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Rist brushes Jane's long hair in front of a large floral carved chestnut vanity desk mirror. The looking glass is empty of Jane's snow pale face. She's still not used to her absence in the mirror, no representation, as if she's nothing. Not even her shadow shows itself upon the bedroom's hollow facade. She thinks about how this's all a joke and her soul imprisoned body is laughing like legions of tiny osteal fenestra eyeballs from somewhere inside of her existence.

Then she stares deeper into the mirror and notices something move in the depth of the reflection. In the background. In the murkiness. She can witness the dim green glowing lights like eyelids, one by one, opening. As she continues to watch, unblinking, they become clearer. Focused. Apertures of souls. They're blinking and watching her like a blurry staring vignette obscurely bordering primate eyes. Pupils like diseased planets built of cemeteries. Jane turns to look at the room behind and there's only the furniture and Rist. She turns back and the green groaning glow's gone from inside the mirror.

Rist is still in a subtle shock watching the absence of Jane's reflection. She pokes her several times, inspecting her finger while it touches nothing in the looking glass.

"Holy shit, Jane. Wow! This mirror is broken!"

Jane decides to have fun with this strange moment between friends.

"What if I'm the reflection and the mirror is the real world that I no longer exist in? Can reflections die? Maybe you're also a reflection but you can see the real you because you still exist over there. What's the difference between Alice In Wonderland and Alice In Chains? Nothing."

"I appreciate your attempt at humour but you're not funny and this is unsettling."

"I know. It's disturbing for me, too. Though somehow less unsettling than waking up at the bottom of a mire."

"Please stop, if not for me, then for what's left of the little self respect you have."

"How can I stop? I can't even die."

Rist smiles and gives a short laugh. "I feel like a teenager. This makes no sense. It's nice to feel young again."

"I don't feel young. I just feel lost and in a few moments, when the sun rises, I think I'll feel dead."

Rist shakes her head and finally puts makeup on Jane. Black mascara for the green glowing night time eyes and a light brown blush with cranberry red lipstick. When she's finished, Rist crouches and places her hands on Jane's naked bent knees. One of her hands moves down and rubs Jane's calve like she's slowly trying to warm that part of her leg.

"Maybe, while your laying in bed, unable to move, I'll bring people over to have a mock funeral for you. Except the joke will be on them because you'll actually be dead. I'll dress you in black and cover you in white roses from my flower garden in the backyard."

"You have a flower garden in the backyard?"

"No, but I'm sure I do in a reflection somewhere. Don't mess up your face while you're dead, please."

Jane smiles. The fresh hint of morning hits the room and Jane slouches into Rist's arms.

                 ****

Jane wakes upon the queen size bed in the room where Rist was doing her makeup. A mirror on the ceiling reflects the better parts of atoms and a pillow crease of nothing. A painting on the wall is more of a looking glass.  Rigid Blackwood coal frame borders the brush strokes of a dead horse with flies eating sugar from its head and reminds Jane of herself within herself. A Godivean woman kneels and mourns, displaying her bare back upon the chest of the dead animal. She is like the scent of dead flowers crushed in a half read book. And there's a raven. Always a raven with Jane.  Its pouring eyes watch the fourth wall like a spiralling Möbius. Jane remains like a funeral and notices hidden names like eulogies written in the somber romanticism. "Terra" is stroked on the beak of the raven like a fissure exposing the other side of the watercolours through the black bird. The other name is of a birth mark on the horse's hip, "Judith." Oddly, that name is the least gloomy part of the painting. The rest is like lead in the mouth of a dog wearing a collar with four carpenter nails hammered into its neck.

The painting is a ponder of beauty and terror and the mire girl breathes and her body unfastens from death. She feels tingles and sensations and the air of the olden room and the clothes upon her.

Jane wears a black wrapped dress over a long sleeve gray reglan. She sits up like a resurrection and white roses tumble softly from her clothes. She smiles and jumps off  the corridor chess pattern comforter, watching petals fall to the floor.

