#author's pick

I did some research to help fill in the gaps, but ultimately it didn’t help much. There’s been a tradition of posthumous marriage in France since the 1950’s, but it’s only for if the couple had serious intent to wed beforehand, and the president has to review the request. (Apparently 1 in 4 aren’t approved.) More famous is Chinese ghost marriage- “mínghūn”- and those are for completing intended marriages, continuing lineage, or giving an unmarried daughter’s spirit a proper place in an ancestral tree. Apparently, however, it’s far more common to marry two deceased individuals, and besides, the whole family was for all appearances as Irish as I am.

When I met up with them- at a nice little coffee shop in downtown, halfway between us both- the way they explained made it all come together.

Their names were Cara and Donovan. I won’t give their last name, but you can rest assured it had an O’ at the start. Their daughter, Melanie, had been diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer, last year. The doctors had given her ten months. She had made it four before having a generalized seizure in the middle of the night.

They’d gotten her to the hospital, but they told me that she had been in something called status epilepticus, which meant that she just kept seizing. None of the medication had been able to make it stop, and at 3:42 AM, she was gone. 

Melanie, too, had always wanted to be married. Before the seizure took her, they’d all been in the process of trying to find her a future widower to marry her for the short while she had left. It hadn’t happened in time. They wanted to fulfill her final wish anyway. They had done the same research I’d done.

“For closure,” Cara said to me. “We know it’s for us. Maybe we like to think Mel will be happy about it too, but we know it’s really for us.”

The two prospects they’d been speaking with for a temporary marriage, both also terminal patients with a similar wish, had balked at the idea of continuing with the plan after her passing. Cara and Donovan had turned to several different avenues of advertisement.

And so I was here.

We talked about why I wanted to do it, too. I told them about being a loner, wanting a family, wanting to know there was somebody out there- alive or not- who would be with me in one way or another until I died. They said that was a good reason. I told them I worked from home, wasn’t good with people, wasn’t good with romance, and at this point in my life I could genuinely see myself being committed to a woman I would never meet. They told me they understood, that they were sorry I’d been so lonely. We talked about my work, and my hobbies, and their hobbies.

Finally, bracing myself, I told them I was transgender. They exchanged a glance, and then Donovan met my eyes and smiled.

“That’s not a problem,” he said, gently. “So was she.”

When they invited me to dinner, to a family dinner like I hadn’t been to for years, of course I said yes. 

I was excited. I really was. Even if this didn’t work out, I was looking forward to that dinner. I wanted to sit down and eat and talk with these people who had accepted their daughter without qualms, who had accepted me. I wanted to know what it was like, even if it was just once.

It was wonderful. It was perfect. It wasn’t just once.

I met Melanie’s younger brother, Sean. He wasn’t in full pitch support of the whole ghost marriage plan, but he spoke frankly and without rancor about believing it would help Cara and Donovan move on. We talked about work and Sean’s college major- ceramics. He even showed me some pictures of projects he’d put in the kiln that day on his phone. They were really beautiful, and I told him so, and he seemed quietly pleased, though his thanks were subdued.

Then we talked about Melanie.

Her family loved her. They loved her so, so much. I could see it in their eyes and hear it in their voices when they talked about her. None of them shied away from mention of her cancer or her death. I think they’d come to terms with it when she was diagnosed, quickly, so that they could spend the time she had left well, and they handled their grief by facing it directly, bringing it into the light. I admired them for that. I still do. I handled the loss of my family, such as it was, by shying away from it, burying myself in work and isolation until I forgot them, until the pain was so distant I didn’t remember to feel it. 

Melanie’s family handled her loss by loving her until it eclipsed the pain of losing her. Listening to them talk about her like that, the bold and bright adoration in every word, I couldn’t help but start to love her too.

That dinner marked the beginning of the year in which I courted a ghost.

I spent more time with the family than I had spent with anyone in- shit, maybe years. It was a sharp adjustment, but it felt good. Like moving a limb just let out of a cast, or squinting into the sunlight until your eyes adjust. We got along well; had the same sharp senses of humor, the same sensitivity to noise, the same lapsed Catholic attitudes. Cara and I shared a fondness for Irish myth, and Donovan and I both loved NCIS. I read up about contemporary ceramic artists so I could talk to Sean about his major. 

It helped that we had a common goal: we wanted very badly to get along. I wanted to be part of their family, and they wanted me to be part of it just as much. We were all praying I was the right fit. Maybe I was courting them more than Melanie.

They told me so many stories about her. They told me about her interests, what she studied, the kinds of trouble she got in. They showed me her room, and Cara even had me sniff a scarf that still smelled like her. They showed me almost endless pictures and videos, from home videos to school portraits to selfies to candids to the majority: hours and hours of footage documenting the last four months of her life. 

Donovan told me, in his low, soft tone, that when she had started chemo in earnest, started getting really sick, he had realized how little of her he might have to remember. He told me it terrified him. 

He took up recording as much as he could. 

As a result, the Melanie I knew best was the Melanie who was weak and sick from chemo, almost always laid up in bed, in the hospital more than half the time.

She had no hair, no eyebrows or eyelashes. She was deathly pale, even her many freckles washed out to near-invisibility, her lips blanched and cracked. She often snapped at the camera, was impatient and sarcastic with her parents, her brother, the many nurses and doctors. They had recorded her gagging and vomiting, if only incidentally, because by the third month they were all numb to it and when it happened all Donovan did was set the camera aside to rub her back before picking it back up.

She also had the most beautiful laugh I had ever heard, and her face was round and lovely even starved by the cancer, and her jokes and the stories of her bizarre exploits reduced me to hysterical tears even secondhand from the family. I loved her fire, the way she railed against her fate while making wry jabs about funeral costs. She played piano, and I loved her hands, her long and elegant fingers, the shapes they made on the keys. She had been studying law, before, and I loved when she mentioned it, the odd state laws she’d memorized for fun, the funny technicalities of the court she liked to talk about.

