A Halloween Tale

“Do you really have a skeleton working here?”

I winced a little, and wanted to shout back at the customer outside. I’m a person, not a skeleton. But I left it at a wince. He couldn’t see me, anyway, as I was standing behind the partition in the cramped kitchen area of the restaurant.

In the back of my mind, I catalogued the wince as another little involuntary reaction I’d done without conscious thought. This gave me a speck of joy. Only a speck. People liked when I reacted physically to things, even if they wouldn’t say it. I know I got Hilary on my side after she saw me shrug for the first time. People were curious that way.

It was, again, only a speck of joy. I ducked my head and brushed my fingers over the white smoothness of my skull. I’d decided against wearing the red bow today. Someone called it tacky on Monday when I walked into the park, though they probably thought I wouldn’t hear. I guess that was just one person. Not representative. And it was the only feminine thing I had—there was the apron, hanging loosely from my neck and ending just below my hip bones. This, I’d learned, was something like a dress that every gender wore; indeed, it was the uniform here in the fine establishment of Seoul Bowl. It was no marker of my gender.

No, I shouldn’t walk out and talk to the man. He’d see me as a skeleton, and there was a very low chance that would translate to “woman”. More trouble than it’s worth.

I ladled another scoop of rice into the plastic bowl, and passed it on to Axel for the chicken and teriyaki sauce, the angry red hot kind. I always wondered how sauce could be angry. I had no tongue to experience that, of course. It did look red, though.

I refocused on the man speaking to Patrice at the till. It was strange, the things I could tune out that others couldn’t. I didn’t technically speaking, have ears—not even the three little ear bones they called ossicles in Human Physiology 1010; they’d long fallen out of my skull in the absence of tendons and muscles and the tight little stretch of tissue called a drum. The runes glowing within my skull—no, refocus, the man is speaking, Amber.

“… course, it doesn’t matter anyhow,” I caught him saying. I deflated; I’d straightened out my spine a little, so there’s another unconscious human reaction I mentally noted with joy. The man continued. “Just, it’s odd, isn’t it? A soldier of the Sorcerer, and now it’s working here at Titan’s World. I’ve been coming here since I was a kid! Just odd. Wouldn’t you say, Colleen?”

“My god, Brent, order already! You’re holding up the line.”

“Oh, right. Um. Three bowls of the normal, and…”

I listened to the order in a half-hearted way. That was entirely a metaphor, though even in a full-hearted human I wondered how it could possibly be literal. The man—Brent—concluded his order and then retreated with his partner and kid to the vague area in front of the stand customers always tended to reserve awaiting their food.

My arms had done the work of filling several black plastic bowls with rice in the meantime. That wasn’t nothing. I recalled the feeling of splitting I’d had to endure when I first managed to multitask. My brain was entirely… runic in some way science couldn’t quite quantify yet, so it was an open question if my kind even could multitask.

Apparently we could. The anxiety building in my chest—again, metaphor, though it didn’t feel that way—subsided. It didn’t entirely dissipate.

---

It was four hours later when my fully-conscious mind was brought back into the kitchen at the restaurant. Someone was tapping my shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” I started. It was difficult when your mind let you entirely ignore the outside world. I’d long ago learned humans couldn’t do that—or at least, not nearly as well. Loud noises, for example, would jolt them back into the present, something that never happened naturally with me.

It was Hilary who tapped me on the shoulder. I turned my skull in her direction, even though my sight wasn’t centered on the eye sockets within it.

“No, no,” she said. “You’re doing fine. You’re a machine, practi—oh, that’s, I didn’t mean. Like. I’m sorry. You’re really doing well, I mean.”

I was told humans didn’t like being compared to machines, so I wondered if I should take umbrage. But no, I really wasn’t bothered by that. “It’s okay,” I assured her. Would physical touch be appropriate here? I decided not to risk it, so I settled on a shrug. Ol’ reliable.

“Right. Anyway, I just got a call from Front Office. Ramona called out sick.”

“Hm.” This soon before her shift? As far as I understood the system, that would mean she’d just earned half a point. A bad sort of point, leading to disciplinary action if enough accumulated. “That’s tough,” I offered.

“Yeah,” Hilary said. “Anyway, that means I need you to head down to Frosty’s once Zeek’s shift is up. He’s heading home at five.”

I blinked. Metaphorically. I did some mental math. “I’ll head down there with…?”

“You’re doing great,” Hilary assured me, which didn’t seem relevant until she added, “and you’ll do fine on your own down there. Last week you took orders for an entire hour here, so I know you’re able to.”

