Lesser Creek: A Love Story, A Ghost Story
On the trestle bridge, a boy and girl stand side by side. They can just see the water through the trees. Directly below the bridge, abandoned rails curve gently to their vanishing point. Weeds grow between the cracked ties, and two children walk, kicking stones along the track.
On the bridge, the girl looks at the water. Lesser Creek. It seems familiar somehow. The greenery does its best to swallow the sparkle and shine, keeping the light at bay. But all along the bank, running parallel to the tracks, muddy paths cut through the growth, and run down to the water’s edge. Hoof-paths, paw-paths, and foot-paths, carve gaps in the green. They are made for stolen sips and stolen kisses, midnight swims, and midnight drownings.
She remembers fireflies.
Maybe it wasn’t this bend of the creek, but some other. She wants to remember blue shadows between the trees, and the secret-wet smell of earth, bare feet trailed in cool water, and luminescent bugs flashing Morse-code transmissions from another world. And so she does. Who’s to say her truth is wrong?
“It wasn’t always like this, was it?” Memory nags, and she asks the question, wishing she didn’t have to break the silence that has stretched between them for so long.
The boy beside her watches the children’s dwindling figures, following the rails.
“Do you think we could catch them all?” he asks.
For a moment she thinks he must be talking about the fireflies she wants to badly to remember. But his past isn’t her past; his memory is other-wise, and as inconsistent as hers. Who knows what meaning the creek and the rails hold for him?
Side by side on the bridge, the boy and girl are roughly the same age: fifteen, sliding backward to ten and upward to twenty, depending on who is looking. It is the age they’ve always been, for as long as they can remember. Which isn’t very long.
She remembers fireflies, and sometimes, she remembers drowning.
She looks at the boy side-wise, wondering how he died. If he died. Have they had this conversation before? She picks up a stone, weighing it a moment in her palm before letting it fly. It pings the steel, reverberating like the memory of trains.
Maybe one of the children looks back at the sound, and maybe they don’t. Everyone knows these woods, that bridge, these rails, that water, are haunted.
The girl picks up another stone, frowns, and closes it in her hand.
“Will we bet, then?” she says. This seems familiar, too.
“Yes, a bet,” the boy agrees. “And a tally, on that big rock in the water.”
He points through the trees; she knows the stone—a big boulder planted firm in the creek’s middle, dividing the current.
“At the end of the summer, we’ll count up the marks, and see who wins,” the boy says.
A cicada drones. The sound means heat to her, summer-sweat and irritation so sharp she can taste it. She shivers all the same. It won’t take much for the boy to win, between the airless nights and the far worse days, the sun beating down on everything and pushing people to the edge. She bites her lip, but she’s already nodding.
The rails, stretching one way lead to the horizon, and in the other, they lead to a town. It nestles around a vast crossroad, and maybe, for that alone, it’s cursed.
Could it be the town that calls them, again and again, this boy, and this girl, in their myriad forms? Or does the town exist because they come here again and again to stand on this bridge, over these rails, beside that water, to bet on the town’s souls?
The town has never borne her any love, the girl thinks. Not for the boy at her side, either. She should take joy in the reaping, but she never does. There is a hunger in her, a hole deep at her core; it is in her nature to wish that hole full.
She isn’t greedy. One soul, just one soul, ripe and sweet as the last summer peach, might last her all winter long. She looks side-long at the boy beside her, and breathes out slow.
“Deal,” she says.
“Deal.” The boy spits in his hand.
The devil’s own twinkle shines in his eye. They shake on it, and go their separate ways.
And so the summer begins.
*
The first time you see her, you think: She isn’t real. Because you’ve lived in Lesser Creek your whole life, and you’ve never seen her—never even seen a girl like her—before.
Your second thought is: She’s a ghost. Because everyone knows these woods are haunted, and didn’t a girl drown here years ago? All the stories say so.
She’s sitting on a wooden bridge over the narrowest part of the creek. Her legs dangle over the water; one hand touches the topmost rail, fingers curled as if to haul up and flee at any moment. Her hair screens her face, but you know she’s chewing her lip in concentration. Just like you know exactly what color her eyes are, even though you haven’t seen them yet. They are every color you can imagine, and so is her hair. Because even looking at her full-on in the sunlight, you can’t tell anything about her for sure.
She is definitely a ghost.
You sit next to her, legs dangling beside hers, close, but not touching. Your mismatched laces trail from scuffed shoes. She doesn’t flee, and so you say, “Hey.”
