Gray skies and gray asphalt, miles of road-meets-sky horizon, all of it, gone; gone to a blurry motion-sick slurry. I'm sure you know the feeling. Sleepy haze of an overlong and overcast road-trip. Every inch, foot, mile of road, equally replaceable with the last; that's by design, it seems. But I won't bore you with the politics of infrastructure, let's get to the ghost story.

It hit the asphalt with a lurid thunderclap clatter. Rain poured down around the battered old suitcase, its scuffed brown body an acorn husk, gold corners alone gleaming in the gray gravel-mud that coated the shoulder of the road. Cars tore by, sometimes vomiting tattered fabric or sunshine-filled plastic bottles in its direction; mostly indifferent (wreathed in roaring white flame of deity Speed).

This case was not the only of its sort. You've probably driven past a few yourself, scattered and forgotten luggage, flown off a roof-rack and bloomed in the air (bird with a clacking bill for wings, vomiting feathers and fabrics to fly higher, lighter). Or maybe it stayed shut, in which case the real loss would be a piece of such well-constructed luggage... In this situation, though, we're looking at a pretty shabby overnight bag with a real human touch to its locking mechanism.

See, it wasn't a quality latch, but rigor mortis that kept the suitcase closed upon that shocking impact. My rigor mortis. I'm dead, you see; or I was, at the time. We'll get there. For now, I'm dead, rooming up (can't really say living) in this suitcase with a hideously patterned sock-made-pocket full of bile and exactly three feathers. Raven's feather, behind my ear; vulture's feather (slick with black carrion-slime, probably not even blood) under my tongue; a hummingbird's wing crushed in my hand (so tiny and fragile once, it only counts for one feather. The vulture's had more substance.)

We don't count the various ticks and fleas about my legs as room-mates. Strictly speaking they weren't a part of the ritual, more an unfortunate side effect.

The ritual... A hazy thing really. I don't remember it, the years it took; just scattered sensation. Insect scraping and reptile-dead conscious, the burns of so much rough twine and the burning stink of forest formaldehyde. Slick feather under my tongue, black flower croaked behind my ear, balled-up jewel in my fist (hello there, little cousin, we're the same except you're pretty...) The Worst Person, the summoner culprit, is similarly spotty in my mind. All flat black hair and incandescent frustration and the kind of glowing rage that drifting moths like me just beg for in frost-mist months. (Except I'm not even ephemeral Luna-green... Just fluttering dead-leaf-dust at best.)

I guess it’s fine; guess it’s who I always was. Shriveled up tail, tucked between the legs... fibers of crabgrass, highly resistant to forceful blunt pulls... willow bark chewed in mobius ropes... wordplay of post-rot mummy leather... shrunken-head squirrel shoved in a box of salt and poppy petals. Ticks still stuck in its rasping hide, (squirming insect taste for a vein), nothing left to ooze...

Lovely crunch of spindly bones off a tendon string... no sympathy for an angel, blistering white heat, makes the inside of the nose shrivel up, bleed wildflower ambrosia... Hornet honey, carrion-cast, wriggling with silent insect clicks, and I am it all, the omni-directional crystalline orchid blooming into pain (ragged moth-eaten fuzz on the bone) all consuming (yellowed bone stuck to fur).

Human snail, folded up, I carry my home with me. Wander-lustful, not sure if I’m lost. (If I am, I’m lost on purpose... I’m the only one responsible.) The days like to run together, recently, in the absence of sleep (the stomach aches sharp, like a heart full of nothing... curse-kissed, air bubble displacing cherry fibers) and I, alienated, envy them their closeness. Day and night. Schrodinger's victim, shoved in this box neither dead nor alive, neither fine nor traumatized, just knowingly alone.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

I don’t know when I started externalizing this monologue; only that I had a good reason to jump—startle, dive into shame—when a straggly hiker passed me from behind. He looked, honestly, to be in worse shape than me, with his hundred-dollar hiking sticks and his face unclean and unshaven; but still he stared back at me over his shoulder with this look of intrigued revulsion. Made me painfully aware of how I must smell. (Eau de insect, for the curious, burning on my wrist. Sticky pale joints. I smelled like ant bites, I guess.)

“I’m sorry,” I said. Sorry for this traveling song, nonsense wanderings of a human snail (twisted up jelly bones, carrying around a too-small spiral home) “I’m sorry,” I repeated. Repetition; a theme in my waking dreams (congruence with the pathetic spiral-shell sickness curling up in my violet insides)

The hiker scoffed and turned around, kept walking... outpaced my numb shuffle. All the while (pale red windbreaker fading into the fog) I frantically tried to get the cold atrophy in my skull to hold a spark, think what he meant...

Trying to assign meaning to such smoky nothings (a scoff, a flat affect, lack of performance) ... it’s just tiring. Tiring, and alienating, and probably immoral to hurt such a battered soul as my own any more. Or is it worse to count myself among the fridge-stuffed? I never knew electric frostbite or suffocation, or hands; I didn't have it so bad, comparatively. If I'd been taken by some random, cruel instinct of the human animal... I don't think I could have taken it. But I was a sacrifice; my demise meant suffering minimized.

(I think that was the only kind of Ego I could have guiltlessly possessed. The kind that tries to understand another as an objective recorder, no mind paid as tribute to the needs of its own. Make sense? It wasn’t a self so much as it was a tiger pacing wasteful circles. Existing to be gawked at. Hell is a cage of other people.)

Sorry. I am, and was, going on about myself like I'm anything more than an inciting incident... some cold case to start a story. I swear I'm not a narcissist, I’ve just had lots of time to think about this. Be in my own head, my own cage, my own person... I wish I could have kept the witty-narrator facade up a lot longer. I wish I could have lived a lot longer. I wish a lot of things could have lasted longer; sleep, life, performance... to the extent those differ. Please keep looking at me.

Above all, though, one realization. I don't actually hate this. Who I am, who I've become... I don't dislike it at all. I hate the people who made me embrace... this splintered revenant splendor, I guess, the waking dream (not nightmare, very important) but that state is more a gift than anything. I mean I always wanted to be a beautiful dreamer, and I'm sure I don't feel awake, and I think I'm not so bad-looking most of the time... bug-chewed bits aside, there had to be some reason why the forest wanted me, why the Worst Person would deliver, why the bugs would eat me (folk-horror sacrifice maiden strung up scrawny on a pine). Well now I'm just making myself seem pitiable when the point is that I have it pretty good. I don't hate my life, such as it is, but I know I should.

So now we're right back where we started again, but worse. A new chamber in the nautilus shell, goddamn box just a tiny bit smaller than the last (bending my brain and breaking my wings, the crumpled hummingbird in a rigor mortis fist.) At least a chrysalis guarantees a graduation, some new banner bursting forth in afterbirth fabric... There's nothing to do in this box but rot and think and try not to give into the pull of either.

I guess that’s as good enough a place as any to end my sad little ghost story. From here, I'll lurchingly wander onwards, (up and out and about, spread pained petals of flower smoke). Maybe find who killed me and give him a good scare. I don’t think I want to haunt anyone, though, even if that's what I'm supposed to do. Seems like such a waste of time. Spinning wheels, cage-pacing when I could roar down a jungle road. Godspeed.