Hunger (2 page)

We went to Mary’s grave—at least I did—once a
week or more. Took flowers, little things. Near Christmas, I took a
wreath, because she liked to play with them. I’ve heard all about
how people think graveyards are a waste of space and greenery, and
maybe they’re right. But I know that having that site, where little
Mary rested in the earth, was a boon. I’d come to it weekly like a
pilgrim to a shrine, making these little offerings. Talking to her
like a crazy person. You don’t know what it’s like, to lose a
child. I hope you never know it.

That Christmas, when I was thirty-six, my
regular little visitor came, as usual, at midnight. I wasn’t in bed
then; Melissa and I were wrapping our presents, late as always,
both of us crying and trying not to look at the fireplace, where
Mary’s little stocking wasn’t. Family things like this, they’re
hard. But sometimes you have to cry or go mad. Melissa’s pretty
good; she’d rather see me cry than go mad. Most of the time,
anyway.

She knew when I heard it, of course. I went
stiff and lifted my head, swiveled to look out the window. Melissa
couldn’t ever see the little ghost, but after she decided I wasn’t
completely crazy, and that she wasn’t going to leave me if the
worst thing about me was that I saw ghosts on Christmas, she did
her best to be understanding.

The little nameless girl stared right through
me, with her wide, hungry eyes. Her lips moved over the same words
that she spoke every year. Not for the first time, I wondered when
she’d died, and whether it was from starvation. Not for the first
time, I wondered where.

But for the first time ever, I wondered if
any parent had ever gone to mourn her passing or her death, the way
I had with my little Mary. And for the first time, the little ghost
girl stopped her endless litany and smiled at me. Smiled,
translucent and desperate, standing inches above the untouched
snow.

I knew what I had to do, then. Wondered why I
was so stupid I couldn’t have thought of it before.

* * *

Melissa and I had the worst fight of our
marriage on Christmas day.

“Can’t you just leave it until next year?”
She’d shouted, her eyes red, but her tears held in check. “This is
the first Christmas we’ve had to spend without—without Mary. It’s
the most important time for you to be with the rest of your
family.”

“‘Lissa,” I said, because I knew she was
right, but I knew I was right too. “I’ve got to do this. That
little ghost—”

She snorted, which was about as close to open
criticism as she’d come.

“That little girl died somewhere, and I don’t
think her parents ever found her. She’s lost, she’s hungry, and she
might even be trying to reach them, if they’re still alive. Think
about how you’d feel. How I’d feel. I have to go.”

“Next year,” she said, but her voice was
softer. “Just wait until next year. Please.”

* * *

It took me two days to find a flight down
south, which meant drawing money out of the savings account. Two
days notice isn’t usually enough to get any kind of decent charter.
I thought we’d have another blow over that one, but Melissa was
silent in a mutinous way.

I thought she’d refuse to take me to the
airport, but in the end, she and the kids piled into a car, and I
had to explain to my three living children why I was leaving them
to go chasing after a ghost they couldn’t see. Only Alexander
remembers it now; the others were just a little too young or a
little too distracted.

When I got onto the plane, I heard the
tapping on glass that always came for each of the twelve days of
Christmas. The window was a tiny oval plastic pane, and the clouds
were streaking past at hundreds of miles per hour, but the little
hungry girl was there, with her wide eyes and her voiceless plea.
This time I nodded and watched her face against the background of
columned clouds and sunlight.

* * *

Well, to make a long story a little bit
shorter, I followed her. From the moment we landed, she appeared,
floating on air in the arrivals lounge. Thin, scrawny and openly
ravenous, she followed me with her eyes, and I followed her with my
legs. I didn’t bring much in the way of luggage because I thought
it’d be best to travel light, so I zipped right out of the airport
on her trail.