You say it carefully, not looking her way. You think of a deer, ready to be startled, though she’s nothing like that at all. She could swallow you whole.
Where she sits, the air is cooler, like the deepest part of the creek, where the sunlight doesn’t touch. Viewed side-wise, you can see right through her. Her skin is blue, her hair moonlight, and you just know, when she finally turns your way, her eyes will be stones, and her will lips stitched closed. And you decide that’s okay.
Then she does turn, dropping her hand from the top rail to the sun-warmed wood, almost touching yours. And she’s as real and solid as you.
“Hey,” she says, and smiles.
Nothing changes. She isn’t real. She can’t be. Because girls like her don’t smile at you. They frown, and they’re suddenly very busy, always with somewhere else to be when you’re around.
This girl smiles at you. So she must be a ghost, even though the sunlight catches the fine down on her legs and turns it crystalline. You know it’s a lie. The hair brushing her shoulders, the shadow in the hollow of her throat, the peach-fuzz lobes of her un-pierced ears, and the scab on her left knee—these are all a skin stretched over the truth of her. She is a hungry ghost, and she will devour your soul.
And you decide that’s okay, too.
She tells you a name that isn’t hers. You give her one in return. The water murmurs, and you talk about nothing. Time stretches to infinity.
Maybe, just maybe, her fingers brush yours when she finally stands up to leave.
“Will I see you again?” you say, hoping your voice isn’t too full of need.
She doesn’t answer, but her teeth flash bright in a nice, even row.
And so your summer begins.
*
The first murder occurred on a Tuesday. Or rather, it was discovered on a Tuesday, but the body had been cooling over two weeks, based on the flies buzzing over the sticky blood, and the discarded pupa cases nestled in the once-warm cavities.
Crime of passion. Scratches, bruises, evidence of a struggle, but none of a break-in. Spouses—one dead, one fled.
On a Thursday, the missing spouse turns up two counties over. A confession ensues.
Outside the county Sheriff’s Office, the boy from the bridge leans against sun-warmed brick, and smiles. He chews bubblegum, shattering-hard, packaged flat in wax paper with trading cards. Collectors throw away the gum, keep cards. Not him. He savors the dusty-blandness, the unyielding material worked by teeth and tongue until it bends to his will. He throws the cards away, precisely because he knows they will be collectors’ items one day.
He listens through an impossible thickness of brick, plaster, and glass to the blubbered admission of guilt. There are tears; he can smell them, even over the cooked-hot pavement crusted with shoe-flattened filth. It smells of summer.
Sweat and stress and a tipping point—all the ingredients he needs. A beery night, a whispered word, a suggestion of infidelity. A death born of rage. This is the way it’s always been. His finger, the feather, the insubstantial straw snapping the camel’s spine.
The boy pushes away from the wall. Struts, hands shoved deep in too-tight, acid-washed pockets. Hair, slicked-back. He might have a comb tucked into one pocket, or a pack of cigarettes rolled in one white sleeve, depending on the slant of light that catches him.
He commands the sidewalk. Dogs, children, old men, fall into step behind him. Old women tsk from the safety of their porches. Young girls, well, it’s best not to say what they do.
He heads west, strolling past scrub-weed and abandoned lots to the fullness of wild fields, cuts left to the creek.
He shucks shoes, wades in, and lays a hand against the massive boulder splitting the water. It is graffiti-strewn, perfect for sunbathing. Perfect for other things, too.
The boy chooses a sharp-edged stone from the current, and makes a single mark on the boulder’s side—a white line on the grey.
His summer has just begun.
*
This is what the world tells us about girls: They are always hungry.
They are cruel.
They will suck out your soul, and leave a dead, dry husk behind.
They will laugh at your pain.
That’s why we stitch up their mouths with black thread. We cut out their eyes, and replace them with stones to stay safe from their tears.
This is what the world tells us about boys: They are hungry, too.
They grab food with both hands, stuff it in their mouths, careless of what they eat, never bothering to chew.
They are too loud.
They break everything around them, without even noticing it is there.
That’s why we catch them by the tail, so they won’t turn around and bite. That’s why we cut off their heads, fill their mouths with dirt, and bury them at the crossroads. That’s why we burn their hearts, because unlike girls, we know they’ll never feel a thing.
It is all true, and every word is a lie. Don’t believe anything anyone tells you about ghosts or devils.
*
The second time you see her, you think: This can’t be real.
