The Carcass of the Ghost

It was only a matter of time before Franny had to kill her brother. They sat in her car, in a parking lot off the Daniel Webster Highway. And while he stared at the door to the record store, her gaze was fixed on the glove compartment. That was where she’d hidden the gun she’d bought at a Salem pawn shop while he watched the horses race at Rockingham Park. That was where her ticket to the future lay, the key to unshackle her from the chains of their past. She closed her eyes and prayed that they would leave soon, that they would get on with the third and final act of the third-rate production they called their life.

“Maybe she isn’t coming,” she told her brother.

He said nothing, had nothing to say.

“Are you sure it was ten years?” she asked. “Not fifteen? Not twenty?”

He fiddled with the cracked CD case in his hands, opened and closed the lid of it. Under his breath, he mumbled something that sounded vaguely like “She promised.”

“Promised what?” said Franny. “Promised a fifteen year old boy that, in ten years, they’d see who chose the better bootleg?”

Franny’s brother grunted.

“Don’t you think you’re taking the whole thing a tad too literally?”

He grunted again, then laid his head on the dash. His fingers played with the latch on the glove compartment.

“Let’s go home,” said Franny.

Her brother sat up straight and stared her down. His eyes were already dead. She wished she could have shot the poor wretch right there, put him out of his misery. “Don’t you remember that night?” he said. “Don’t you remember? You were right there. It wasn’t... I’m not—”

She placed two fingers on his lips to quiet him. She remembered all too well, try as she had to forget. “She isn’t coming,” said Franny. But in the silence that followed her proclamation came the sign he’d been waiting for, the proof that she was wrong.

The car shook at the deafening pop of an exhaust system backfiring behind them. Franny’s brother whipped his head around to see who had come, but he already knew. Franny could see in his eyes, in the split second before he turned, that he knew. And then, there it was, the specter of the past that should not have been: a purple Harley with a green flame job and a misfit couple sitting astride it. And, as if she needed to provide further proof, the woman on the bike pulled a CD case from her pocket.

“It’s them,” shouted Franny’s brother, slapping his sister on the shoulder. “It’s her.”

The bike tore off out of the parking lot and through the next one over, the only way to head north.

“C’mon!”

Franny thought of protesting, thought of telling him that they didn’t need to do this, but she knew that was a lie, and even as she thought this she was putting the car into gear.