She walked beside my car, tapping against the
smoked glass, begging for food. It was hard to say who was leading
who, because I knew where I was going, or at least I thought I did.
In retrospect, it was lucky I had her with me, because everything
had changed in the years between my five year old and thirty-six
year old selves. The great old manor house that haunted my inner
eye was still there—but it wasn’t a house anymore, it was a small
hotel, and at that one that had seen better days. There was a paved
road leading up to its doors, which showed that the place had had
money once, and I took the bend slowly, keeping an eye on my little
companion.

After I got out of the car, explained what I
wanted to four different people in two different languages, and
checked into a small room, I found the little girl waiting for me
by the window in the dining room. There were two other elderly
couples in the dining room, so it was quiet, almost austere.

That’s where I first saw you,
I
thought. And I stood up, pushed my chair back, and walked out
through the front doors. It didn’t surprise me when I found her on
the porch, ringing her hands dramatically and begging for food. She
didn’t need to be dramatic; her arms were almost skeletal, her
eyes, sunken disks in the paleness of ghostly skin.

“All right,” I said quietly. “Where?”

She started walking, and I started to follow
her. All the while she was chattering away. Food, please. Please,
I’m so hungry. Please, feed me.

“I’m not doing this for you,” I said. “You’re
already dead.” But I didn’t realize, until the words left my mouth,
how true both statements were. She stopped her chattering then;
left it behind as if she didn’t need it anymore.

* * *

I must’ve looked funny, coming away from my
car with a shovel and a pick-axe. If I did, no one commented, and I
made a note to leave a generous tip if I wasn’t interrupted or
interrogated. You see, the site that she came to stand on wasn’t
all that far away from the grounds of the house.

“Did you die here, that night?” I asked her,
in between shovelling dirt.

She said,
Feed me please, I’m so hungry,
feed me
. So I didn’t ask her anymore questions. I just kept
upending shovels full of dirt until my back ached with the effort.
You’d probably laugh if you knew how shallow the unofficial grave
was, but I didn’t get as much exercise as I should back then. But I
found her, and this was the only Christmas miracle I can think of:
The body. It was dead, all right, and it was obviously the same
little girl that had plagued my nights for twelve days each year,
but it hadn’t decayed at all. No smell, no worms, no rot. I thanked
God—and I didn’t care whose. I hadn’t thought much beyond finding
the body.

Should’ve, though, because as it turns out,
it was a
long
walk from the hotel to the place that the
little ghost began to lead me to. This was the fourth day, and the
day was definitely gone. There’s really not that much in the way of
light along the dirt roads, and the lamp I held didn’t help—the
body didn’t weigh much, but it was really awkward to carry
one-handed. I managed.

Funny what runs through a mind in the dark
with a small girl’s corpse hugged against your chest. Mostly, I was
worried that the police would appear over the horizon, see me with
this young girl, and have me shot on sight. I thought I was crazy;
I thought I was stupid. But I wouldn’t have let go of her; this was
as close a chance to peace as I was ever going to get. I kept
following her and she kept leading.

And then we found it. An old farm, of sorts.
Not a good farm, and not one that was meant to make a lot of money
either, although I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no judge of
farms. There was this little light flickering in the window of the
small farmhouse, and as I approached it, I realized that it was
candle-light. Someone was awake.

You’ve never frozen solid in the middle of a
dark night with a little girl’s ghost nagging you and a little
girl’s corpse in your arms. I didn’t know what to do. I mean, now
that I’d found her and brought her home, I wanted to drop her body
and run. But she kept on at me, asking for food with her pale thin
lips and her wide eyes, and I knew by now that it meant she wasn’t
quite finished with me. So I did the stupid thing.

I walked up to the closed door of the little
house, and I knocked as loudly as I could. After five long minutes,
someone answered. She was short, little; she seemed ancient. I
thought she was going to drop the candle she was holding when she
saw what I was carrying; she went that funny white-green color that
people go when they’re in shock.

I’m sorry,
I said, in my broken
Spanish.
I wanted to
—

But I didn’t get a chance to mangle the
sentence; the little pale ghost suddenly threw herself over the
threshold of the house, chattering away—chattering in a child’s
high, fluting burble. Saying something other than
please feed
me
or
I’m so hungry
. She pressed herself tightly
against the apron of the old woman.