Black knee high boots lay at the foot of the bed. She steps to them and takes them and slips her right foot into one of the shiny, steel toe shit kickers. Jane sits and raises her foot above her head and pulls the boot zipper toward herself and then applies the same procedure to the other boot.

The skinny, drop dead blonde rises and walks around the creaking, pinkish oak hardwood floor to try out the new killer footwear. They're a perfect fit, holding her feet and calves naturally like shadow hands. She taps a foot against the wall. Definitely steel toes.

Comfy!

She opens the overly stiff creaky door and walks through and beyond the master bedroom, witnessing down at her heel to toe movement. Jane goes through the short hall and bangs down the stairs and into the kitchen. Rhie and Rist are sitting at the table drinking coffee and chewing on some kind of dead animal jerky. Their eyes look tired.

"Good morning!" Jane sings.

Rhie looks at her expressionlessly. Rist smiles and takes a sip of coffee.

"Do you like your boots?"

"I love the boots! They're amazing and they fit perfectly!"

She begins modelling and bending over with her ass facing them, running her hands up and down her right leg while not breaking eye contact with Rist.

Rhie stares and forms a wide smile across his face. Rist notices his gaze and pinches one of his nipples.

"You know," he says, "that's the wrong move if you're trying to get me to avert my eyes."

"Jane, you better stop before Rhie explodes like a water balloon filled with something other than water."

Jane stands and shrugs. She finds a third chair in a corner of the kitchen and drags it into the seating arrangement. She sits down and patters one finger after the other on the laminate table, producing tapping sounds with her fingernails. She's very much trying to annoy the two adults in the room. Rist sighs and peers at Jane from over her coffee cup.

"We'll take you to the leader of the Ghosts soon. We need a coffee at the moment. It was hard to sleep today, what with an actual dead body in our room. And Jane, you weren't breathing. You looked just as I saw you ten years ago and it hurt to see you like that."

Jane's smile disintegrates. She leans back in her chair and averts Rist's gaze.

"The boots were a gift that I was bringing for you from the city to the outpost. I never got to give them to you. You died before I could. It's not your fault. It's just seeing you like this today brought up a lot of shit that me and Rhie had come to terms with. And not only about you but about other horrible events that happened at the same time. And no, I don't want to talk about it any more than I already have. It's too painful."

Jane folds her arms and nods and stands, moving the chair away with her calves. She doesn't want to look at either of her friends. She decides that she needs some air, so she turns and leaves the kitchen. Jane makes her way to the front entrance and opens the creaky hing storm door. She steps into the chilly sweaty fresh outside darkness and lets gravity sit her upon the porch swing. It has a steady creak when she moves back and forth like a hovering rocking chair. Jane stops the moving motion when it occurs to her that the groaning creaks will be like finger tapping. She doesn't want the adults to come outside. Jane abandons her attempt to feel like a teenager and goes back to whatever lack of timeline the caesura of her memory positions her age. Is this how she used to feel in her old life? She sighs.

Jane watches two mice, a big one and a little one run across the front yard and disappear under a blue tarp. The wind chasing them seems to laugh at everything in a language that only it can understand. It carries with it a horrible sound. Somewhere an owl is ripping apart a rabbit. The air smells like dirt and trees and old paint and fresh blood.

She feels the wooden arm rest of the chipped burgundy swing and it's as rough as the callous silvery tree it was made from, before a human made a simulacra of it. She notices four knots in the single piece of timber that she's resting her arm on and begins picking at one of the knots with her thumb. Jane falls into her mind.

Why did I have to die? I could have been someone...something completely different. I could have been like Rist or someone's mother. I could have been with whatever the fuck his name is or was. What was so special about me that I was the one who had to give the ultimate sacrifice? I guess the sad part for me is that I'm not even tired. I feel like I'm just getting started. I don't want to die and yet I'm willing to go to my death again because I've already been there. And I know there's more to me. I really don't feel whole. Maybe I'm a perspective that's one part of a collection of other perspectives.