I loved Melanie. I loved her as much as you could possibly love a person you’ll never meet. I think maybe I loved her more than that. By the time I had watched all the footage they gave me for the third time over, I really wanted to marry her- not just to be married, or to marry into her family, but to be married to her. 

We visited her grave a lot. The first time they brought me, they introduced me as her potential husband. I said hello, told her it was nice to meet her and told her I hoped she would like me. I’d brought her flowers- bluebells.

(If I can be honest with you, I was terrified that I was going to get there and Cara was going to see the bouquet and tell me that Melanie had a personal hatred of bluebells, or was super allergic, or thought flowers were stupid. She didn’t. When I showed her and asked her if Melanie would like them, she told me that when Mel was little, she had tried to eat bluebells every time she saw them, because she was absolutely convinced they were the same thing as blueberries.

Then Cara told me she wished I could have been there for the funeral. I could only hug her.)

One night, a few months in, it really hit me that I would never meet Melanie. I would never actually see her, never really get to hear her voice. I’d missed my only chance to meet her on this Earth. Her life had passed mine by, and there was no getting it back.

I spent the next day with Sean. He seemed to know I was grieving. Maybe it was obvious that I’d been crying. Either way, he brought me to the cemetery, and we brought Mel flowers, and sat at her grave, and he spent hours telling me about all the times they’d gotten in trouble together, things her parents still didn’t know about. I cried more, on and off. So did he. We cussed Melanie out together for leaving us, good-naturedly, told her she could’ve at least raised one more hell before she went for Sean to tell me about. It ended up being a pretty nice day.

I met Melanie’s surviving grandparents, her mom’s parents, soon after that. Mary and Liam were dead set against the marriage from the moment they had heard Melanie’s parents intended to find a husband for her post-mortem. They had decided they hated me as soon as they knew I existed. I wasn’t looking forward to meeting them, but I knew I owed it to them to look them in the eye and at least weather their grief. After all, they’d be my grandparents too, someday soon.

So we had dinner together, all five of us. While we ate, Donovan made an obvious effort to keep it light, maybe hoping they’d talk to me and we’d click the same way I’d clicked with him and his wife. I made the effort- I told them about my life, talked about some of the things I’d found in common with the family, we discussed ceramics for a bit. 

Nobody brought up Melanie until Mary delicately, deliberately set her fork down and said “So are you a necrophile, then?”

There was an astonishing silence.

It was obviously the worst possible time for sarcasm, so of course, I said “Yes. It’s my defining personality trait, and the only reason I was hired.”

She looked at me levelly. I held my breath.

Liam burst out laughing, high and bright, and while everyone startled my hand flew up to cover my mouth and I found myself mortifyingly close to tears, because now I knew where Melanie had gotten her laugh.

There was an argument, of course, and it lasted a couple hours. It seemed like well-tread ground. Sean and I sat out, neutral and opinion unwanted, and once it was clear they were going to rehash the whole thing he got me a beer and himself a can of soda. I quietly told him the beer tasted like piss, under Mary shouting about the sanctity of Melanie’s memory, and he quietly told me that Donovan had brewed it. I solemnly toasted him and set it down on the table far away from myself, and he laughed.

When they were done, Mary asked me why I wanted to do it, more calmly than I expected.

“I love your family,” I told her. “I don’t have one right now. I want to be part of this one, and if I can help them, I want to. I know it’s weird and a little fucked up and you don’t know me. I’m sorry.”

She pursed her lips. I got the sense I hadn’t convinced her. A week later, Cara called me just about bursting with excitement, because as it turned out, I was wrong. They’d given me their blessing.

We set the date for April. 

I was as involved in planning it as anyone else. The only thing I wasn’t allowed to help with was picking out the dress. We consulted records of other ghost marriages, discussed customs, what was right to borrow and what we had to invent ourselves. Cara and I talked incessantly about Irish wedding customs, handfasting and mead and claddagh, bells and coins in shoes.

When I went to get fitted for the suit, Donovan came with me.

He taught me how to tie the tie. He didn’t say anything when I sniffed unattractively in the middle of a fancy-ass store, just put his hand on my shoulder while I wiped my eyes with the handkerchief he handed me.

We invited every family member Mary and Donovan could think of, and despite the extreme clarity in the phone calls and invitations as to the nature of the event, most of them came- some even had kids in tow. I met a baby who’d been named after Melanie. The mother offered to let me hold her. It was terrifying. My hands were shaking so hard I was petrified I was going to drop her.

Nobody had been that interested in trying to bargain out holding a wedding in the graveyard, so we held it in the backyard. The ceremony itself was simple and strange.

Melanie had been wheelchair-bound for most of the last month, so her wedding dress had been neatly arranged over it, sleeves draped on the armrests, skirt flowing over the footrests to brush the grass. A picture of her was positioned on the seat, a pure white bouquet of lilies and roses and baby’s breath in front of it. Donovan pushed it down the aisle. Sean stood to my right, Cara to the left where Melanie would’ve been. Liam had been captain of a vessel in the navy when he was younger, so he was the closest thing to an officiant we felt we needed.

Once the chair was opposite me, Donovan stepped back to stand with his wife, and I knelt.

Liam tied the cord to handfast me to an awkward combination of the picture and the end of the right sleeve. I held tight. The bouquet chimed softly every time Liam brushed it- someone had taken the time and effort to carefully tie a tiny silver bell to the stem of every single one of the flowers.

Cara had asked me to use the Celtic vows. She and Melanie had talked about it, once. There hadn’t been too much discussion of the details of the marriage- by that time Melanie wasn’t fussed about the particulars, and said several times she didn’t mind if they just wheeled her into the nearest courthouse and found a judge who wasn’t busy. The one thing she’d mentioned wanting, though, if she had the option, was those vows. 

