THE WARDROBE’S BEST DRESSED: EXCERPT FROM SARAH TOURJEE’S GHOST

GHOST

The human who remains does not see me and yet there is something that makes me stay in

that house with her. I can’t call to her, I can’t inhabit. We are parallel, separate, estranged. We keep moving laterally, at times the dogs may intersect.

Settled inside the skull now, I want to know, if I am where a brain should be, does this make me a brain? Is he alive if something inside his skull thinks? If the spirit is all that remains of one, and these bones are all that remain of another, can we combine to make something that lives?

There is something that keeps me from leaving this desert, leaving the house, leaving her, and looking for someone else who might hear. (I try to lift the skull from within it but as I rise I rise through it. I look down and the skull remains in the dirt.) She empties something within the walls of the house, perhaps something I can collect, like answers to questions. What is the secret of these creatures that live? How do they stay inside? How do they move the body? Or maybe it’s simply the remnants of a calling out, of a search that is familiar, of an echo that compels me to stay.

This excerpt appeared in Sarah Tourjee’s book, Ghost, available from Anomalous Press. Purchase yours today!

Sarah Tourjee lives online at sarahtourjee.wordpress.com and on land in Providence, RI. Her short fiction and prose can be found in Quarterly West, Conjunctions, PANK, The Collagist, Wigleaf, Everyday Genius, Anomalous, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a manuscript entitled Sam Says, Sam.

This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected Nicole Oquendo. Nicole Oquendo is an Assistant Editor for Sundress Publications, and the Nonfiction Editor of Best of the Net. Her most recently published essays and poetry can be found in DIAGRAM, fillingStation, Storm Cellar, and Truck.