Jane watches the night and witnesses shadows moving in the darkness with her glowing eyes. There're other green eyes out in the conurbations, like there were watching in the endless wreckage landscape of the city's peripheries and also in the makeup mirror of Rist's room. They blink like twinkling stars as they stare. Are they ghosts? Revenants? The shadows of people long since extinguished? What are they? Jane looks away and from her side eye view, she watches the many green eyes dim and disappear.

She whispers to herself, "I wonder what they're afraid of?"

Jane tries to capture the thoughts she had before the green glow intermission.

Maybe I need to get away from Rist. It could be enough for her that she knows that I exist somewhere in this world. I don't want her to suffer and it seems as though that's exactly what I bring into her life. Horrible memories that will get unpacked over and over again. I'm lucky, in a way. I have none of those memories. I guess that's the silver lining in being the one to die versus being a survivor. Having no memory actually makes sense now. I still think that my body hates me, though.

A fluttering sound like the pages of a book blown by the wind brings Jane out of her cavernous mind as a raven lands on the porch ledge before her and jumps around in quizzical circles over and over again, like it's trying to pluck its own fragile tail feathers. Then it abruptly stops and faces Jane with its neck and beak moving up and down and slowly toward her, like it's agreeing with her and it wants to tell her something. It opens its black beak and lets out a long caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaw. And then a series of different caws. Quiet and loud and also crackly and slowly like a record moving back and forth under a needle. Then it spreads its long wings and looks like it's growing vertically by at least four feet. The bird looks menacing as it continues to stare at Jane with the burning green eyes of a feathered dragon and the body of a blackened archaeopteryx.

Jane bites her lip. Then the mire girl's mouth opens as wide as it will. Her eyes become saucers because she's no control over this action. Fear and anxiety begin eating Jane like utensils. Her body throws itself into a kneeling position upon the rotted plank porch floor. The porch swing knocks her in the middle of her back, pushing her closer to the raven. Her head tilts back and she feels her jaw break. The sounds of cracking and popping are almost as horrific as the pain. Her cheeks tear open, spurting blood everywhere, creating a much bigger mouth. Tears trickle down her temples and into her hair as her head tilts back, away from her lower jaw. She can't move or scream.

The raven flies like an avian dinosaur directly into Jane's broken mouth. It crashes into the back of her throat and buries it's talons into her flesh and spine. Then Jane's jaw lifts toward her tilted head and her tilted head lifts toward Jane's jaw and her teeth snap shut. The raven explodes into a mess of blood and bones and broken calamus and afterfeather and skin and talons. Jane feels herself siphon the blood from the creature, pressing her tongue hard into the roof of her mouth, squeezing every morsel of screaming marrow. Once done, she finds control of her body again. Her jaw's no longer broken and her cheeks are no longer torn, they've melted back together. But her eyes go crazy with nystagmus, like her experience with the rat. She remembers it's poor little vermin face and spits feathers and little bones and a beak. The mire girl crumples to the ground and violently sobs. She breathes and tears fingers into her hair and releases a blood vomiting scream.

"What am I!"

She bangs her head into the deck floor boards then  quickly stands and decides that maybe she needs to run away and far away and never look back. The mire. The dark forest. The slaughter house. She can't run away from her own body, though. There's no escape...

Then the moment fails as she feels someone wrap their arms around her and whisper, "shhhh," into her ear. Rist holds her as Jane falls back onto the slivery worn deck boards and turns and curls into the fetal position, crying into Rist's shirt.

"It's ok! It's ok! Whatever just happened, it's over. You killed a bird, I think. It's dead. It's over. You're alright, Jane. You're alright."

Jane shakes like the rat she destroyed a few nights ago. "I'm afraid this might be just the beginning. I think I'm losing my soul to my body."