You are blood of my blood, and bone of my bone. I give you my body, that we two might be one. I give you my spirit, `til our life shall be done. You cannot possess me for I belong to myself But while we both wish it, I give you that which is mine to give You cannot command me, for I am free But I shall serve you in those ways you require and the honeycomb will taste sweeter coming from my hand.

We used them.

There was no kiss. Mel wasn’t there. When Liam untied me, though, I pressed the end of the sleeve to my mouth. 

Just for a moment.

I wheeled Melanie’s chair to the table, sat next to her, and we ate like it was the end of the world. Everyone who drank got absolutely smashed. We danced until our feet hurt, and then until our feet were so sore we hobbled to our chairs and rested them and then danced one more time. Everyone was crying, and everyone was laughing, and the music wasn’t too loud but it was clear and it was ringing and none of us stepped to the beat for shit but it didn’t matter. We were grieving Melanie. We were celebrating her. We were remembering her. 

I was remembering her.

My final dance was with Cara. The music had been shut off by then, because it was 3 AM. The guests with kids had left at midnight, and the rest I don’t know when. I was too drunk to notice. 

I held her to my chest and we swayed. We had both been crying most of the night, but neither of us cried a single tear for however long we stood there.

“I’m glad it’s you,” she said.

All I could say was “I’m glad it’s me too.”

Finally, she pushed me away. Told me to go to bed. We hadn’t discussed it, but I knew I was welcome and expected to sleep tonight in Melanie’s room.

I laid down in Melanie’s bed. I held a pillow to my chest, and I sobbed, loud and unrestrained and heart-wrenched, until I fell asleep.

When I woke up again, it was… It wasn’t dawn. But it wasn’t dark, either. It was a half light, the kind that comes right before the sun rises or right after it sets. There’s no way I could’ve put a time to it, because I don’t think it was a time. All I know is that I could see what was standing over me.

I don’t want to detail the particulars of what I saw. Not because I think the sight was too gruesome, not because it sickens me to think of for too long, not because I don’t have the words. Just because it makes me so goddamn sad.

She had Melanie’s face.

I knew Melanie’s face intimately. I knew it from the photos, I knew it from the videos. I knew it from Cara and Donovan’s faces, from Sean’s face, from Mary and Liam’s faces, from the gaggle of cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and grandkids I had met that very day. And whatever I was looking at was, she had Melanie’s sweet, kind-hearted, heavily freckled face and the body was, I instinctively knew, her corpse.

She wore her wedding gown.

She was rotting.

I sat there and looked at her. I looked at the maggots climbing over and through her flesh. I looked at the clean seam between her untouched face and the neck that was close to halfway gone. I looked at her eyes, clear and unclouded and a brighter, sharper grey than they had been on any screen.

I did not scream.

When she spoke, she had Melanie’s voice. It was the voice that broke my heart, the hoarse one, the one from bad days, where she threw up until her throat was sore and she said her head felt like a plane engine sounded.

“What’s your name?”

Looking back on it now, the strange calmness and detachment that slid over me, the certainty that I was dreaming- I probably dissociated. It’s good I did, because being certain I was dreaming, I thought to myself that it was inspired by the strange, myth-like ceremony I had been a part of that day, the grieving wedding, and gave the question some consideration.

“You’re my wife,” I said, “You already know my name.”

The corpse stilled. Even the maggots ceased to turn. She seemed to be confused for a moment, and then there was a sudden resumption of shuddering and churning, more rapid than before.

“Of course,” she repeated. “It’s yours and mine.”

“Yes,” I assured the shape that may or may not have been my wife, because I didn’t know what else to tell her.

“Say our name,” the thing said.

I took a long time to think, watching the maggots squirm. I guess I’m lucky that she was patient, that she waited for my sleep- and shock-slowed brain to come up with a response that wasn’t just my name.

“Will you say it first?” I asked her. “Please? I love your voice.”

There was a long silence. The thing in the wedding dress looked at me mournfully, as if she didn’t like how I had answered.

“My voice is awful,” she murmured. “It’s hoarse. It’s rough and my throat hurts. The tube… my throat- when they intubated me, when I was seizing- you don’t love this voice.”

As she spoke, she went paler and paler. Her eyes dimmed. A maggot crept over the edge of her face.

I don’t know what came over me. I don’t know why I did it, I don’t know how, I have no fucking clue. I sat up in bed and I took the hand hanging by her side. It was the most awful thing. Soft, way too soft, and wet, and sticky, and so cold, and I felt a maggot squirm under my thumb. The maggot was warmer than her.

I was so spaced out I couldn’t process it, didn’t react.

“I love your voice,” I said.

The maggot writhed out from under my thumb, and it sunk into her flesh in the gap left behind.

“Even when it’s hoarse. I heard it hoarse on video a lot. It’s still your voice. I still love it.”

She stared at me, unspeaking, unmoving.

I glanced down at our hands and said “I’m not hurting you, am I? Mel?”

When I looked back up at her, she was looking at me like I had told her she was going to burn her house down with everyone locked inside. Like I had horrified her beyond saying. I started to let go, started to speak.

“Melanie? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to-”

Then everything was dark, I was laying down again and I could hear a slow, steady beep.

My throat was sore as hell, and when I figured out I was awake and could open my eyes, I opened them to a hospital room.

A few soupy moments passed by in near-silence, and then a nurse came rushing in.

There was a lot of commotion. Lots of medical staff asking me what I remembered, how I felt. I told them I had gone to sleep, had a strange dream, and nothing else. Nobody asked what the dream was about except the neurologist. I was evasive, said I couldn’t really remember mostly just because I didn’t want the contents of the dream to get back to my family. I figured it would hurt them more than it would help the neurologist. He took it well enough, didn’t press me.

