G.G. Silverman
The Crush
I’m from a different plane of reality, and though I’m you and you’re me, you’re better, somehow, and it makes me crazy, so I follow your every move. Tonight there are more of me, more of us, pale ghosts of myself from the multiverse, and like me, they’re failures, and we’re pissed. What do you have that we don’t? So we’re here, in your bedroom, stalking you for answers, wondering where we went wrong.
We form a circle around you, closing in as you sleep. You are perfect, inimitable, your life is a peach. Look at this penthouse, for fuck’s sake, one of us whispers. We pet the satin sheets. We ogle your understated but glam furnishings. A certifiable hottie sleeps beside you, wearing nothing but air. We ghosts are jealous, or awe-struck. Mostly jealous.
We press nearer to you, slumbering beauty, still alive and pink and fresh, your rosebud nipples decidedly perkier than ours, and we listen to you breathe, admiring how even the way you suck air through your nostrils when unconscious is soothing in pitch and tone, an utter delight. While admiring you, we have thoughts of self-hatred, and regret: Why couldn’t we have worked harder? Why didn’t we invest in real estate when we had the chance? Why didn’t we make a harder play for the hot guy? Sometimes we slip into bed with you, and watch your face with our unsleeping, unceasing eyes. We don’t hug you, because our love isn’t kind, instead, we pig pile your body; we are a heaping mountain of ghosts crushing your heart. Except, for all our crushing, we can’t kill you, we can only make you squirm. Eventually another ghost enters the room, a version of us, but way more terrifying. We’re mostly pedestrian, garden-variety spooks, but she has leveled up—she’s the girl who ended up in a Japanese horror movie, a wraith with a curtain of stringy black hair in her eyes, the screamiest of scream queens. She stands in the doorway, all creepy-like and backlit, features inscrutable. We shudder. It’s the face, or lack thereof, that’s why we’re scared of her—the eyes we can’t see, the expression we can’t read. What does she want? Revenge? Empathy? A good hair stylist? We note silently that you, the woman we’re haunting, has really good hair, even in her sleep, and we hate you for it. Hair envy among spooks isn’t a stretch.
We sense abject loneliness from the girl in the door, the most misunderstood creep of all time. One of us holds out a spectral hand from under the covers, signaling our welcome. She takes it, and we pull her onto the pig pile, the heaving mound of ghosts. Climb aboard, one of us says. Let’s crush this bitch.
G.G. Silverman lives just north of Seattle. She is also disabled, neurodivergent, and the daughter of immigrants. Her short fiction has appeared in the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Women in Horror anthologies NOT ALL MONSTERS and CHROMOPHOBIA from StrangeHouse Books, and was a finalist for the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award for feminist writing, among other honors. Her work has been published by Cemetery Gates Media, QU, Psychopomp, Scissors + Spackle, Speculative City, Corvid Queen, So To Speak, The Iron Horse Literary Review, The Seventh Wave, Molotov Cocktail, and more. She has just completed a collection of feminist short fiction with speculative overtones. For more info visit www.ggsilverman.com.