               ****

It takes a long time for Jane to calm. This isn't the first time she's had zero control over herself, over her body, but it's the worst experience so far. It's like the raven was in charge, using it's invisible hands to hold her down and break her jaw. Then again, maybe her body was somehow in control of the raven. She could see it fly into her mouth even when her head was touching her neck. How is that possible? How is any of this possible?

Jane thinks in a thin italic slant.

I have to try and let this go. It happened and I don't understand. Is this something that I'm going to have to get used to? If it is, I have no choice. I will. I have to. Ok. I'm fine now. You're fine, Jane. Stand up, brush it off and show Rist that you're ok.

Jane still really wants to go to the Ghosts meeting place and become a member, though she doesn't think that she needs a mask. She'll still take one. This is something she's been looking forward to. Apparently, to become a member, she needs two vouchers. Rist and Rhie will certainly do that for her. Then, she must pass whatever test their leader has in store for her. The leader calls herself "The Grand Ghost."

Jane loses it laughing when she hears that title. "That's so fucking lame!" Rist just smirks and nods her head.

Rist insists on redoing Jane's makeup and as soon as she's satisfied, the three friends are on their way to the Ghosts.

              ****

Rist and Rhie have their skull masks on, glowing beside Jane with her nighttime eyes. They run like apparitions through tall grass and nettle yards and climb over galvanized chain link fences, feeling the blurring, emboldening sweaty freedom within the midnight dystopian city.

The meeting place is an old fair ground where a toppled Ferris wheel lays destroyed upon a carousel. Aluminum horse heads and legs and tails lay twisted and bent under the passenger cars and rust metal scaffolding. Jane can see a birth mark on one of the horses that looks like the birth mark from the dead horse brushstroke of the painting in Rist's room. The hip is sticking out from the wreck just above broken colour glass that's shattered upon the cement like a mosaic waiting to be collected by ancient artisans made of stain glass religion.

Many other Ghosts are haunting the fair ground and the surrounding neighbourhood. Jane can witness them approaching through the perimeter and distant darkness. As they come together, most look Jane up and down like she's a hunger artist side show with glances and glares like they're witnessing the living dead for the first time. They're certainly noticing her wild, malachite eyes. Double takes turn into stares. A tall Ghost whispers in the ear of a short Ghost, "Is that who I think it is?"

A circle forms around Jane. All of the Ghosts fold their arms and watch blankly in her direction. No one speaks language for a long time, only the wind rattling the destroyed Ferris wheel scaffolding. Then, a lanky woman wearing a white floral crown made of tiny bones situated above her skull mask pushes through the panoptic wall of the undead simulacra and casually walks over to Jane. She smells of lemongrass and sage and cerement and meat and sex.

"So! You want to become a Ghost? In order to become one of us, you must die. Symbolically yet in a physical way, of course. This is done by unfair combat. Whatever it takes to place you at deaths door without permanently injuring you. When you wake up, in no matter what state, you will be a Ghost. Capeesh? This is your sui caedere!"

Jane witnesses this woman in the eyes the whole time. The Grand Ghost doesn't return such vision for very long, in fact, she smells somewhat afraid as she breaks eye contact. Jane wonders what this could mean.

Then the woman yells like an announcer at the Ghosts who form the circular barrier around Jane, "Are you ready for the ceremony!"

All of the other Ghosts break out in yells and howls and whistles. There's loud stomping of boots and clapping of hands as the Grand Ghost exits the circle.

A Ghost on Jane's right runs at her and clocks her in the face with a hard glove fist, dropping her to the knee scrapping cement. She rubs her cheek and gets up and stalks the Ghost. He swings at her head with a wild punch. She evades his fist and grabs his arm and twists the elbow behind his back, cracking it and flipping him hard onto the concrete, smashing his back onto his broken arm. She then stomps his face until he stops trying to get up. His nose is a meaty mulch cartilage mess.

Jane thinks like a times new roman.