When my family came, they all came together. Donovan looked like he hadn’t slept for days, and nobody else looked much better. Sean threw his arms around me, ignored Cara telling him to be gentle, and rocked me side to side roughly for a moment. When he drew back, I asked what had happened. I’d been too foggy to ask any staff and didn’t really want to hear it from anyone but family anyway.

Donovan and Sean glanced uncomfortably at each other. It was Cara who told me. 

“You had a seizure.”

“A seizure?” I felt like my thoughts were dragging through mud. I knew what she was saying was significant, but I couldn’t put it together.

“You were in status epilepticus for twenty eight minutes.”

I understood all at once, very numbly.

Sean softly added, “Your hand got hurt, too. The doctors think, uh… you maybe got a cut, somehow, and it got infected. You had, uh. It was- not so good. But it’ll be okay now, they said.”

Both my hands felt very distant and strange, so I had to look down to see which one was injured. The right had an IV attached. The left was bandaged.

I’d held Melanie’s hand with my left.

I’d been handfasted to her with my left.

“How long was I asleep?”

“Three days,” Cara said.

I meant to ask if anyone had contacted my work, if they were okay, how they’d been holding up, what procedures the doctors had done, what they thought had happened to me.

Instead, all I could say was “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

This time, Cara embraced me.

It turns out it takes time to recover from almost dying, especially when it includes a three-day coma and the mysterious death of a chunk of flesh on your hand.

The doctors told me over and over that they couldn’t understand how the gangrene could have advanced so far without anyone noticing it. I shouldn’t have been able to function. It was weeks and weeks’ worth of damage. My palm and the undersides of my fingers had been blackened and withered with it.

Sean, at one point, cheerfully told me that part of the treatment had involved maggots. They had put them on my hand and they had removed the dead flesh without disturbing what was still alive.

I didn’t know how I felt about it, but I must’ve looked less than excited, because he changed the subject very quickly.

In the end, when I realized how bad it’d been, I had just been relieved to still have it attached. The function was massively reduced, and I had to do pretty extensive physical therapy to get as much back as I did. I could just about hold a mug and hook my fingers around stuff. It took some effort to get my typing back up to a reasonable speed for programming, but I was ridiculously fast before, so it wasn’t an impossible task to adjust. I’m lucky I’m right-handed, though.

I had just moved on to working on a little fine motor when it happened again.

My family had asked me to move in, after. They were up front about it- if I had another seizure like that alone in my apartment, I could die. They weren’t wrong, and I’d about had it with living alone anyway, so the guest room next to Melanie’s became my room. 

The reprieve lasted a month. I’d written it all off, by then, the seizure and the dream both, as a byproduct of drinking far too much and having some kind of terrible hidden infection, compounded by an extremely emotional event. I’d gone through the hospital wringer, every test they could think of, and it’d all come clean once I was recovered from what had put me there to begin with. So there was no reason why, sober and healthy and feeling melancholy, I couldn’t curl up in Melanie’s bed instead of mine one night.

When I woke up in the half-light again, I knew I’d fucked up.

I looked at my wife. She looked worse, this time, and I struggled to place how for a moment before realizing that the first time, she had looked impassive, even determined, until I had upset her at the end. Now she looked disturbed. Troubled, somehow.

“Melanie?” I said.

She shook her head.

“... You aren’t Melanie?” I ventured, and she shook her head again, and sighed.

“I am. I’m Melanie. I’m… I’m your wife.”

Her voice was just as hoarse. It sent a pang through me, and before I could think better, I asked her, “Does your throat still hurt?”

A cascade of maggots rained down her body as she clenched her jaw and fists and shook her head, violently. Not in denial, but in frustration.

“Yes,” she grit out, and her voice was clearer now, somehow, coming through her teeth, louder. “Yes, it fucking hurts.”

“Is there some way- is there anything I can do?”

At first, she shook her head again. Then she sighed, long and crackling, and made eye contact with me. When she spoke again, her voice was abruptly as healthy as it’d ever sounded in any of the videos. “You can tell me your name. Then you’ll die, and I get to come back in your place.”

For a moment, I didn’t know what to think at all.

Then I thought about thirty things at once- I don’t want to die, I would die for my family to be happy, maybe this is why I’m here at all, what if it’s a trick, if she comes back will she come back whole, will she be happy, what does she want, is she suffering here, will I suffer here, will we switch places, will she take my body?

“You’re left-handed,” I blurted out, instead of any of that.

“What,” she responded, clearly baffled.

“When we handfa- when I handfast- when we handfasted, I did it with my left hand. Because you were- you’re left handed.”

“Is this some kind of trauma response?” Melanie asked. I don’t think she was asking me.

“Do you want to come back?” I asked, and then flinched at myself.

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again to say “Yes.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. I- can I think about it for a minute?”

The expression on her face was one I hadn’t seen in any photos or video: complete incredulous disbelief. “Can you think about it?”

“I know,” I said hastily, “I know, it’s not like you got to think about it-”

“No!” This was a face I had seen, a voice I had heard. It’d been aimed at the cancer, mostly. Melanie was pissed.

“Why the fuck do you have to be good? Why can’t you just be fucking taking advantage of my grieving family- fuck, you’re so nice. You took my hand, you- you didn’t even flinch- you were scared that you hurt me, and I hurt you- you dumb son of a bitch, you don’t know me, you can’t fucking talk about killing yourself to save me like it’s a- a car purchase! Can you think about it?!”

Maggots flew everywhere as she gestured furiously. You already know what a weirdo I am, so I’m not gonna lie to you. In that moment, the only thing I could think was I’m so glad I married you.

“Mel,” I said, and she stopped and stared at me, brows furrowed, chest heaving.

I wanted to reach out and hold her hand again. I don’t know what I would have expected, had I considered it, but the hand that had been damaged was the same here as in real life, stiff and strange and scarred. Melanie looked at it too, and her face tightened, pained. After a moment of thought, I reached out and touched the edge of the mattress, as close to where she stood as I dared.