No one in the world had ever seen the little
ghost but me; she’d ruined every Christmas I’d ever had. Except
this one. This one was to be the exception. The old lady looked
down at the apparition, and then she did drop the candle. I caught
it before it hit floor, but she didn’t seem to notice; her arms
were tightly pressed into her granddaughter’s shoulders.

No, not granddaughter’s.

She began to speak in rapid Spanish, and the
girl replied softly, almost soothingly. Neither of them spared a
word or glance at me for the better part of an hour, and all I
could do was stand and stare. I wondered if Mary’d ever come back
this way for me. Shook my head, to clear it—but the thought was so
fierce, I’ve never forgotten it.

It might have been my shaking that caught
their attention, either that or it was the fact that dawn seemed
ready to clear away the night’s ghosts. That included my little
tormentor. She came to me first, and reached out softly to touch
her own dead cheek. Pulled back at the last minute and shook her
head.

Thank you
, she said, in toneless but
perfect English.
I’m not hungry anymore.
She turned to
look back at the old woman who had been her mother. Said something
else in Spanish.

Tears were streaming down the old woman’s
cheeks, and even though my Spanish was bad, I understood what she
said back. Her daughter walked into the dawn and vanished like
morning mist. And I stood on the porch, with my stiff arms and her
daughter’s body, waiting for her to say something.

* * *

I buried the body on the grounds in front of
the house, and made a rough cross to mark the grave. There were
other such rough graves, but I didn’t ask her and she didn’t
volunteer. Maybe if we’d spoken the same language, we might have
communicated better. But maybe not; I understood what it meant for
her to rest a battered old doll against the newly turned earth; I
understood what it meant when she whispered to the face of the
awkward cross.

In the end, she said ‘Thank you’, and I said,
‘You’re Welcome.’ There was a lot of pain in her face, but there
was a lot of peace there too. If I could have brought her daughter
back to life, I would have. But I would have brought mine back,
too. Sometimes you just have to live with your limitations, no
matter how much they hurt you.

* * *

I gave her all the money I had with me.

I know it’s tacky, but she took it. I told
her to feed the children, but I didn’t ask her what she was going
to do with it. I didn’t care. I wanted to be back home, with my own
family, before the end of Christmas.

On the fifth day, there was no sign of my
hungry little ghost. On the sixth, there was nothing either. And on
the seventh, while I sat on the plane, tapping my feet and
wondering if Melissa had moved all of my things into the guest
room, it was blissfully silent.

She met me at the airport, Melissa did. Her
face had that searching look to it, and she stared at me for a long
time before she hugged me. It was a good hug, a real welcome
home.

“I’m free,” I told her, and I meant it.

* * *

That was thirty years ago, and that was the
year that Christmas became a time of peace, rather than a thing to
hate or fear. I tell you about it now, because I saw her again—the
little ghost girl. Only this time, when she knocked at my window, I
wasn’t terrified and I wasn’t angry. I know what she’s trying to
tell me this time, though I don’t know why she’d be bothered.
You’ll have to take care of your mother when I’m gone. Yes, she
does need taking care of—just not in the obvious ways. Let her talk
at you, let her talk to you.

Just like I’m doing now.

I always loved all my kids, and I know that
it doesn’t have to stop just because one of us is dead.

I love you.

THE END

Short Stories by Michelle West and Michelle
Sagara

The first six stories released are connected
to the Essalieyan Universe of the novels I write for DAW as
Michelle West. Since those are my most asked-for short stories,
those are the stories I wanted to make available first. The rest of
the stories will be released in chronological order from the date
of their first appearance, which are listed in brackets beside the
titles, along with the anthology in which they first appeared. All
of the stories have new introductions (which will probably come
through in the samples if you’ve already read the stories but want
to read those.)