There was one other ghost aboard the 831 bus, though I didn’t know her name. I’m not sure she knew it anymore. The spirit always sat by the same window, three rows behind the driver on the left hand side, whether or not a breather also occupied the same seat. She rode the same route and watched the same scenery go by day after day, month after month, year after year. The only time she ever moved was to look away whenever we passed the haunted house. That’s what everyone called the old Victorian mansion on University Avenue.

It’s not like the place was in worse shape than our humble home. Even with its faded, rundown façade, it was a far grander house than chez Specter. Even so, whenever we passed, icy pinpricks stabbed into my soul skin, and I wanted to shrink into my pile of laundry like a turtle in its shell.

And it wasn’t just ghosts. Breathers also walked or jogged a little faster when they went by, though perhaps they didn’t know why. There was something unnatural in that awful abode, something inexplicable, something terrible behind the boarded up window on the second floor.

The bus pulled to the curb, and I swelled as Rose stepped aboard, her white cane clacking down the aisle.

“Over here, Rose. I saved you a seat.”

“That you, Daisy?”

Rose had been born with a disease that robbed her of her sight when she was even younger than I was when life robbed me of my flesh. She had been a concert pianist until rheumatoid arthritis gnarled her fingers. It was a condition of old age, one I would never be burdened with.

It’s funny how breathers use the word condition that way, as if suffering were a toll one must pay for living, as if life were conditional on pain.

I, Ruth Specter, hereby solemnly swear that I have read and understood the terms and conditions of this life, and accept that I might suffer crippling joint diseases, boils and lesions, headaches, toothaches, earaches, stomach aches, and of course heart aches. I, the applicant for a mortal body, hold harmless and indemnify all deities, angelic entities, and other supernatural parties for any sunken hopes or dashed dreams.

I moved the basket of clothes I’d picked up from Mr. Kim’s and set it on my lap. Rose sat beside me and folded her cane into three pieces.

“Heavens it’s warm today,” she said. “Humid too.”

“Sure is.” It was just as well I couldn’t feel temperature, humidity, or lack thereof. Mending work was thin during the dead of winter, and oil to heat the house would have been expensive. Electricity was the one vital necessity, according to father. Heaven forbid the television should ever go dark.

“Piano lesson?”

“I’m afraid it was Derek’s last one,” she said. “Would you believe he’s going off to college already?”

“Derek Farmer? But he couldn’t be more than nine or ten.”

“Eighteen.” Rose shook her head. “Time moves faster with every breath I take. But we all get older, don’t we?”

I gave a nervous laugh. “Sure do.”

“Yes, Ma’am. Life is short. Too short to hide away from the world.” She touched the scarf that covered the space where my face should have been.

I pulled away. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Nothing sadder than a flower wilting in its own shadow, Daisy. I bet you’re stunning under all that cover.”

“The only breather … person I mean … who would find me beautiful is a blind one.”

“We all deserve to be loved, but how can anyone love us if we don’t let them see us?”

“Really, Rose, there’s not much to see. No fooling. I’m as plain as they come. Most people wouldn’t even notice me.”

“Daisy, you’re one of the sweetest, kindest, most thoughtful souls I’ve ever known. You don’t have a plain bone in your body.”

“You’re partly right.”

Rose pursed her lips and drew a large breath through her large nostrils, causing her chest to puff out like a barn owl. “Now you listen to me. I don’t want to hear anymore talk like that. You are beautiful, you are special, and you are worthy. Anyone who can’t see that either has cracks in their eyes or cracks in their hearts. You remember that.”

We arrived at her stop. “I’ll try,” I said, melancholy muddling my voice.

She stood and elongated her cane with a snap of her wrist. “Girl, be bold. Let the world see you the way I see you.” And with a click-clack of her cane down the aisle, she was gone. If only everyone were as blind as Rose.

#

The rest of the week was work and more work, broken up by long evenings watching television with my parents. It was Friday night, date night, and I was wandering through the stations as I might’ve a barren field, nothing for miles in any direction. It was all just so much noise. Even my father seemed disinterested.

I wondered what Cole was doing at that moment? Probably reading some classic novel, or playing guitar, or writing a song for some girl he met in history class—the girl he would fall in love with, marry, and have children with.

My own schooling was so long ago. Things they must teach now I never could have imagined. The world was a different place then. 1918, the year I died, was the first year elementary school became compulsory for all American children. Before that, it wasn’t uncommon for young ones to leave their schooling after the third grade.