“Melanie, I’m a huge asshole who does programming work for Google. The past year has been the only part of my life that was worth anything, and it was only worth anything because it was for you and your family. You didn’t get to choose. I’d get that luxury. You were going to be a lawyer. You’re brilliant, you’re focused, you could do real good in the world. And- I mean- I just-”

My voice broke. Melanie’s fingers fluttered briefly and helplessly at her side before she stilled them, glancing down at my hand again.

“I do love you,” I said, soft, “I know I don’t really know you. But more than that, I love and know our family. I could give them back their daughter. I’m not suicidal, but I could give them back their daughter. I got this year. They wouldn’t miss me like they miss you.”

There was a suspended moment of silence. Melanie closed her eyes. She mouthed a noiseless no, but I couldn’t have said whether it was one kind of denial or the other.

When there was nothing further, I ventured to ask “What’s it like?”

“It’s like… being asleep,” she murmured. Her eyes fluttered visibly under their lids. “I dream. They’re pretty good dreams. I dreamed about this. That’s why I knew what to do.”

“Did… do you dream about us? About the living?”

“Sometimes, yeah.”

“Did you dream about our wedding?”

Her reply was very quiet. “ … Only a little. I wasn’t trying, I didn’t want to see. I wish I could have seen more. … I wish I could have been there.”

“We used the Celtic vows.”

Melanie glanced up at me, cracked lips parted a little, and her brows creased just the slightest bit. Not quite an expression.

“‘I give you my body’,” I quoted, and it broke into much more visible pain.

“Stop.”

“‘While we both wish it, I give you that which is mine to give-’”

“Stop! I don’t, shut up, stop- Fuck, don’t. Don’t. I don’t.”

I stopped. Melanie put a shaking hand to her mouth, ran it over her head. The worms she dislodged, I noticed for the first time, burst into little clouds of dust as soon as they hit the hardwood.

“I can’t do this,” she said. “I can’t. I couldn’t live with myself. It was different before. When I dreamed about how it would happen, I thought… it was selfish. I thought it was whatever caretaker or god is in charge of this shit telling me that they had made a mistake, and I thought you were a shitty person taking advantage of my family. I thought they were paying you or something. I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but I tried not to dream of you. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to find out what kind of person I would be- be killing. Replacing.”

“I’m willing,” I said, and she made eye contact and replied “I’m not.”

I’d started crying at some point, but hadn’t noticed, didn’t until Melanie reached out a little towards my face, then grabbed the tissue box off the bedside table and put it down on the blanket next to me. It made me laugh, shaky and tearful, and I wiped my eyes with my sleeve before I took a tissue.

“It isn’t fair,” I said. “It isn’t fair.”

“No,” Melanie murmured, “It isn’t. None of it is. But we have to make do with what we can.”

“I love you,” I told her again, helpless. She smiled at me, and it was sad but it was fierce and determined.

“It’s okay. I’ll just go back to sleep, and I’ll dream of you, and my family will be okay. You’ll make sure they’re okay.”

“I will,” I promised. 

Melanie hesitated briefly, then said “Do you think your first name is safe? The dream specified ‘full name’, but-”

“I’m willing to take the risk,” I said wryly, and Melanie wrinkled her nose at me. I took a deep breath. “Hi, Mel. I’m your husband, Benen.”

We both braced, but nothing happened, and after a stressful few seconds we both burst into relieved, nervous laughter at the same time.

“Benen, huh? That’s one I haven’t heard before.”

“It means, uh, ‘mild’. Like fucking salsa. Found that out after I changed it and it was too late, obviously. Most people call me Ben, anyway.”

This time, her smile was warm and genuine. “It’s nice to meet you, Ben.”

I beamed back, reflexive, and Melanie laughed.

“So what now?” I asked, and she shrugged.

“I go back to sleep.”

“Would you- I mean, can I… Would you want to lie down with me? The one time?”

Melanie hesitated, clearly torn, and I added “I don’t care if you hurt me. It- my hand wasn’t really that bad.”

After an immediate shake of the head, she reconsidered, sighed, and lowered herself to curl up on the bed next to me awkwardly, painfully, like her withered muscles and the holes in her flesh had started to matter, now, at the end. Gingerly, carefully, she laid her head just on the edge of my lap, her skull feeling strangely bare and fragile against my thigh even through my sweatpants.

I laid my hand, my left, on the side of her face. The base of my palm rested on cold, wet rot. I didn’t care. My thumb stroked slow arcs across her cheekbone, prominent and sharp, the intact skin dry and rough and over-hot.

“Goodnight, Ben,” she whispered.

I told her that I loved her. I told her to sleep well.

The doctors ended up taking the hand off at the wrist, in the end, and I’m never going to walk without a limp. I don’t care. It’s a price I paid gladly, and I would pay it a thousand times over again if I had to. In the beginning I regretted the loss of the hand that was fasted to Melanie, but I figure it went to her, anyway, so it’s alright.

I never saw her again, no matter how many times I slept in her bed. For our fifth anniversary, Cara and Donovan- with my and Sean’s permission- finally remodeled her room, made it a master for us. My old bedroom became a guest again.

I do dream about her, but they’re just dreams. 

I rest easy knowing she’s dreaming of me too.

Liam passed away last month. Liver failure. Even though everyone else is just as practical as I am about the grief, I feel oddly guilty about the lack of pain his loss brought me. There’s the natural ache of knowing I’ll never hear that laugh again, never tell him I don’t want to hear his goddamn deep sea fishing stories and hear them anyway again, but there’s no uncertainty, no fear of the unknown on his behalf. I know he’s resting. I know he’s at peace. I know he’s going to get to see Melanie again, in the dreams.

