K. Noel Moore

 

 

After Nellie started working at the Wisteria Street Preschool, they gave her a grace period of two months before they sent Remy home with her. That was a long time, Greer told her. Most new hires didn’t get that long. If she wasn’t used to the idea of Remy by then, it might be best for her to find a different place of work.

She wasn’t used to the idea. In fact, it creeped her out more than it had at the start. But there was nowhere else willing to hire her, so she played along. She agreed to be the little ghost’s mother, just for one night.

The Twos class at Wisteria Street had eleven children in it, but no teacher other than Nellie would acknowledge that fact. Twelve seats were put out for snacks, twelve cots for naps. Twelve heads were counted at recess. Twelve names were called out as parents arrived — ”Look who’s come to see you!” Sarah, Alexei, Natalie, Emi, Grace, Tanner, Oliver, Roman, Tavien, Luke, Jonathan. Remy. On her lunch break her second day there, Nellie Googled mass hysteria on her phone. She Googled communal grieving rituals and death rituals worldwide to see if there was any place where this practice of pretending the dead were yet alive was normal. (There was; there were several, in fact. In certain parts of Indonesia, for example, families might keep treating their dead as living for twenty years. Giving food or clothes to ancestor spirits was the norm in the Eastern world; in the Western world, one only saw it a few times a year, on Day of the Dead or Samhain, but one might see it.) She decided her coworkers were crazy, but she was willing to play along. She had nowhere else to go.

It took about three weeks before she started to go crazy along with them.

Nellie had never believed in ghosts, but this twelfth child wasn’t a ghost, exactly. He couldn’t be. Even an apparition had presence, it took up space; little Remy was an absence. He was a hollowed-out space in the air where a child should have been. If you looked closely, maybe you could detect light bending, a shimmer like movement. Otherwise, he was only felt, as a nagging sensation that something was missing from the room.

The day she was to take him home, Nellie Googled tulpa effect. She Googled explaining hauntings and found plenty of examples.

She felt him as she bleached every surface twice and rearranged shelves of toys. Emi was the last to go that Thursday. Emi’s mother was German, and she spoke with a thick accent that sometimes made her incomprehensible, but Nellie liked her best out of all the parents. She was calm; she was kind. She didn’t ask too many questions or set too many rules for her daughter’s caretakers.

“How are you, Nellie?” she asked. “You look tired.”

“Ich bin ein bisschen müde, Frau Kellerman,” she replied. Nellie had taken German in high school. She didn’t remember much, but the Kellerman parents appreciated her efforts at small talk anyway. They appreciated that Nellie was teaching Emi’s little friends to count in German. Eins, zwei, drei, fier, fünf….

Elf Kinder. Zwölf Kinder. Eleven children and Remy.

“More than a little bit, I think. Have the children been giving you much trouble?”

“The usual. You know what that feels like, I’m sure.”

Frau Kellerman laughed. “Yes, I do. Believe me, I do.”

Nellie wanted to ask her about Remy. Had she ever taken him home? Did she know when the custom had started? Did she believe in ghosts, or did she think it was insanity, or did she accept it as a legitimate communal ritual? But these were personal questions, and far beyond what Nellie had the vocabulary in any language to ask.

She waved goodbye to Frau Kellerman and Emi, then crossed over to the corner where she felt Remy’s presence. Thought she felt it. She took a deep breath and reminded herself to go with it. What you think you feel, you feel. What you think you see, you see. You can hypothesize about tulpas in the morning. Tonight, if you want to keep your job and your sanity, everything is real.

“Ready to go, sweetie?” she chirruped. “You’re going to stay with Miss Nellie tonight. I think we’ll have fun together, won’t we?” Nellie extended her hand.

She gathered his bag and his car seat (who had they originally belonged to?), and walked out with a closed empty fist hanging at her side. The seat barely fit in her tiny Spark.

“You’ll be okay, Remy,” she cooed as she wrestled it into the backseat. “It’s only a short drive. You’ll be just fine.”

She drew the seatbelt tight, and she drove him home.

Nellie had no trouble cooking dinner for a child; her diet was already the rough equivalent of a ten-year-old’s. She cooked up buttered noodles and carrots — Remy’s she steamed and mashed, but hers she ate raw. She wondered what to do with his food. Eat it? Or leave it untouched, like an offering to the gods? (Come to think of it, what exactly did people do with offerings to the gods?)

In the end she left it. She didn’t even clean it up; she decided to do it in the morning, when Remy was gone. In case he wants it later. When he was gone — when someone else had him — she’d throw the food away.

There was nowhere in her tiny home for him to sleep. She made up a cot for him out of blankets, and decided she’d sleep on the floor next to him. Nellie couldn’t bear the thought of laying a child down in such an uncomfortable bed, while she slept on a mattress herself. At least on the floor he couldn’t roll around and hurt himself — could he? Maybe he could. Remy had once died from SIDS. (No, he hadn’t. That was a fact unspoken, and a fact unspoken was no fact at all.)

Nellie knew she wouldn’t be sleeping much that night.

For a preschool teacher, Nellie’s knowledge of lullabies was sorry. The simple nursery songs didn’t stick in her head the way other teachers complained they did. They washed right over her. When the time came to rock the baby to sleep, then — after playing blocks with him after dinner — she turned to the classics her father had sung to her. “Bye Bye Blackbird.” “Sweet Georgia Brown.” “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.” Hummed half-remembered versions of Sinatra and Dean Martin. Nellie’s father had never known many nursery songs, either. (The man could sing, though. He sang like he should have been on Broadway.)

Nellie sat with him, rocking him in her arms and swaying. They fell asleep like that, with Nellie lying on her back, Remy on her chest. Her fears were assuaged, in the end: when she woke, the weight that wasn’t quite a child remained, unreal and alive as anything, on her chest.

 

 

 

 

K. NOEL MOORE is an Atlanta-based genre writer and poet. They have two historical fantasy novellas, ‘Undertown’ (July 2018) and ‘Incendiary Devices,’ (December 2019) up to buy on Kindle, and work available to read 100% free all around the journal-sphere. You can find them on twitter @mysterioustales; feel free to ask about their weird and wild experiences with ghosts, children, or any combination thereof.