Fuck. I hated taking orders, standing out publicly for everyone to see. But Hilary couldn’t see my emotions; in a human, those feelings would have twisted the face into an expression. I said, “Yeah, okay. Till closing?”

“You’d be a peach.”

A peach. A fruit, something sweet and therefore positive. But they also had pits, which were inedible to humans, so did that mean—? No, she was smiling and she reached out to squeeze the bones of my left forearm, the radius and ulna. This in combination was a conciliatory gesture, I understood. She meant peach as in sweet. I’m sure.

“Yeah. Thanks. A peach.”

---

Walking out onto the blacktop of this area of Titan’s World drew a good deal of attention. I kept my head angled downward, though without eyes it was functionally impossible for a human to recognize when my attention was on them. Still. With a steady pace, it would have been rude to interrupt me as I made my way to the small shaved ice stand. Thankfully, none of the park’s patrons did.

I exchanged a brief conversation starter with Zeek (“How are you?” “Fine, yourself?”) before informing him that I’d be taking the stand over. He patted me on the shoulder, then turned to walk back to Seoul Bowl to check in with Hilary before heading home. My understanding was that his age—fourteen years—meant he was not allowed to work past a certain time in the evening. I labored under no such restriction, though I was only technically ten years and five months old, as I had experienced nothing like the decades-long physiological maturation humans do.

I walked into the small wooden stand, which was cramped by the presence of the rather large machine that produced shaved ice. Several sticky bottles containing various syrups were haphazardly placed beside the cash register. I secured my purse on a shelf beneath the register, then stood, adjusted the nametag clipped onto my apron, and settled in.

I recalled after five minutes of relative stillness that this lack of motion might be misread by the humans milling around outside the nearby roller coaster queue. Indeed, when I shifted my head slightly to the left, a human who had been looking in my direction underwent a startle response. They then turned to their friend group, and I assume informed them of my presence. The group was well within the range of my hearing, though I had long learned it was impolite to exercise this sense outside normal human ranges.

One member of this group, a large fellow who presented male, approached the stand. I shuffled around a bit in the manner I’d long observed. He placed a palm on the plastic sill before the open window and said, “Hey! You sellin’ frosties?”

“I am,” I responded. The rest of the friend group was following timidly in his wake. “I’m Amber. May I take your order?”

The man—an adolescent, I judged—bent over and gave a little laugh of surprise. “That’s so weird! How can you, like, talk even?”

I pondered for half a second my response. The truth was, the mechanism that allowed me to speak was not well understood, much like the many qualities that allowed me advanced human-like cognition, hearing, and touch. I settled on an agreed-upon expression of ignorance. “Magic.”

“Right, right.”

“Did you want any shaved ice?” I said, as I ignored the whispers between others in the friend group out of politeness. A human doubtless would have difficulty discerning such exchanges at this distance. One of the girls, however, let out a cry of surprise as a gust of wind knocked her ballcap from her head. She chased after it, but the hat was surprisingly light and evaded her grasp for several seconds.

“Marissa, what the hell?” said another girl in the group with a laugh. The boy in front turned away and joined in laughter at the sight. Marissa struggled to form a coherent word as she continued pursuing her hat. Finally, it was thrown against a chain-link fence, allowing her to snatch it back in her hands.

“Are you really going to order, Davis?” another member of the group said.

“Oh!” The boy in front, responding to the name Davis, turned back to me. “Um, yeah. A large Tigers Blood, please.”

“Really?” This came from Marissa as she rejoined the small group circle now planted before my stand. “It’s, like, fifty degrees out here!”

Ah. My tactile sense allowed me some recognition of changes in temperature, but nothing so fine as a human’s. I could tell the difference between boiling water and liquid water near its freezing point, for instance.

Davis was stubborn in the face of this rebuke, however. “Yeah, so what? I grew up in Alaska. This is hot for us.”

Marissa expressed her disbelief with a shake of her head.

“It’s two dollars and fifty cents,” I informed him. He pulled out a wad of paper money, rummaged through it, then handed me a five-dollar bill.

I input the order into the cash register, and with a ding, the drawer opened. I counted out two crisp one-dollar bills, then carefully plucked two quarters from their drawer and placed them on the windowsill. I handed the bills to Davis hand-to-hand, as the wind might have otherwise blown them away.

“Thank you,” I said. “One moment while I prepare your order.”

“You’re, like, insane my dude.” Davis took his money and stepped back into the small circle of friends. “Wicked,” he added, though this wasn’t addressed to me, so I pretended not to hear.

I swiftly engaged the machine, filling the large plastic cup with shaved ice. Then, I placed it under the pump and delivered several applications of the red, sugary syrup, ensuring it permeated enough of the shaved ice for reasonable customer satisfaction.