Someday, I’ll see her again too. I won’t rush it. I love my life- I love my family. I don’t want to make them grieve another child, another sibling. I’ll live well, for as long as I can, and when I go I won’t be afraid.

The hospital had called me when he was already in surgery. The attending told me that there had been no time to waste- at my request, she rattled off the broken bones and lacerations and complications in a list that seemed to never end. It was dizzying, numbing- I remember distantly wondering, at one point, if this was what out of body experiences feel like.

I stayed there overnight three nights in a row. Held his pale, cold hand while he slept. My friends brought his quilt from home, the one his mom made him. In that paper-white hospital bed, hooked up to machine after machine, my baby boy looked utterly foreign to me. Like a stranger who bore a striking resemblance to the person I loved. It was heartbreaking. It still is, just to remember. He was so unbearably fragile- I hadn’t felt so helpless and protective since the first time I’d held him in my arms as a newborn.

When he finally woke up, I could’ve wept with joy- but I didn’t, for some reason. Just told him where he was, what had happened. I actually had to a couple times before he really came to.

There was confusion, disorientation- I was ready for that, had been warned. What I wasn’t prepared for was my own confusion. My strange loneliness, and grief, and the persistent sense that James wasn’t lying in the bed in front of me at all. 

I couldn’t reconcile the feeling of missing him with his exhausted but living presence; its continuation all through recovery, moving him home, the totally familiar banter and complaining over still having to do schoolwork (“I almost died, mom! You’re not seriously gonna make me do calc right now?”). 

It was bizarre, deeply unsettling. And believe me, I knew it was probably me. Once he was well on the road to recovery, two months safe, I started going to doctors.

I saw two psychiatrists, a neurologist and a brain injury specialist trying to figure out what had given me Capgras delusion. None of them could identify anything wrong with me. Beyond a bout with depression in my youth, I’d never had any indication of mental illness, and no one could identify any physical issue with my brain at all. As far as they could tell, I was in sound mind and perfectly healthy- except that some part of me was convinced my son wasn’t my son.

The second psychiatrist was probably the most helpful. His priority was James, and I appreciated that more than I could say.

“As long as the primary part of you knows James is still James,” he said, “As long as you are treating your child as your child, that is my concern. The rest, you will be healthy, we will deal with it. The child is safe, you are aware of your failing, all is well.”

And you know, I agreed with him. It didn’t matter if I was sick, as long as I still loved and cared for my son, as long as I was there for him when he needed me.

We discussed telling James. The doctor approved of my choice to let him know. I knew that I’d been acting strangely, distant, and it was my responsibility as a mother to explain to him what was going on, to spare him whatever upset I possibly could and be honest with him about our lives.

So a couple nights later, I sat down with him after dinner, and I told him I had something I needed to talk to him about.

“James,” I said, “This is going to be hard to hear, and hard to explain. Bear with me, okay?”

He nodded, looking concerned. I took a deep breath.

“Something- something happened, after your accident. There’s been something wrong with me, with my brain. I haven’t- I haven’t recognized you. You still look like my son, I know who you are, but something in the back of my head is telling me, just, ‘This isn’t James’. I’ve been to the doctor a couple times, but there haven’t been conclusive results yet, and I...”

I trailed off as I glanced up, trying to reconcile the barefaced terror in his expression with what I had just said, backtracked desperately.

“Honey, it’s okay- it’s okay, the doctors aren’t worried, I’m okay- I KNOW it’s you, it’s okay! I love you, I know you, I just- have this super weirdo symptom. And I’m not letting it change anything, I swear. You just deserve to know what’s going on.”

James was- he was sweating. He visibly recollected himself, put on his brave face.

“So they- they don’t know what’s wrong?” he asked, voice cracking, and before I even tried to start telling him about the tests that had been done I had to stop and pull him into my arms for a hug.

I could feel him shaking.

—

JOURNAL ENTRY 04/22/2017

James has been acting weird. More weird. I think he might’ve gotten in some kind of trouble, because he’s got this guilty look to him, and he’s kind of avoiding me? Not a ton, just a little. 

I talked to Dr. Baine about how it feels like I’m relearning him. He said that was good, and we discussed the possibility that I don’t have Capgras at all- apparently Capgras is much more persistent and pervasive than that, and patients don’t typically become at ease in the presence of subjects of their delusion, no matter how much time passes, unless the root cause is treated. He said I might have something else entirely going on, and even suggested the idea that it might’ve been a one-time thing, since it hasn’t recurred.

He also encouraged the idea of “getting to know” the “new James”. He and I are both really pleased with my emotional progress, and how easily I’m associating memories of James to the current James lately. I have to say, it’s a relief. The guilt and sneaking might be worrying, but as a silver lining, today he gave me a funny look and I recalled a nine-year-old James with the exact same look on his face as I caught him sneaking off with a whole pack of Oreos. No internal conscious prompts or anything! I think I confused him when I laughed.

—

We fell back in step easily enough, but at about the half year mark, James started going downhill.

He finished the school year in good spirits, bouncing back from the accident with barely a limp to show for it. The doctors were all pleased and impressed with his progress, and he was his physical therapist’s favorite client ever, I’m pretty sure. It was all going amazingly well. 

Then it was summer, and he started spending more time with me.

It’d been so long, my therapy was going great, and I was so careful to treat him normally, ignoring every twinge of unfamiliarity and suppressing every flinch. If I’m honest, I felt like a real piece of shit sometimes- what kind of mother jumps a mile at her son coming up unexpectedly for a hug? In broad daylight, dammit. I made progress, but I could tell it wasn’t fast enough. All my effort just too little, too late.

We got him to a psychiatrist recommended by Dr. Baine, because the guilty behavior didn’t subside, but his enthusiasm and natural good nature did. I was worried about depression, and I also wanted him to have a safe adult to vent to about me. Can you imagine? Your own mother, looking at you like a stranger? I couldn’t take the thought, and he had to deal with the reality. 