Because it’s too perfect. It’s the Fourth of July, and you’re at yet another bend in the creek. (With her, it’s always water.)
The grass is dry, but it remembers rain. The creek—angry here—smells of mud, death, and time. Things have drowned here. Things have been swept away and forgotten. Things sink, and sometimes they rise. But you take the water for granted; you always have.
A bonfire leaps high, smelling of meat and burnt sugar and wood. There are fireworks, fractured light captured and doubled, each boom-crack echoing your heartbeat, and reverberating in your bones.
You are surrounded by people you see every day. They live behind counters in the local stores; they line porches, and spit tobacco; they drive the bus carrying you to school. Except tonight, they are strangers. Tonight they are demons. And in a world of strangers and demons, you latch onto the only girl you’ve never seen before. The only one you know for sure isn’t real.
She is solid and warm. The fireworks stain her with cathedral window colors. She smiles, and her teeth turn crimson, emerald, and gold. She is fierce and wild, too hard to hold. But you take her hand.
She leans her head on your shoulder. Her hair tickles your skin, and you smell her above and beyond the campfire, which is black powder and pine needles. She smells of soap and smoke, but also of water, of deep and sunken things. It’s a creek smell, and breathing it is drowning, but you do it just the same. You think: This is love.
It’s the Fourth of July, but this is where summer begins.
*
There’s a story they tell in Lesser Creek about a girl who drowned. She had just turned fifteen, or seventeen, or twenty-one.
Just shy of fifteen, she was sad all the time, without ever knowing why. There was nothing wrong with her, other than being fifteen—a world of tragedy in its own right.
The girl was hungry constantly, and never full. When she simply couldn’t stand it anymore, she went down to the creek, filled her pockets with stones, and lay in the deepest part of the water with her eyes open until she drowned.
If you go to just the right spot, where the water is the coldest and your feet don’t quite touch, you’ll hear her. It’s hard to be still, treading water, but if you hold your breath, make your limbs only a fish-belly flash in slow motion, never rippling the surface, she’ll whisper your name.
These woods are full of ghosts.
Near twenty-one, she was a farmer’s daughter. She got in the family way, and her parents locked her up, and forced her to carry the child to term. Maybe the baby was still-born, and maybe she delivered it screaming, bloody, and alive. Either way, she ran away the night it came.
She ran to the trestle bridge, and threw the baby off just as a train went howling past. Who can say which wailed louder, the baby or the train? Overcome by guilt, she threw herself after the child. Her body rolled down the slope, and the creek carried it away.
If you stand at the very center of the bridge and drop a penny, when it lands, you’ll hear a baby cry. Except sometimes it’s the lonely mourn of a train vanishing toward the horizon. And sometimes it’s a girl, just shy of twenty-one, weeping for her sins.
At seventeen, she was murdered. Her killer cut out her eyes, and replaced them with smooth stones. He stitched up her lips with black thread, and left her in the shallowest part of the creek where the water barely covered her.
The stories say her killer was a drifter, or the devil himself. They say he confessed the same day the murder was done, screaming it all over the town square. When everyone came to see what all the fuss was about, he wept, inconsolable.
He cut her eyes out, because she wouldn’t stop looking at him. He sewed her lips shut, because she wouldn’t stop whispering his name. They hanged him just the same.
All of these stories are true. Every one of them is a lie.
The girls of Lesser Creek leave flowers for the hungry ghost at the water’s edge, and burn candles in her nameless name. The boys bring pretty toys, and line them up all in a row. The old women bake oat cakes, sweetened with blood, and the old men mumble prayers. Each brings their hopes and fears, and such desperate love.
No matter what they bring, the ghost is hungry still.
*
The second murder comes late July. In-between, there are a string of assaults, a petty theft, one count of grand larceny, and a host of undocumented sins.
The boy follows the hoof-paw-shoe-hewn path through the branches to cross the shallow water near every day. He can do that, no matter what the stories say. The wavelets glitter bright, wash sweat and grime from his skin. His toes grip slick stones, and he never falls.
He makes another mark on the boulder’s side. They multiply like rabbits, like flies. They turn the grey stone dense and arcane. There is power here not found in the other graffiti. And the stone itself is rife with meaning, too—stolen kisses, secrets trysts. Oaths are sworn here, fated for breaking. It is all his doing. Or so the oath-breakers and kiss-stealers say. He drove them to it; it’s what devils are for.
