Linda’s annoyance with Marion was tripled by the fact that she was from the same state: a region worlds different from the vibrant college town where Linda grew up. Marion’s Texas was oil fields, mudding, and babies right out of high school.
Tristan handed the butter to Marion. Marion’s face twisted in confusion; the bread hadn’t been passed around, and it seemed as though Tristan forgot that butter was meant to go on top of something else. Marion nodded at the dish, as if in approval, and continued nodding, unsure of where to go from there.
“Here, honey.” Charity placed a slice of bread on Marion’s plate. Marion looked relieved.
No one ate. A camerawoman arrived with a tray of steaming pork, then sides: green beans, a bowl of baked beans, and a tray of corn on the cob. Linda’s stomach ached, and even though she knew that eating wouldn’t fix her particular butterflied affliction, she spooned generous helpings of meat and beans onto her plate. She grabbed the tray of corn, and as she stabbed with her fork at the juicy kernels, her fellow contestants stared her down. Did she dare? She requested the butter from Marion, slathered a thick glob across her cob, and bit in. The inside of a kernel squirted across the table, and a mixture of corn juice and butter dripped from the corner of her mouth down her chin.
“I love a girl who isn’t afraid to get messy!” Tristan said, and Marion snatched the corn tray and piled high her plate with cobs. Sabrina ate like a normal person, and Charity didn’t give in to animal temptation. She fixed a dainty plate and nibbled at a green bean.
“I heard you two took a walk.” Tristan pointed with his fork to Linda and Charity. “Are we becoming friends?”
“No,” Charity said. Linda’s body heated from head to toe.
The ground vibrated. It was enough to stop Linda’s train of thought, but not enough for her to be sure that the rumbling was real. But her dinner companions also wore puzzled expressions.
The ground shook, harder this time.
“Do you guys feel an earthquake?” Linda said.
Before her eyes, the wood seemed to quiver. This time, the floor didn’t stop moving. Tristan jumped from his chair and rushed to shelter inside a door frame.
“Ladies!” he yelled, motioning.
Marion sprung up after him, and together Tristan and Marion clutched at the frame. Sabrina dropped to the ground and scurried under the dining table. “The door frame thing is outdated,” she yelled, but Tristan didn’t hear her. Linda copied her friend. Charity followed. The three women lay balled up beneath the table, their dresses hiking, their knees pressed against the hardwood. The floor moaned and shivered, and Linda felt it against her knees. For a moment, it felt like flesh against her skin.
“Is this normal for an earthquake?” she said.
“No,” Sabrina said. “This is haunted shit.”
In that moment, Linda believed it. She was kneeling against the evidence of ghosts. Again and again, the floor shivered, its texture changing beneath Linda’s bare knees.
“Do you feel that?” Linda asked, and Sabrina shook her head in a silent yes. When Charity squeezed her eyes shut, Linda wished she could reach out and comfort the woman she’d thought incapable of fear. On the table, the dishes rattled as the wind outside picked up and whispered against the windows.
From the doorframe, Tristan screamed.
The house creaked like it was letting free one long sigh—then went silent. Linda waited, crouched beneath the dining table, palms pressed into wood that now felt like wood.
“It’s over.” Linda saw Tristan’s feet move as he took one tiny step away from the doorframe. “We’re safe now.”
Linda’s skepticism rushed back. She was on a reality TV show, in a house purchased by the network for a show about hauntings. A world constructed from romantics who thought of love as a game culminating in one life-changing ceremony that signaled the beginning of your actual life. For the next week, she would live in a constructed nightmare.
“I’m going to kill these producers,” she muttered, but when she tried to find the camera operator filming them hiding, she didn’t see anyone. She crawled from under the table. Tatum and Leo, the evening’s crew, hid beside Tristan and Marion, their cameras abandoned across the room.
“They spooked the camera dudes,” Sabrina whispered.
“Talk about unprepared,” Linda whispered back.
Linda wanted to ask Sabrina about what she’d said under the table; did she really believe in hauntings? Maybe Sabrina was a planted contestant, there to legitimize the spooky occurrences. Linda bit her tongue.
Tristan and the rest of the contestants returned to the table. When Linda bit into the corn left on her plate, the kernels’ hot juices dripped like sap from a tree, and she licked it from her fingers until nothing more remained.
Chapter Eight
Sabrina
As she stood from the floor on shaky legs, Sabrina excused herself. In the bathroom, she splashed water over her face, letting the cold droplets soothe the skin that burned from embarrassment. She had freaked out and given into superstition.
Her mother’s obsession with hippie intentions and manifestations had expanded to fill her entire self, until Sabrina, then an impressionable child, couldn’t help but cling to the power that it promised. If Sabrina wanted it bad enough, it would happen—and Sabrina wanted what her mother wanted for her: for her beauty to win over the world. In her older age, Sabrina’s mother’s soul pickled until it was too bitter to taste. Instead of gifts, she manifested curses.
It wasn’t the curses that killed Sabrina’s mom, but Sabrina wondered if the cancer started from those awful impulses, lodging itself in her throat until it grew to take her over head-to-toe. No matter how badly Sabrina wanted it, not even her fierce desire kept her mother alive. At first, she blamed herself; maybe, deep down, she wished her mother dead. As she grew older, she clung to rationality like a life raft.
Sabrina licked a finger and swiped below her eye where her mascara smudged. She reached into the drawer where she had hidden several lipsticks and pulled out her favorite shade of all-day pink. As she dabbed the stick against the areas that dinner had ruined, she remembered how her mother, then her sister, taught her this and all the rest. They bought her books on makeup application, weight maintenance, and sex appeal, alongside children’s adventure novels. Her mother wanted her to use her looks. Sabrina learned to do just that.
As she stared into the mirror, something shifted behind her. She turned, but it must have been shifting light. She pressed her hand to the wallpaper. Beneath her palm, a heartbeat that was not her own. She shivered as she ran through all the normal explanations: plumbing, electricity, a prankster on the other side of the bathroom, the earthquake’s aftershocks. I’m a goddamn nurse, she whispered to herself. I’m a rational woman.
Her sister, however, believed it all, and sometimes, Sabrina craved that surety. If manifesting were real, then her mother’s birth spell was real, and Sabrina’s purpose really was to win the heart of an eligible man, to exist for others to see and love.
Sabrina hadn’t told Tristan about her mother’s blessing, but his keeping her around suggested that he believed her purpose to be physical, too.
She removed her hand from the wall and shook herself back to reality. It had to be an aftershock. And there would be more. Mother be damned, there was no such thing as ghosts.
• • •
After dinner, the group convened in a parlor with an expansive ceiling of exposed beams. Two couches covered in coarse floral fabric flanked a giant glass coffee table. They took their seats: Tristan, Sabrina, and Marion on one couch, and Charity and Linda on the other. Tristan poured fresh glasses of red wine from a decanter while the camera operators filmed.
“I’m not used to earthquakes.” Linda swirled her glass like she knew jack shit about wine.
“That wasn’t an earthquake,” Tristan stretched an arm across the back of the couch. “Don’t you believe in ghosts?”
