Short Story: Excrucior

Ghost story: Once, she had dared to touch him. Only the once.

Photo by Daniel Gregoire on Unsplash

“Where are we this time?” he asks, hunched in the darkness at the top of the bed. Neon lights seep in between broken blinds. A fluorescent stutters behind a cracked open bathroom door. In the dim light, he looks little more than a velvet silhouette.

“Tulsa, baby,” she says from the adjacent bed. Her hands tremble as she lays facing the window; the slivers of light sharpen her features and pit her eyes.

“A long way from home, Scout,” he says.

“‘Home is wherever I’m with you,’ Eli. Remember— ”

“Please don’t— ”

“Remember when you would sing that to me? Remember when you would say we could go anywhere and it would always be home?”

“Please, Scout, we shouldn’t— ”

“Shouldn’t what, Eli?”

Eli swings his legs over the side of the bed. There’s a grace to his movements as if the air itself parts before him, as if nothing in the world touches him.

“Scout,” he says, leaving it hanging in the air.

In the neon glow, every floating droplet comprising him twinkles like a distant star. The mattress protests as Scout rolls to face him. He is three feet and an eternity away.

Once, she had dared to touch him. Only the once.

“You’re right about us being a long way from home, baby.” She sighs as she pulls herself upright.

“You’ve been here long?”

“A few weeks. Time enough to find a job at a salon, get my bearings. The usual.”

“So you did it again?”

“There wasn’t any other way, Eli.”

“Scout, you shouldn’t keep doing this. You shouldn’t— ”

“You really going to do this, Eli? Lecture me? Waste the whole fucking night you’re back? You have some nerve to pull what you did and then scold me.

“Fuck it,” she says. “If that’s how you want our night in Tulsa to be, then fine.”

She jumps up from the bed, stomps to the bathroom, and slams the door. The bathroom does not care for her misery. Over her strangled sobs, the faucet drips loudly. Low moans filter in through the adjoining paper-thin walls.

“I’m sorry, Scout,” she hears from behind the bathroom door.

“This just…hurts me. Every time. It takes some getting used to. Where I am, there is some solace in the stillness.”

“Glad to hear there’s fucking solace for you,” Scout sobs besides a brown-ringed tub, “while I’m still here. Suffering. Always hustling, always on the move, always trying to bring you back.”

She counts the faucet drips, keeping time to her own ragged breathing.

“You always said you wanted to see the country,” he says. Too late and too flat to have any of the warmth his flippant asides once brought.

“With you, Eli! With you, for more than just the odd night when I’ve been able to gather up enough to summon you.”

She throws open the bathroom door, wearing a fluorescent corona. The flare catches in him, refracts, and diffuses across the room. Eli’s form scatters. His silhouette scurries away to dark corners and untouched shadows.

“Oh fuck!” Scout cries as she slams the bathroom door closed. “Baby, I’m so sorry.”

The room again sinks into gloom. Eli reforms.

“Maybe now we’re even?” he murmurs as his mouth coalesces.

In the neon glow, the tears streaming down Scout’s face burn red.

“Even? Baby, I can’t even hug you. I know that every time I bring you back it hurts. That all you feel is what’s missing. Hell, you wouldn’t stop talking about the damn ocean back in Memphis.

“But I hunger for you. Your touch. For what our life was supposed to fucking be. And I do this stupid summoning bullshit over and over because it’s the only god damn thing left. And you know what? All it does is drive me crazy.

“I’m always chasing that sunset, Eli.

“We’re not even,” she whimpers. “As much as I want to forgive you for putting that gun to your head, I’m the one stuck here. But I love you, baby. Even still.

“And I hate you for it, Eli.”

In the next room, the couple’s screams of ecstasy crescendo. Scout staggers and slumps onto her bed of jagged, world-weary springs.

“And those assholes in the next room aren’t helping.”

“Want me to go through the wall?” Eli asks, alighting onto the other bed. “Ruin their fun?”

“I didn’t bring you back for you to play voyeur.”

Eli pauses. A ripple passes through the droplets forming his otherwise placid face.

“Have I told you how good you look? I should have.”

“Don’t lie,” Scout says, burying her face into a pillow. “I can feel how puffy my eyes are.”

“Your eyes are as beautiful as they ever were. Your nails look amazing too, my love. You managed to paint both hands yourself?”

“Of course.” Scout turns, allowing one eye to peek from the pillow. “I did them special for you, baby. I thought sugar skulls were fitting.”