He has a tally of at least a dozen-dozen, and it is only July. The girl’s space is empty.
He watches her, sometimes, courting her soul slow, taking her time. She is hungry; the boy sees it in her eyes. But sometimes she smiles.
And when she does, he realizes his belly is empty, too.
The marks on the stone don’t fill him like they should.
Once upon a time, he was a musician. Once upon a time, he was good at cards. He was driven out of town, beaten with a stick, hung at midnight. His heart has burned countless times. He has tricked and been tricked, loved the wrong man and the wrong woman. It is always the same in the end.
Once upon a time, he walked the rails. Once upon a time, a canvas strap bit his shoulder, soaking sweat, gaining dirt. Walking, he ran. He trusted wrong, sleeping in open box cars, warming his hands by vagrant fires. He gave too much of himself away. He swapped stories, and accidentally told the truth.
He found himself dead, spit dirt from a shallow grave, and walked again.
He jumps on stumps, and has a quick hand. Dice and cards always fall his way.
Even though the marks crowding the stone aren’t as triumphant as they should be, the boy makes another one, and drops the sharp stone. The creek vanishes it, a card up a magician’s sleeve.
This is what the boy and the girl both know, even when they made their deal: It isn’t fair. They have been given roles to play—ghost and devil, hungry to the very end.
The summer ticks past, far too slow.
*
There’s a story they tell about the time the devil came to Lesser Creek. The townspeople chased him all along the rails. They caught him, and killed him, cut off his head and buried it upside down. They drove a spike through the ground to make sure he couldn’t pick it up again.
But will-o-wisps still drift under the trestle bridge in the dead-black of night, the devil’s own lanterns, leading the damned to the water’s edge. And if you walk along the ties at midnight and count thirteen from the moment you pass under the bridge, you’ll hear the devil breathing behind you. If you take one step back, you’ll find the twelfth tie missing and he will reach up and drag you down to hell.
The first time the devil came to Lesser Creek, he was just a boy, no more than seventeen. He committed a crime, or maybe folks just didn’t like the way he looked at them. Maybe the summer was too hot, and tempers were too short.
Even though he looked just like an ordinary boy, they pulled up rail spikes, and nailed them right back down through his feet and his hands. When they came back after three days, the body was gone.
No one brings flowers or blood-sweetened cakes to the old rail line. When old women pass, they spit, and old men still drive an iron spike between the twelfth and thirteenth ties on moonless nights to this very day.
It is a lonely place.
When the devil came to Lesser Creek the second time, he made a deal with a drifter who dared to skim stones along the steel rails just to hear them sing. If the man brought the devil twenty souls by summer’s end, his own would be spared, no matter how he sinned.
It was a mass-murder summer. A fire and brimstone summer. Preachers thundered through the churches of Lesser Creek, damnation heavy on their tongues. The air clotted thick; wasps drowned in sweat, humming between the pews and banging their heads against the stained glass. Birds fell from trees, hearts baked within the delicate cages of their bones.
All the fans stopped turning. Ice cream sizzled before it could touch the cone. Soda went flat in every fountain. Cold water forgot to flow, except in the creek where no one dared go. Wives beat their husbands; fathers cursed their daughters. Boys burst into tears for no reason, and kicked their dogs.
And the drifter came, and the drifter went, and bodies piled like leaves in his wake. No one could ever say if it he did the killing, or not. But every man, woman, and child in town swore up and down they heard laughter echoing along the train tracks, and it was the devil’s very own.
*
The next time you see her, you know she is a ghost, because she kisses you. And girls like her don’t kiss you.
You are sitting side by side, hand in hand, by the creek, always by the creek. Her feet are next to yours, relaxed where yours are tense. Your footprints sink into the mud. Hers are ephemeral, and disappear.
You grip her hand too tight, and sweat gathers between your palms. Planted in the dirt, feet in the current, you look toward the rock snagging the center of the stream. Graffiti scores it. It is a magical, mystical thing; a totem centering all the summer days in danger of flying off the edge of the world.
How un-solid these liminal years of your life are. At any moment, at every moment, you are in danger of losing cohesion. The rock in the center of the stream is eternal. It says X was here, and that is real—tribal and shamanistic. Written in stone it can’t be denied. If you vanish, the rock will remain, a record of your being.
Here and now, she kisses you, and it grounds you, too. It is the culmination of a summer’s worth of desire. It is the inevitable consequence of bridges and fireworks and the muddy banks of creeks. It is the only outcome of frog-song and bug-drone, and all the other milestones of the season.