It was a hard time, especially in the West, and many families relied on the income their children brought. We were better off than some, though by no means well off. I completed elementary school, but father was injured on the job at the Utah Power and Light Company, which was unusual considering he was an accountant. So I went to work in the Woolen Mills, and did so until it caught fire that terrible day in July.

“There,” said mother abruptly, snatching me from my whirlpool of thoughts. “I like this program.”

Father woke from his stupor. “Ah yes, doctors slicing and dicing fat people into thin people, turning bird beaks into pretty little button noses.”

It was a show about plastic surgery called Extreme Transformations. I’d seen it before. Gory stuff. We watched as a doctor rammed a long suction tube under a woman’s dimply skin and sucked the fat into a clear vessel, great globs of it tinted pink from breather blood. It was a grotesque soup that would have turned a wraith’s stomach.

“Do you know,” said mother, “that when mortals lose all their girth at once, they end up with great flaps and rolls of skin that hang like sails off the body.”

Father was intrigued. “Do they just tuck it in when they get dressed, like an extra shirt?”

“Sometimes they do,” she said. “And sometimes they slice it away. Snip, snip.”

“Snip, snip?” I said.

“Snip, snip,” she repeated.

My mind began to turn, a slippery idea lubricating the rusted wheels within. “What do you suppose they do with all that extra skin?”

“Toss it in the garbage heap I suspect,” she said.

Father sighed. “Such a waste of skin.”

“Waste not, want not,” I muttered to myself. The phrase had long been the clarion call of our frugal community, one I’d always taken to heart. Another phrase also came to mind. God helps those who help themselves.

#

The first thing I needed to do was find the nearest plastic surgery office. Since we had no computer of our own, I snuck into a house half a mile away, and while the owner slumbered upstairs, I began my search.

There were not one, but three candidates for what I needed, and I headed toward the first of them at once in the dead of night.

Finding nothing in the offices themselves, I scoured the big trash bin outside, poring through every disgusting bag of medical waste. I found plenty of bloody bandages and paper gowns, but no flesh.

I returned the next day to watch a tummy tuck. The surgeon sucked fat out of the abdomen through a large straw-like implement just as they had on TV. Then he made a deep incision in the belly and sliced away a large chunk of skin that was roughly the shape of a squashed circle. A nurse weighed it and dropped it unceremoniously onto a cold metal tray. The surgeon sewed the patient back together using a stitching technique I’d never seen before, something he called under-skin stitching, which as he explained to some sort of younger trainee doctor, was used to minimize the appearance of scars. I made a mental note of it.

When the surgery was over, the nurse emptied the tray of skin into a plastic medical waste bag. I watched the bag for several hours, and more joined it. Finally two men arrived to take the bags away, sealing them into a red plastic bin and loading it onto a truck with similar receptacles from other offices.

I hitched a ride in the back of the truck to an industrial part of town and watched men wheel the containers into an incineration building where the flesh was burned to ash.

Father was right. It was a waste of skin. But some of it at least would go to good use. I would make sure of that.

#

I observed a dozen more surgeries over the next several days, and when no one was looking, borrowed some of the supplies I would need. The curved needles used for the under-skin suturing were most crucial of all.

The skin was the tricky part. I couldn’t just grab the stuff and make a run for it. People would notice large bags filled with medical waste floating through the air in broad daylight. Also, my parents never would have let me hear the end of it if I made it onto the ten o’clock news.

I waited for the bags to collect in each office. When no was one around, I removed the slabs of skin and placed them in plain black plastic garbage bags, replacing the flesh with wet towels, which approximated the heft and swing of the excised tissue.

After I stuffed the squishy garbage bags in a seldom-used closet and waited for everyone to leave for the night, I waited a few hours more until I was sure car and pedestrian traffic would be lightest. As luck would have it, there was hardly any moon that night, and by sticking to alleyways, side roads, and ditches, I nearly made it home without drawing unwanted attention to myself.

I say nearly because I had the sensation somebody was following me. Was it another ghost, or something worse?

I cut across the park, which was less than two blocks from my house, and the playground swing began to squeak. No one—no breather anyway—was sitting on it, and there wasn’t a puff of wind to speak of.

“Who’s there?” I whispered into the darkness.

There was no reply.

Frightened, I picked up the pace. The squeaking swing stopped.

I ran, but dropped one of the bags. I could sense him getting closer. I left the bag behind and flew as fast as I could, wending my way across the abandoned lots with the remaining bag in hand. My house was in view, all light extinguished save for the television’s ever-present flicker.

If only I could get there.

But the spirit was gaining on me, the tortured soul reaching out its gangly limbs like tentacles. Was it a wraith?

