"I DON'T THINK THIS is a good idea."

My voice cracked like old leather, and I cleared my throat, desperate for water or new vocal cords—maybe a new life. Beside me, Amy hunched over in the passenger seat, her head deep in her cupped hands, elbows pushing divots into her thighs. My fingernails dug into the worn rubber coating on the steering wheel, finding the plastic core underneath.

"We agreed. We need an alibi," Amy said. And she was right. We had. Ankle deep in silt, fighting to erase the snapshot of our mother's ghost emboldened behind my eyelids, I would have agreed to anything.

But I kept all of those...thoughts to myself.

Amy continued, "Someone has to see us. Anywhere but there."

I let my gaze drift out the windshield into the crowded SuperSavers parking lot. The parking spots, divided by faded white lines, were color-coded in golds and browns. Makes and models from years past sat empty in the sunshine, waiting to welcome their trusty homemakers and lunchtime adventurers with sweaty interiors.

"Okay...okay...how should we do this?"

Amy sat up straight. Her face was expressionless. Her mouth was set plainly, indifferent. I doubted she would flinch if I stuck my fingers into her blank eyes and scooped.

"We'll flip for it," she said. "Heads: I go in, and you stand out by the van. Tails: you go into the store, and I'll stand outside."

It all seemed so casual, so reasonable, so simple. I couldn't disagree. If people saw us in public, no one would connect the rotted corpse along the creek bed to the Shippys. No one would suspect a crime because we'd committed nothing worse than shopping for groceries without coupons. I uncurled my stiff fingers and rubbed my hands together. The friction stung my dry palms. I was still alive, then.

The numbness was finally melting.

Amy had her infernal coin on her thumb, tucked and balanced against her fist. "Ready?"

I wasn't, but I nodded on cue.

"Call it," Amy said and flicked her thumb.

I heard my voice whisper, "Tails," as the quarter somersaulted, one elegant flash of silver at its peak. Afternoon light knocked on the windshield at the right angle, and I saw our reflections splattered behind the Barber's arc. The Shadow behind me darted. The semblance of an arm reached out and flicked the coin from its orbit. My stomach clenched. Amy snatched the coin mid-fall and slapped it, hidden, onto the back of her hand.

There was no reason even to look.

It was tails, sure as shit.

I don't remember leaving the van, but I must have because I suddenly looked up at the quick beep-beep of a car horn. The sun's glare on the chrome shocked my vision. I waved an apology and jogged to avoid the rest of the Cadillac's reversal; the soles on my sneakers peeled off the sticky tarmac with each stride.

Fucking tails.

Somehow I traversed the sea of parked cars to the front entrance of the largest grocer in Sterling Hill. SuperSaver was a whale-sized entrepreneurial expedition housing everything from diapers to wine, canned food, and paperbacks. The thrice-high red letters loomed above me as I crossed the barrier and left the hot concrete behind to enter an air-conditioned colossus.

I stopped just inside the sliding doors. Two slats of glass and metal hushed closed behind me. An array of produce greeted me. Complied by size and type—fruit vs. vegetables—each assigned displays and cases that could never touch. Carrots and apples, lettuce and oranges, all forced to watch one another at a distance, separate, until Fate, disguised as a shopper, threw them together in a cellophane skin and left them to roll in the metal bilge of a shopping cart.

Gingerly, I picked up a handbasket for camouflage. Closed-circuit television cameras watched me through bulky, fish-eye lenses. Their ceramic-like, grey faces were stationary but attentive, waiting for the perfect crossover of human motion and the field of their limited vision to prove pertinent. I stood in the CCTV beam, making sure whatever fuzzy image could be captured would be.

It was the plan, after all. The alibi. It was the same reason Amy now lingered outside in the parking lot, waiting beside the city van parked strategically under the veil of a tall street lamp that housed its security camera.

Drawing stale, sweet, compost-scented air in through my nose and out through my mouth, I focused on my single task:

Get milk.

Five aisles deep, the realization I was in trouble crept in through the soles of my shoes and wound its way up my legs, bypassing my crotch and lodging in my chest. Offshoots rooted my throat and spread prickly buds that bloomed giant, red petals behind my eyeballs, blocking my vision.

I didn't know it was a panic attack until I was too far in the middle—of the fluorescent-blanched SuperSaver and my emotional state—to stop. My heart raced. My sweaty palms clutched the handbasket, a shield. The bricks attached to my ankles trudged one step, then another, forgetting how to walk. Below, the buffed, linoleum floors puddled and seized. My body dipped. An elbow (mine?) brushed dry good boxes, macaroni boxes, off an aluminum shelf. Shitshitshit. Steel-strong hands compressed my skinny chest. Fingers tore the yellow shirt off my body and wadded it into a cotton ball, forcing it through tissue and bone to stuff up my lungs like mucus—

     Everyone has a ghost, see. Not the personal, dematerialized essence that co-exists with the fleshy body, although that is also true, and it glows like a lamp flame inside a glass chimney. No, everyone has a passenger. A follower. Someone or something that trails after or before. A deceased relative, enemy, or pet who insists on sharing space.
 