Nothing got better. If anything, it got worse. He stopped trying to hug me, started avoiding me in earnest. I couldn’t decide between giving him space and frantically doling out affection, redoubling every expression of love I could. I’d nearly lost him, and I was terrified of losing him to his own mind. And mine. Again.

He seemed to crumple under my touch, and it was impossible for me to figure out whether it was good or bad, because sometimes it brought him to tears, but at the same time, he leaned into me like if it wasn’t for my presence he would fall and never get back up again.

It was a hard time. When he had come home from the hospital, I had known exactly how to help him recover. Now, I didn’t have the slightest clue. My days were consumed with self-help and forums on loved ones with mental illness. 

I was so busy trying to fix him that the break took me completely by surprise.

The day was entirely our new normal. James, reserved and quiet. Me, bustling around, trying to fill the empty spaces. I’d had a particularly busy day yesterday, remoting in from my home laptop to fix a huge accounting error and emailing and calling what felt like everybody in the fucking world, so I was trying to make up for basically ignoring him for 24 hours. 

That was probably what did it, I think. The proverbial straw. My attention, my affection, all day long, focused. Made his favorite dinner, played his favorite game with him for a while, and when I asked if he wanted to play another round or if he was tired and wanted some alone time, he just… collapsed in on himself. I called his name, alarmed, and he started shaking, breathing strained.

“I can’t do this,” he gasped, “I tried so hard, I’m sorry-”

“James,” I said, “Honey, are you alright? Talk to me, honey, what’s going on?”

“It’s my fault it’s my fault I’m why you can’t recognize me,” he babbled, “It’s my fault, I can’t do this, I can’t do it right-”

He was hyperventilating, trembling. My head was going in bewildered circles, trying to make sense of why he would blame himself for my delusion, why he could think he had caused it somehow. I extended my arms, helpless, and he shrank away, drew his legs up to his chest.

“I can’t do this,” he forced out, breathless, “I can’t, I wouldn’t have done it if I knew it would be like this, I don’t wanna be human anymore, I don’t wanna be James-I knew I wasn’t good at being James, I knew I would fuck it up, I broke my promise, I told him I wouldn’t fuck it up-”

Caught in the middle of reaching out, I went very still as I worked through what he was saying, one word at a time.

“James,” I said, very carefully, “Can you tell me more, please? I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’m not James,” he shouted, and then burst into tears.

I was left speechless. Obviously, my first conclusion was complete and utter horror that I had somehow drawn my son into my delusion with me. 

“No,” I blurted, “No no no, honey, of course you are, you’re my son. Shit, oh fuck, I’m so sorry, baby, let’s call the doctor right now, it’s gonna be alright-”

And then James looked up at me and everything about him changed.

Every feature seemed to suddenly come into focus, like I had put on glasses after months of living without. Too many teeth, sharp and pearlescent behind lips drawn back in distress. Eyes a striking, shocking yellow, like a wolf or hawk, predator’s eyes. Spattered across the cheeks and the bridge of the nose were freckles James didn’t have, the same bright gold, and as I stared in the evening light I realized, dimly, they shed a warm glow across the planes of the face and reflected oddly in the eyes above them, the tears streaming down over them. Bioluminescent.

Even the body had a sudden gangliness to it that James had left long behind in his childhood. The sweatpants I had tailored for him ended an inch above the ankle, and bony shoulders swam in the shirt that I could have sworn had stretched over them a moment ago.

I didn’t want to believe it. I wanted to tell myself I was hallucinating. I wanted to call my doctor.

But this was what my lizard brain had blaring for months, endless, while I worked diligently to wear the alarm down and shut it off. It was so present, so real. It didn’t swim, or fade, or change, as I sat there, struck dumb.

The creature- the doppelgänger, the shapeshifter, the fae, whatever it was- had begun to shake in earnest, visible. “I’m sorry,” it gasped, “I’m sorry. I didn’t think- I thought- I thought it would be fine, and you wouldn’t have to lose him and I could have- I could be-“ 

“Who are you?” I whispered.

The thing that had become my son sobbed, took a rattling inhale, made a heartwrenching noise I had never heard James make in his whole life.

“I’m sorry,” it managed, just barely, “I tried so hard, I tried to keep my promise but I’ve never been anybody before, I didn’t know it would hurt, I don’t know how to make it not, I fucking suck at this I didn’t know it would hurt I’m sorry-”

It couldn’t shape any more words after that, it was crying so hard. Just inarticulate noises, little catching syllables of apologies.

The only thing I could do was ask, barely audible, “Did you kill my son?”

Its head snapped up in shock, horror writ large across its face. “No,” it wheezed, emphatic, “No no I didn’t hurt him I couldn’t we’re just scavengers I didn’t hurt him I couldn’t-”

The crying tore through its tiny frame and shook it like a leaf in a windstorm, where James had been broad and sturdy and took tears in stolid, slow breaths. It looked and sounded so genuinely distressed and appalled at the idea I couldn’t cling to it, even though the atavistic root of me wanted to, wanted it to be simple, wanted to be angry. Wanted my son.

“What happened?” I whispered. “What did you do? Why did you do this?”

There was a moment where the doppelgänger couldn’t catch its breath enough to answer. My hand came to its shoulder in pure instinct, pressing slightly, out of the hunched curl it had crushed into with the force of its distress, making it a little easier to breathe.

“I didn’t know then,” it choked out as soon as it could. “I didn’t know anything. We- we’re supposed to become somebody as babies, and we just replace what’s already lost and nobody knows better, but I wasn’t- I couldn’t- I’m fucked up, and I got too old, and then when he crashed his car I just- it’s what we’re supposed to do. It’s what I was supposed to do, but I can’t- I’m broken, and I can’t do it, I can’t pretend anymore, it hurts-”

I sat back, dazed. A changeling. It was a changeling.