Was this guy being initiated too? He had no idea what he was doing. If they're all like this, it's going to be awhile before I'm knocked out.

Jane raises both arms and slowly spins, making a "bring it" "come to me" gesture with her hands. She smiles the whole time.

Two Ghosts attack her. One grabs her from behind and the other begins feeding punches to her ribs and stomach like a true pugilist. Jane kicks the Ghost holding her from behind in the crotch and head butts the other in the face. She sweeps the legs out from underneath the Ghost in front of her and slams her knee into his skull, knocking the pugilist out. The Ghost behind her grabs her hair and wraps her in a choke hold. Jane grabs his head and drops her ass to the ground. The Ghost's chin connects with the top of Jane's skull. He stumbles back, holding his broken jaw and Jane kicks his legs out from underneath him. She doesn't attack any further with him, he's having a problem breathing. Winded. She's not sure he'll chew ever again.

Three more Ghosts enter the inner circle. Two women and a very tall, well built man who flexes extremely ripped even with a hoodie on. He cracks his neck and lunges at her. She jumps toward his face with a drop kick and connects her heal with his left eye and temple. His face hits the ground and she lands on her feet. Jane is getting the impression that these people don't really know how to fight very well. But how does she know how to fight with such knowledge? Rist did say "superhero." Then the two women attack as one. She blocks some of the punches and kicks but eats others aimed at her legs and back. Jane takes a punch to the kidney and falls to one knee, pressing into a rough stone, cutting into her skin. The two women continue the onslaught and it's her face they're after now. Uppercut after uppercut bounces Jane's head back, whiplashing her neck and cutting her chin open.

They're getting tired. I'll make them pay for going after my face.

One of the women gets a little too close and Jane doesn't waste the opportunity. From her knees, Jane jumps up and swipes the Ghost on the cheek with a sneaky elbow timed just right, making the damage severe by using the Ghost's own momentum against her. That Ghost falls to the ground and doesn't get back up. A tooth protrudes from the woman's mask.

The other woman grabs Jane's hair, pulls her down and connects with numerous knees to the face. The girl from the mire stands and gets her footing. She plants her feet, picks the Ghost up by her legs after eating another knee and smashes her shoulders into the cement ground. The Ghost's head bounces off of the concrete. She looks like a skull fracture.

Jane falls on one knee over the unconscious Ghost. Another rough stone presses on her Patella. Blood gushes from the mire girl's lips and both eyebrows and her chin and nose. She knows the wounds won't last long because she can feel her body already healing. Jane brushes the hair from her face and gives a cracked, high pitch scream of savage defiance.

I must look like a monster, what with the blood on my pale skin and the animal glow in my eyes.

Then four menacing men enter the inner circle holding Louisville baseball bats. They're laughing. They mean to end this ceremony quickly.

Jane says, "So...fellas...I see that you want to be turned into popsicles."

She can hear Rist shriek as the first bat breaks Jane's jaw. Then the other three get involved and pummel her. They don't stop. Jane falls to the ground in the fetal position. With every swing another bone's broken, organs mulch, her skin becomes a pulpy dark claret mess. Thoughts dawn like every morning death that this isn't the advertised ceremony. They're trying to murder her.

This really fucking sucks...

When they're done, she's a puddle of liquid meaty maim spread like a gore pavement. Her vision is of shadow and she listens to a type of breathing like crackling and wheezing ascending from within her, climbing her spine like a noose rope into her brain. She looks at her eye lids and witnesses her reflection in them. The monster is smiling back with the fangs of a terrifying intention. In this instance, Jane is happy to lose control. It bares all its teeth and places Jane in a balcony seat to enjoy the a thespian butchery that's about to darken the darkness. She can hear it slouching away from the endless theatre of her mind and up into the reality of her situation.

