10| Psychopomp Magazine
Nikki Stein
Ghosts
We start talking when you walk over to me and Jeremy and pull out your gold Zippo to offer us a light. Jeremy’s been screwing with his dime store BIC for almost two minutes, and we both know it’s out of juice, but he’s insisting it’s just too cold out, and it’ll light eventually. After you hold your fire to our blue lips Jeremy offers you a cigarette in return, but you don’t smoke, you explain—you’re just a friend to smokers, you’re just prepared; you even keep a fresh pack of Marlboro Reds in your purse just in case some poor freezing fuck runs out and can’t afford to buy another pack.
When you hand me the smoke you say the brand suits me because it’s glamorous, and that’s how I know you’re not lying about how you don’t smoke, and it’s also when I start wanting you.
Back inside the bar Jeremy buys us all shots of tequila, and when we’ve taken them and he retreats to the bathroom, you tell me that tequila always makes you want to die.
The taste, or the feeling? Or both? I grab your hands and look at your freckles, the ones that have stayed through the winter. They are like a mirror, mine copper, yours black, but not like the color you’d use to talk about skin, more like the color you’d use to talk about nothingness, an arrangement of tiny black holes, sucking, magnetic, somehow all this and yet absent, like shadows.
The bartender pours us another shot before I can stop him, and he’s making eyes at you, and he starts telling us (you) about this theory he has, how humans aren’t the first species to build great civilizations and create governments and languages and canned meat. How a dozen other species did it before us—bears and cats and ants—only to find out what mankind