“I would’ve saved him if I knew,” the changeling said, desperate and raw. “I swear, I would’ve saved him, but I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything, not until I became him, and I couldn’t- until- after.”

“If you knew?” I said, voice breaking.

“I didn’t know,” it repeated, miserably, tears dripping off its chin. “I didn’t feel. We’re scavengers. I’m sorry, mo- ma’am. I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. I wanted to save him, after. I couldn’t. It was too late. I was too late.”

I looked at it.

The eyes, for all their unnatural color, were red-rimmed. The nose, aqualine instead of snubbed, was dripping.

The changeling was rail-thin. It had a tiny white scar just under the curve of its collarbone I could see from here, even in the low light, that I knew was from the surgery after the accident. It was hugging its legs to its chest. It had almost called me mom, out of habit.

It was so tiny. Just a child.

They. They had almost called me mom.

They were just a child. 

I didn’t think very hard about what I did next, and I don’t think I ever will. It seems like the natural conclusion. 

I pulled the child I had taken care of for the past half a year into my arms and let them cry.

—

JOURNAL ENTRY 06/18/2017

I think I might already be done with the first stage of grief.

— 

It was a long time before I asked the question I dreaded most. “Was he... was he alone?” 

The changeling hesitated. I waited, pressing my shaking hands to their back. God, but they were so pitifully thin. I could feel their spine, their ribs, the protrusion of their shoulderblade.

“I don’t know if I counted,” they said, finally, so quiet I could barely catch it. 

“If you were there,” I replied immediately, “My son did not die alone.” 

They made a little stunned noise, struck with pain and joy both, like I had told them something utterly impossible. I rubbed over the bumps of their spine, gentle, pressed my chin to the top of their head and closed my eyes.

“Please,” I said. “Can you tell me about it?” I could feel the movement as they swallowed. Their skin was clammy with a cold sweat.

“There was black ice on the road,” they murmured. “He couldn’t have seen it, couldn’t have anticipated it. The car skidded, and went out of control, and... and when I found him- it was- there was a lot of blood. If I had known- but I wasn’t- we don’t know anything. We aren’t anything that we don’t steal. 

“I... I came up to the car. He saw me, his eyes were open, but he didn’t scream, didn’t say a word, just watched me. 

“I didn’t hurt him. Didn’t touch him. I swear I didn’t touch him, never. There- there was enough- on. On the ground, for me to. Do what I needed to do. All I knew to do. 

“Once I was him- looked like him, I wasn’t him yet- that’s when he talked. He asked me what I would do. I told him that- that I was him now, that I was going to be him. After he. After.

“He said...” They faltered, choked on the next word a few times before clearing their throat and wiping hastily at their face. “He said- ‘Don’t you hurt my mom. Don’t you fucking hurt my mother, I swear to Christ. You say you’re me now, you better be the best me there ever was. I don’t care what you are. Don’t hurt my mom.’ 

“I... I promised him I wouldn’t. I promised, and- and I said I would keep you safe. For him. And he- he looked at me, and then he closed his eyes, and. And I waited with him. Until he stopped breathing. And then I was him, and I knew what he knew. And I brought the body into the woods, and I did- what I had to do. To get here.” 

I was numb. I knew, later, that I would scream, that I would sob, knowing my son had died lying in the snow, with only a stranger beside him, without knowing if I would ever find out he was gone at all. And then the last bit sank in.

“You did that? To yourself?” 

They nodded, just once, curling closer to me. “I had to,” they said, and when I pulled back to look at them, they hastily scrubbed their nose with the end of their sleeve. 

They looked so much like him in that moment, bizarrely, that I felt lightheaded, had to close my eyes. The reality of it hadn’t quite set in yet, but I could feel, in that moment, a taste of the grief to come.

My son was dead. My son, the one my wife had carried for nine months in her own body, the child I had raised for seventeen years- he was dead. I would never see him again. His spitting image had been right in front of me for all this time, but I would never really, truly see him again, because he was dead, and whatever was left of his corpse was rotting somewhere out there in the woods. I hadn’t seen him since the accident. I probably never would.

James was dead.

But there was a child that had his memories sitting right in front of me, who I had loved like him in his place, and they were scared, and they needed me.

I took a deep breath, and then another.

“Is there another name I could call you?” I asked, as gently as I could. They sniffed, shook their head a little. “I never had one,” they whispered. “We aren’t supposed to. We just... take them.” 

“Okay,” I said. Closed my eyes, breathed more. “Okay.”

I opened my eyes again and said “Do you want to pick it, or should I?”

“You- you don’t have to. I have to leave, right? I can- can figure it out.” Then, almost as an afterthought, “I can- make it look right. I can make it really easy, you won’t have to do anything.”

I shook my head. “How old are you?”

“Seventeen,” they said, promptly, then “Sorry, no, I- um- I’m not sure. I think- no, I don’t know. Older than I was supposed to be.”

“Do you know anything other than what you got from James?” I asked, and they shrank a little, broke eye contact.

“Kind of,” they mumbled, “Just. About me, and- what I’m supposed to do. It’s a little blurry. Before. It’s supposed to be, because it makes it… easier.”

I nodded, casual. Said “Okay, so you don’t know any more than James about living on your own.”

They looked so confused and hopeful it was almost painful. 

“You’ll stay here,” I said, softly. “I’m going to grieve, hard, and I’ll have to get to know you. But you know me exactly as much as he did. And I- I loved you even when my brain was screaming you weren’t my kid. I think I could love you just fine now.”

They burst into tears again.

I put my arms back around them, pulled them close and started trying to remember what other names my wife and I had considered for James.

—

JOURNAL ENTRY 09/04/2017

Jackie went to their first day of senior year today. They’ve been talking about getting their GPA up, applying somewhere really good. They keep saying biology, in this really general sense, but I think they want to be a doctor.