My body is a haunted house that someone has shuttered with me still inside it. When it's humid, the bedroom doors swell too big for their frames. The cupboard doors rattle like loose teeth. Not milk teeth left under a pillow for the tooth fairy, but the opposite—shrunken and fractured from years of anxiety, the molars chipped, enamel worn down. If I’m a ghost and have no body, why can’t I stop eating? And why does everything I eat taste like the almond flour blueberry spinach pancakes you made that one September morning, on a health kick that lasted approximately three days, and why won’t the kettle boil no matter how long I leave it on the stove? Our friends came over for brunch before everything went to shit. They said nobody uses stovetop kettles anymore, only electric—faster, more convenient, with less toxic fumes to fill up the kitchen—but where would we have put one? Our counters were cluttered with all the food we couldn’t fit in the cupboards, and the fragile toothpick bones of mice (you swore the snap traps wouldn’t hurt them, they’d be dead before they knew what hit them, they couldn’t be allowed to live in the walls, chewing through wires like frayed nerve endings), and the love notes we lost somewhere between Ms. Jones’s sixth period algebra class and the sixth circle of hell. Do you want to grow old with me, Y or N? We used to keep a vase of flowers on the table and a fruit bowl near the window. Apples and oranges and bananas in winter, and sweeter, juicier fruits in summer—plums, peaches, apricots, sometimes even pluots and nectarines. By the first week in July, the bowl swarmed with fruit flies. Their tiny, swirling specks of hunger ended up in everything—our shoes, the kitchen sink, the whites of our eyes. I went to the greenhouse store and brought back a teacup-sized planter of sundews—those tiny carnivorous plants with leaves like curled up tongues, their tastebuds sticky and glistening. The prey struggles against the residue, working itself deeper into the trap, and the plant slowly digests it.

Our sundews killed the fruit flies, but also lured more of them inside. Their deadly sap imitates the floral sweetness of nectar, according to the info sheet, though neither of us could smell it. You could never smell much of anything. Once I thought I was having a stroke, but it was just your toast burning. Once, you came home after sleeping in someone else’s bed, and you didn’t understand how I knew. I didn’t bother to explain: not the smell of her skin, or the bitter tang of loneliness. Something more subtle. The north-side air caught in your lungs. The earthiness of a more expensive brand of nutmeg, which she sprinkled on your pancakes. Next time, you didn’t come back, and I was glad you didn’t. I’d rather haunt than be haunted.

You might be interested to know that I’m not too proud for clichés. I drift down the hall from kitchen to bedroom, rustling paper chains and cootie catchers. I flick the lights on and off, just for fun. Don’t worry. It’s not a message in Morse code, calling for help, begging you to come home. I’m not a vengeful spirit, just a bored one. Still, you sell the house and everything inside it—including the toaster, including the mouse bones. A young mother dusts the bookshelves and airs out the rugs. Her six-year-old daughter sits on the kitchen floor and pieces the mouse bones back together on a square of white cardboard. I watch her work. First the skull, then the cervical vertebrae, then everything else—the tibia and fibula touching at both ends, hollow in the middle. The chips of finger bone, still tiny even through a magnifying glass. The girl is smart. She fits the entire skeleton back together before gluing anything down—a slow, careful reconstruction.

Lindy Biller is a writer based in Wisconsin. Her fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Parentheses Journal, SmokeLong Quarterly, Passages North, and The Vestal Review. Her debut fiction chapbook, Love at the End of the World, was recently published by The Masters Review and is now available online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.