Ghosts ride the rails set by ordinary living. 

And there is no place emptier than a graveyard.

Most spirits are passive, akin to toilet paper stuck on a shoe, drug along with little effort. They know my presence, too. Stiffly, they turn their heads to watch me pass, boney hands gripping their charges. They are solid, mostly—the air around them shivers, rippling outward where the veil thins to let them through. If you've ever seen dry flowers, you can imagine their crunchy and half-bled-out colors, the centers darker than the edges. Men. Women. Kids. The kids are the roughest. Most of the time, they tug at shirttails and skirt hems, crying soundlessly. They don't know. They don't know they're dead. No one reacts, and it scares the fuck out of them, scares the bejesus out of their tremulous bodies. That's the crappiest goddamn shit to watch. The lonely lost kids. Blind fear ties them into knots, and they don't notice. They can't see me. It's the most unkind fucked up thing.

—But it wasn't the lazy, tidal drifts of dead that made me lightheaded. Instead, it was the living. Cold skated on my skin. I was naked. (In reality, my clothes stuck to sweat like feathers to tar, but I felt nude. I was a walking rack of ribs. My limp bits swinging to the same tempo as a pair of mismatched fruit twisted inside a produce bag.) Too many. Too fast. Men and women, elderly for the most part, fully clothed in collared shirts and sweater vests, pin-skirts, and thick, tan hosiery, roamed erratically, pushing shopping carts ahead of them with the finesse of battering rams.

Amy would ask me later what happened in those fifteen minutes I was gone, after we'd flipped the coin and before the ambulance. It confused her how a boy buying milk could wind up on the local 5 o'clock news. What could I say? That my body betrayed me. That it'd perceived benign surroundings as a threat and hiked my adrenaline high enough to put me so nearly into a coma that I could taste the saline IV? There was no reasonable explanation because logic didn't apply. I knew it was ridiculous, even in the middle, but I couldn't depart from the path.

Cool air from the commercial fridge washed over me as I hauled open the silver-rimmed glass door. My fingers grounded on the handle, and I inhaled the stale scent of old, freeze-dried dairy. My face was hot, clashing with the clamminess of my spine. I let the static hum of the refrigeration unit calm me.

A minute passed, then two. The labels on the bulbous plastic jugs and trim glass bottles reached out. I perused the different sizes of milk arranged in white rows inside the refrigerator and selected one shapely quart alibi.

Milk in hand, I shut the door. The rubber sealed, cutting off the thrum of the motor. For a moment, I was fine.

Then I saw him—the Shadow.

He appeared as usual, darkness looming, eclipsing my reflection on the glass door like a great bear raised on its hind legs. The pit in my stomach widened to accommodate his prickly energy.

I was too tired to fight the vision.

As I watched, the Shadowman lifted a hand and pointed to his right. His black, cloudy arm stretched impossibly long, skimming the glass surfaces of the refrigerators lining the wall, racing toward a revelation. There were hints of the ghost from the creek in his gesture. The correlation terrified me.

I didn't want to look.

That doesn't mean I didn't.

As I stood contemplating the milk on display, the aisle had emptied. The overhead lights abandoned their brightness in exchange for an even less appealing mood. The glow of the dairy cases remained strong, throwing an electric pallor over the broad, vacant aisle, ominously extending its length.

My breaths were short and explosive in my ears. My heart ceased beating altogether, and I strangled the glass neck of the damp bottle.

There was an endcap of waffle cones and sprinkles with grotesquely happy children printed across cardboard housing; I could see their primary colored outlines moving at a distance. Behind them, a man turned the corner with heavy steps, arms swinging loose at his sides.

He entered the aisle and stopped.

Recognition punched me hard in the throat because I knew him. It was the man from the creek.

He lunged.

I screamed.

On the evening news, witnesses claimed the scream was nothing humanly possible. One man reckoned I was possessed, which wasn't too far from my truth if it was left to me to decide. There was some debate about what kind of animal the sound resembled, and maybe I'd done it as a prank, stowing a portable tape deck on my person with a loudspeaker—a regular shithead.

I don't remember.

Suddenly, I was outside on the pavement, lying flat on my back. My pants were wet. I heard secondhand that I'd dropped the milk bottle, falling on shattered glass and milk in a frantic scramble. I hoped that was the only reason. There were people. A circle of unfamiliar faces. And hands. Hands with gloves.

Someone tossed out the words "possible drugs" and tried to correct them. I hadn't taken any, not yet. But Amy's voice cut ahead of my mumble, and her hands grabbed my arms, hauling me to my feet.

"No, no, he's coming with me...who am I?.... I'm his goddamn sister....yes, I have the authority...go fuck yourself," she said. "Give him room!"

I was her rag doll. Amy folded me into a walking position and wrapped her jacket across my shoulders, popping the collar to shield my face. Holding me tight, we maneuvered the crowd together, beelining for the idling van.

"I'm sorry," she said when we were safely out of sight.

"I know," I said.

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