Whatever it was brushed against my soul skin, and I felt hate mixed with sadness, rage with confusion. If it caught me, I feared I would turn to stone or else become infected with its lamenting nature, its abiding pain. Would I then become a wraith too.

“Please,” I said. “Leave me alone. Whoever, whatever you are, you’re not wanted here.” I scrambled up the porch steps, but as I took the door’s handle. There was only stillness behind me. And silence. The wraith, or whatever it was, had fled.

#

I tried sneaking up the stairs, but the creaky third step and the weight of the remaining bag of flesh gave me away.

My mother called out from the living room. “Is that you, Daisy?” She floated over, Puss folded over her invisible arm. “Where have you been? Puss has run out of milk, and you know you’re the only one who has any luck with Mr. Burnside’s cow.”

“That’s because the cow died about thirty years ago, which you know because I’ve told you a million times. We buy milk at the grocery store like normal people.”

“Puss doesn’t care if it comes from a dead cow or a haberdasher, so long as his belly is full.”

“First thing in the morning,” I said.

“What do you have there?” She spotted the bulging bag of human carnage.

“Fabric,” I said quickly. “Mr. Kim asked me to make a dress for his niece.”

She waved the news away, disinterested.

“That’s all fine and good, but if we do not take care of Puss, he will be a living cat no longer.”

The last thing I wanted to do was go back outside and meet that creature again, but what choice did I have. I growled, stomped up to the attic to drop off the flesh, and grabbed the empty glass milk jug from the kitchen to return for its deposit. It was only a nickel, but every nickel counted.

As I raced out the front door, I froze. The bag of flesh—the one I’d dropped—was sitting on the porch.

#

With Puss fed, I got to work. There was still quite a bit of blood, fat, and sinew to cut away from the flesh before I could sew anything, and it was grisly business, but Slim was more than happy to help clean up. In fact, if he kept on helping he’d soon need a new name. I told myself the whole business was no different than dealing with leather. Besides, its former owners had discarded it like trash. I was giving it a new purpose, a new cause—the noblest cause of all—love.

Hours turned into days. I only left the attic to change channels for my father or buy milk for Puss. But my perseverance paid off. I laid the prepared skin on the floor in strips, ready for needle and thread. But what shape should it take? I hadn’t even considered it.

My own living body had been narrow and shapeless, taller than most of the boys, and awkward in its lumbering gate. Flat as a floorboard and flabby-cheeked, I was no longer a girl, yet not fully a woman. My new appearance on the other hand would be limited only by my sewing ability and my own imagination.

I flipped through old magazines, searching the pages for the perfect vessel. None of them seemed like the me I wanted to be, but there were elements of each I admired.

And so I sliced long, slender legs from one, plump lips from another, high cheekbones from a third, and so on, laying the paper features on the ground like a human collage. I replaced one neck with another, stood back to see how it looked with this chin or that, and shuffled noses as I might have a particularly vexing piece from a jigsaw puzzle.

After hours of indecision I settled on, if not the perfect me, at least a version of me I could live with. So to speak.

I considered cutting a pattern using plain old muslin instead of the precious skin for the first attempt, but muslin didn’t drape like leather, wouldn’t mold to the contours of the human form like leather could, so I tossed the idea and dove straight in.

“I can always get more flesh,” I said to Slim, and the old rat rubbed its greedy little hands and licked its lips ravenously.

It was painstaking work, but stitch-by-stitch the suit of flesh took shape. Whenever possible, I hid the seams in the underarms and elbows, behind the knees and where thighs met, leaving space where space was meant to be.

Boning, the flexible stiffening strips used as corset stays, helped support the torso in lieu of a ribcage, and gave the overall silhouette a lovely hourglass shape.

The skin, stretched as far as it could be stretched, came in such small patches that no matter how fine and straight my stitching, I couldn’t help but think that this new body, with it’s twenty-two square feet of flesh, looked a bit like a hobby quilt.

The lips and nose turned out better than expected, but the ears were hopeless. I prayed the wig would conceal their absence, just as gloves and socks would hide the fact that I had neither hands nor feet.

I considered adding a long brass zipper to the back as a finishing touch, but that would have been gilding the lily. Besides, if heavy petting were in my future, it would have been a dead giveaway.

Once it was complete, I stepped back and admired the deflated body spread out on the floor like an unfortunate corpse whose bones had been removed.

“Not bad,” I said to Slim. “Not perfect, but passable. I suppose all that’s left is to check the fit.”

I filled the new body like air inflating a balloon. It was strange to be so constrained. Was this how I felt as a newborn baby, my soul stuffed and bound into a fresh bag of skin, bone, and blood far too small to contain me? If so, I couldn’t recall.