“Mexico,” he nods. His head ever so slightly drifts through the pillow beneath him. “I got so burned on that trip. A good feeling, in retrospect. To feel anything.”

In the silence, they hear giggles from next door, the drip of the faucet, and Scout’s slowing breathing.

“You falling asleep on me, Scout?”

“Never, baby. Just now that you’re here, I don’t know what to say.”

“Describe the room to me. You were right about what I miss. Touch. Taste. And the scents the most—even the bad ones.”

“Well, there’s plenty of those.” Springs groan as she rolls onto her back. “This is not the finest establishment in Tulsa. The mattress you’re on is the kind you always say you like when you first lie down before you end up bitching about it the whole next day when your back hurts.”

“That soft, huh?”

“That one is.” Scout props herself on an elbow and looks at Eli. “This one feels as if some bastard sharpened the springs, but it’s still the less bad of the two. But the real star of the motel is the smell, baby. When I first opened the door, it was the stale cigarettes that hit me. Like that time we had to drive through the Carolinas with your aunt, and she wouldn’t stop smoking with the windows up the whole way.

“But beneath the smoke is where the riches were. I think it was roach mildew. You remember how that smelled?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Like someone poured oil on old leaves. But it doesn’t matter,” Scout says. “The smells are gone. All I can smell now is the burning hair and nails. There was so much to burn, baby.”

Eli vanishes from his bed and appears above Scout. His form shivers as if simultaneously condensing in on itself and trying to tear itself apart.

“How much hair? How many clippings?”

“Are you really going to throw a fit again about this, baby?”

“How much?”

“Enough.” She rolls to face the window. The bed squeaks its protest.

She freezes as every muscle and tendon turns to ice. Her lungs shrivel. Her heart stops. Eli had put his hand on her shoulder.

“I need to know, my love, what it cost for me to be back.”

He lets go of Scout’s shoulder. Her body spasms as her heart plays catch-up. She throws her head over the side of the bed and vomits up dinner, stomach acid, and bile. And still, her body retches beyond the point of having anything to give.

Only then does she start to feel warmth again.

“I’m sorry, Scout, but I need to know the cost. How much?”

“It was hair from three women and the nail clippings from one of their daughters,” she wheezes as she pulls herself back fully onto the bed.

“Scout, no. A child?”

“Supposed to be more potent, baby, with them having more life to live,” Scout says between labored breathing. Dark bags swell beneath her eyes. “I was hoping with that…I was hoping to have you last for longer than just one night.”

Eli retreats to the head of his bed and curls into nothing more than a ball of shadow.

“But a child, Scout? You know what happens to these people. You know they sometimes never wake up.”

“And sometimes they do,” Scout says as she struggles to sit up.

“Scout, my love, you have to stop. How much pain are you creating, city by city, for just one more night? If for no one else but me, please. Stop. It hurts.”

“I know, Eli.” She lifts herself from the bed and buries her face in her hands. “But I can’t live without you. Baby, I can’t live for anything besides seeing you again.”

Eli is silent. Each drip of the faucet marks a second ticking towards dawn, until he disappears back to his land of stillness, until Scout becomes utterly alone again. Yet the words between them dry up, replaced by Scout’s ragged breathing.

Slowly, the shadows in the room lighten. The pipes in the bathroom bang as a toilet upstairs flushes. A baby somewhere in the motel begins to cry. Outside, a man fumbles with his keys, gives a hacking cough, and tears the foil from a new pack of cigarettes.

“Almost dawn, almost quitting time,” Eli says. “I’m begging you, Scout. Please. Please have this be the last time. For me, for you, for everyone else you’re hurting.

“Please.”

“Don’t care about them,” Scout says from behind her hands. “And frankly, baby, I don’t give a fuck how much this hurts you either. Can’t be close to how much you choosing to paint the walls with the inside of your skull hurt me. How much it still hurts.

“You were always the charitable one, baby. Not me. What choice have you left me?”

Scout wipes her eyes, leaving smudges of mascara across her cheeks, and looks at the other bed. In the dawn light, Eli is gone. She goes over and sniffs the sheets knowing there will be no trace of him but trying all the same.

“I love you, baby,” she says, straightening up to face the day.

“I’ll see you in Amarillo.”

---

Author’s note: This story was originally published in Lit Up on Medium. But, in an effort to collect myself in one place, I’ve cross-posted it here.

Hope you enjoy!