Two women sit on either side of her position on the balcony in her mind's theatre. One is completely naked and has coppery green grey hair and is young and made of freckles but also worn like a century of weather upon a stone. The other in wearing a red dress with white polka dots. Her hair is pitch black like the feathers worn in the hair of arctic fires. They look physically identical in certain ways. The woman in red says, "I've been here before." The naked one looks confused by this comment but nods in acceptance. Jane feels like she knows them, like they're parts of her but not parts of her memories that might be returning. Each woman takes one of Jane's hands and they stare out through Jane's green glowing eyes. The naked woman smiles at her with troubling yet comforting eyes.

They watch the corporeal world.

What's left of Jane's body writhes and cracks on it's own as it gives external existence the impression that she's sill, somehow, alive. Jane's body stands and curls a broken, chipped tooth smile past it's face.

In the distance, she can hear someone say that it looks like she wants more. However, her ears are completely fucked, so maybe no one said anything.

A baseball bat comes blurring toward her head and this visitant version of Jane catches it in her hand without anyone noticing her move a muscle. She pulls the bat and the owner of it close to her face beyond the vision of Ghosts. Jane's body grasps the man by the back of the head and proceeds to rip his throat out with her bare teeth. She chews his crunchy Addams apple and swallows its bits down her gullet. This creature with pale horseman death glowing eyes quickly drains the Ghost's blood and drops the dead weight and stands with a Louisville synecdoche in her hand, watching in slow motion as the other three Ghosts attack.

She focuses on the biggest bat wielder and summersaults toward him. He swings and she drops under his bat and slides underneath between his legs and grabs his genitals and rips them out like pulling a weed by its roots. Blood sprays and gushes from of his torn crotch as he soundlessly screams his teeth onto his tongue, biting it completely off. The mire girl smashes the bat against his right knee, shattering the bat and the knee. The Ghost lets out a whimper of insanity and bleeds to death before his body folds twitching limbs and torso upon the hard cement.

The other two take numerous swings at her back. Jane feels nothing as she watches from within herself. Her body eats a smashing Louisville to the face before she jumps on the Ghost to her left, tearing out so much of his throat that Jane can lick the inside of the back of his neck. When she lets go of his hair, his head dangles backward. Then she lets the body fall to the ground as it excretes its dying shit.

That's when the gun fire starts. The bullets spray her chest and stomach. One hits her between the eyes, blowing chunks of skull and brain onto the Ghost standing behind her. She falls to the ground, smashing what's left of the back of her mushy head onto the cement. She hears a blur of sound, Rist screaming and crying, someone yelling that this isn't how we do things.

Her mostly destroyed ears pick up on the vibrations of the Grand Ghost telling everyone that the pile of crap that is Jane was an abomination, like the things in the dark forest and the slaughter house. She can hear Rist repeating, "no....no....no....no...."

Jane's hearing slowly comes back into full use. Her body, given the time to heal, puts itself painfully back together. The mire girl's insides are that of a shifting mess of bone and muscle moving back into place. Minutes pass and the fairground is chaos around her.

"Rhie!" Shrieks the Grand Ghost. "Take her out of my sight before I get annoyed."

Rhie drops two skull masks on the ground. "No problem and go fuck yourselves, you murderous pieces of shit! That's our friend you just killed! She trusted us!"

The Grand Ghost places the barrel of her gun against Rhie's forehead. "Leave and never return or I'll kill you both!"

Rhie holds Rist, almost carrying her as they walk away.

Many other masks join Rhie's and Rist's on the ground in front of the Grand Ghost. Many words are spoken in disbelief and anger. One man spits in the Grand Ghost's face and is immediately beaten and dragged away. One woman shouts, "you've defiled our home with this act of cowardice!" She's shot by the Grand Ghost herself.

Jane watches as her friends leave and she feels her body become stronger and stronger. She's glad that they've left, because what's about to happen will be beyond her control. Anyone who doesn't escape the fairground now will be torn apart viciously and without mercy. The last thing these murderers will see is the blood soaked, green glowing eyes of a revenant. The grinning grim face of their death.