And she says, or doesn’t say, but you hear, “All I want is one little piece of your soul. It won’t hurt, not yet. You won’t even know it’s gone until much later. One day, you’ll wake up, not in love with me anymore, old, and looking back on your life, and wonder where that part of you went. It’ll sting for a moment, and you’ll move on. Is that so bad?”
Her fingers lace yours, and the whole time she looks at the water, not you.
She says, “I’ll fill you up with me, so you’ll never know anything is missing.”
She pauses so you think she regrets what comes next. It’s what you’ve always known was coming since you saw her on the bridge.
She is a hungry ghost.
Here and now, you love her for her pity. You pity her for her love. It isn’t fair. And so you forgive her, because you’ve been hungry, too.
She says, “Before you agree understand that if you give me that piece of your soul, it’s mine forever. That’s how love works. It consumes you. The moment it ends, you can’t see past it to a day down the road when you won’t be split open and bleeding for the whole world to see. In the wound, you can’t see the scar, or even the scab. Memories and hindsight belong to the future. This is here, this is now.”
You know how this will end. You have always known how this will end.
You hold her hand, tighter than you’ve held anyone’s hand before, and you agree. You give her your soul.
The summer seems very short now. You have so little time.
*
A third murder rolls around mid August, but it holds no joy. The boy is winning by default. He longs for a reversal, a revolt, a turn of fortune. He longs for a trick to grab him by the tail.
He never asked for this, no more than she did. He is a ghost, and she is a devil. The woods have always been haunted, and so have they.
Vandalism. Arson. A near-murder that doesn’t quite take. He whispers temptation. He pours jealousy, hate, venom, all into willing ears. In the end, he’s powerless. So is she. They only take what the world gives them.
He makes another mark, drops the stone in the water. The creek chills him. He wades to shore, wishing the summer would end.
*
She tells you it is over.
She told you; she is telling you; she will always be telling you. And. It. Is.
Welts rise on your skin. Psychological, but so real.
Of course, it had to happen this way. Nobody loves you, ever loved you, ever will. And part of you knows, bitter, that you are being oh so dramatic, so you laugh. But you cry, too. She warned you, told you what she was doing as she did it, but you handed your soul over anyway, because you wanted it so goddamned bad.
Even though, deep down, you know, godfuckingdamnit, you will never be good enough to be loved. Someone else will always win, always be better than you. You will always be hungry, while everyone else is full.
So you walk the trestle bridge, where you can just see the water. You think about the summer, all the people who died, lied, cheated, and stole. The whole fucking town is going to shit, but what do you care? And what would they care if you jumped right now?
They probably wouldn’t even notice you’d gone.
But you don’t. You won’t. And you turn away.
And maybe someone looks back at the sound of something heavy never hitting the rails. And maybe they don’t. Because everyone knows these woods, that water, those trees, these rails, are haunted anyway.
*
She makes a mark on the stone, one shaky line. He stands on the shore, arms crossed, watching. He wants to smile, but it makes his cheeks hurt, as if the rock-hard bubblegum left splinters in his skin. His feet, planted in the mud, ache. He remembers running; she remembers drowning. In the end, it is the same.
In this moment, he loves her for her pity, and he pities her for her love. Could she, would she, ever pity him?
By the stone, she wants to weep, but she smiles, and it tastes of tears. She looks at him, standing in a slant of sunlight, watching her.
One soul, her tally.
He reaches for her, their fingers almost touching.
It is never enough.
His side of the stone is crowded; she has one single soul to her name. It is sweet, oh so sweet, but it won’t sustain her to winter’s end. His souls, crowded thick as they are, are candy-floss, melting on the tongue and never touching his belly.
They have played this game before, and no one ever wins.
She is sick to death of hunger and drowning. He is sick to death of treachery and spit-sealed deals. But they are what they have always been, and what they always will be.
These are the stories they tell you about hungry ghosts, and hungry devils. Every one of them is a lie, and all of them are true.
He reaches for her; she takes his hand. His fingers pass right through hers, leaving her hungrier still. His sigh is the echo of a lonely train running the rails out of town; hers, cold water running over stones.
The season ticks over to fall. A leaf drifts down, caught by the current and swept away, and they look to the bridge just visible through the thinning trees. They know, they both know, next summer they will stand there and start all over again.
And they ache, hoping next time they will remember, next time, they’ll get it right.