your life, those moments you can’t talk about, they rot you from the inside out. Until you’re Cassandra’s wet shadow on the ground. Sunk in your own yellow protein mud.

 

 But the stories that you can digest, that you can tell—you can take control of those past moments. You can shape them, craft them. Master them. And use them to your own good.

 

 Those are stories as important as food.

 

 Those are stories you can use to make people laugh or cry or sick. Or scared. To make people feel the way you felt. To help exhaust that past moment for them and for you. Until that moment is dead. Consumed. Digested. Absorbed.