I placed the finished order on the sill, and Davis took it. “Thanks, dude,” he said. “Hey, up here,” and he held up his fist. I hesitated before I recognized the motion. I formed my right hand into a fist and gently touched it to his own.

This drew another laugh from many in the friend group, but they wandered off, leaving me to my thoughts.

One word kept echoing—metaphorically—through my awareness. Dude. I shouldn’t let such a small thing affect me, but it never failed to. Customers rarely noticed the names printed clearly on our nametags. I had wondered if it was printed too small for easy reference, but this had been consistently disproven in numerous encounters. Perhaps most customers simply did not care. And customer assumptions, absent knowledge that my name was the rather feminine Amber, unfailingly defaulted to male.

I really should have worn the red ribbon. Had I lungs, I would have sighed; for practice, I slumped my shoulders and lowered my head.

---

Hilary came to the booth at 9:43 pm, seventeen minutes before the park closed. “You doing okay out here?” she asked, and I discerned in the tone of her voice genuine curiosity at my well-being.

“Well enough,” I said.

“Good. This place gives me the willies at night.” A shudder passed through Hilary’s frame, confirming her assertion.

“Is it the cold?” I was also genuinely curious.

“No, no,” she said as she pushed past me into the stand, closed the order window, and opened the cash register. She quickly began counting out the bills and coins within, consulting a readout on the register as she did so. “It’s, like… you’ve heard this corner of the park is haunted, right?”

Haunted. Interesting. “No, I was not informed.”

“Well, it is. My sister used to work down here a few years ago, and she said—eek!”

“Did she?” I said conversationally, before I realized Hilary had undergone her own startle response. She was looking through the closed order window, and I followed her gaze with my own visual awareness. There was something… a twist in the air, a tiny thread of light that defied my own recognition. Whatever it was, it hovered ten feet from the order window.

Hilary had pressed up against the back door of the booth. “Did… did you see…?”

I answered honestly. “I saw… something.” I included the pause to emphasize my ignorance.

“It was a little girl, but like,” Hilary gestured with her left hand, which still held a thick stack of twenty-dollar bills. “Like, I don’t know. Old-timey?”

I returned my awareness to the little thread of light, the twist in the air. It had drifted closer, but apparently Hilary could no longer perceive it. Was this a ghost? It appeared to me much differently than it had my human coworker.

“But that’s what my sister said. There’s supposed to have been, like, an old roller coaster here, fifty years ago.”

The park had opened forty-six years ago, so I doubted her accuracy. I did not voice this, however, as I did not wish to be rude, especially given her heightened state. “Yes?” I prompted.

“Yeah, and like, a girl died. First year the park opened, the coaster threw her, like, fifty feet.”

The thread of light slid through the closed window; apparently, it was not a physical object. I saw Hilary shiver, as if the temperature had dropped, though if it had, it was too subtle a change for me to notice. She shook her head, and I sensed her heartbeat had increased in rate.

“Sorry,” she managed. She quickly slid the rest of the bills from the register into the small vinyl bag at her side. “Can you close up the rest for me here’s the key thanks bye!”

Hilary pushed open the door and fled, leaving me alone with the thread of light I assumed was a ghost. The door slammed closed, a result of the force Hilary had applied as she retreated.

Strange. I stood there for half a moment, not really knowing how to proceed. The ghost continued to twist in the air before me. Slowly, I reached out my hand, wondering what the proper human response was in the presence of the ghost. Or if there was a proper response.

My left index finger passed through the thread, registering no physical sensation. Immediately, I felt… something. A flash of light, a sense I could not describe. I blinked and stumbled back from the light-thread.

The sensation was unlike any I’d felt. It was like the rushing of the wind, but also… something more, in addition. Something stressful, that was for sure. Otherwise, I had no reference to it in all my experience. I had no idea what it was. As quickly as the sensation had come, it had left.

I tried a different tack.

“Are you… um. Sorry. Hello, I’m Amber.”

The light-thread-ghost twisted in the air, moving in a way that reminded me of how humans acted when nervous. Slowly, one end of the thread slid toward my hand.

I held it out, and we made contact again. Once more, a sensation overcame me, though this was half-familiar. A sound that felt more tactile than I normally perceived. The sound was a word, and the word was a name. “Heather.”

The thread pulled back swiftly. Was this…? I struggled to comprehend. If this was a ghost, then… perhaps this was a memory of when they were—she was—alive? A memory of something spoken. Humans perceived sound differently than I did, after all.

“Uh… pleased to meet you, Heather,” I said.

The thread continued her cycle of nervous motion for a moment, then slipped out through the back wall of the stand and beyond my perception.