#

Graceful I was not in my new skin. The first time I attempted to walk, my ankles buckled, and I plodded forward with knock knees, dragging the inner sides of my feet along the floor while my arms flailed like horsetail reeds battered by the wind. I looked like a zombie. But then I guess I sort of was a zombie.

As a pile of laundry I could get away with tottering along slumped over like an old maid. But now I was laid almost bare, and precision mattered. Cole would never kiss a meat puppet.

But I wouldn’t give up. Fleshless, I sat on a bench downtown in front of a Thai restaurant and watched people stroll the sidewalk, how the swing of their arms counterbalanced the forward motion of their legs.

Breathers are heavy. The way they move reflects that. As a ghost, I had no mass for gravity to act upon, and therefore no weight. To replicate, or at least approximate, that same fluid movement without all the blood, bones, and organs weighing me down, it took a surprising amount of practice.

At first I lurched forward, leading with my head, stomping my feet into the ground as if fighting a fierce headwind. Gradually I improved, and after another day I was confident I could pass for a breather—albeit a slightly clumsy one. My gait was more a galumph than a smooth and sexy sashay, but I was sure to get better.

With walking out of the way, I turned my attention to the still-monstrous visage gaping back at me in the mirror. It wouldn’t do to go walking around town looking like humpty dumpty after a mob of ham-handed men attempted to glue me back together again, so I looked to the Internet for makeup tips, specifically tricks the skinners used to cover up scars. Two days later the supplies I needed arrived on our doorstep. The modern world really was a marvelous place.

Step one was covering over the irregular web-like lattice with concealer. The first time I added way too much of the flesh colored goop. I looked like a badly decorated cake. I started over, using less this time, and smoothed it with a small triangular sponge until the seams nearly disappeared. That did the trick.

Next came the foundation, which I gently blended with another sponge to avoid any unnatural makeup lines. Matte powder set the makeup and softened the overall look. What fine scars remained on close inspection I could easily attribute to a farming accident, a relatively small lie compared to the rest.

Lastly, I turned my attention to the most crucial and delicate of anatomical structures, the reason for this whole endeavor—my lips. Choosing the right color was, like the rest of the process, a lot of trial and error. In the end I chose a lipstick that was raspberry red with flecks of shiny mica that made the plump folds of flesh sparkle like rubies. If any color could speak, surely this one would whisper kiss me.

The only problem was getting them to kiss, or getting them to move at all for that matter. It took three days working around the clock before I could make them so much as twitch. But twitch they eventually did, and after a few more grueling days, I mastered not only a pout, but a perfect pucker. Perfect enough anyhow. But what if he used his tongue? I had no idea where I’d get one of those.

“One step at a time, Daisy.”

Something wasn’t right, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. I examined every inch of my face in the mirror as I attempted various facial features, which strained my abilities beyond their limits. It wasn’t until I reached a truly grotesque rendition of an open-mouthed smile that the problem came into view in glaring fashion. I’d forgotten all about teeth. Smiling wasn’t the issue. Talking was.

Playing the part of ventriloquist and dummy in one, my lack of dentition was impossible to miss. Sure, I could have tried talking with my lips folded in like some toothless old hag, but somehow I don’t think that would have won over Cole. There was only one obvious solution—I needed some pearly whites. But the only place I knew for sure would have them, and free of charge, was the graveyard. I wasn’t about to go digging around in there. Then it came to me.

“Old people!”

An hour later I was back with three sets of dentures from the old folks home. It was always good to have more material than you needed. And yes, I’m sure their rightful owners would miss them, but they could always slurp soup, and this was, after all, a matter of love and death.

With my new teeth secured, clothes were the next order of business. I shimmied into a pair of dark tights, a black plaid skirt, and long-sleeved gray shirt. Next I pulled on socks and black shoes, white cotton gloves and a straight black wig with bangs that only partly covered the arches of my inexpertly drawn eyebrows.

I slipped on dark sunglasses to cover chasms where green eyes would have been, and I stared into the long dressing mirror. If I had breath it would’ve been taken away. For the first time in over a century I could finally see myself. Okay, maybe it wasn’t exactly the me I might’ve been had death not come to collect its debt of flesh, or the me I’d always dreamed I’d be, but at least I was a something instead of a nothing.

For good or ill, this palimpsest of a body, this mockery of a face, was the one my love—the great love of my death—would gaze upon for the first time after months of anticipation. The question was, would he run toward me, or would he run screaming?

Next Chapter: Chapter 4