When I open the closet door, the ghost hides between my high school letter jacket and a pair of faded jeans with the knees ripped out somewhere near the back. She wears a clean, white apron, the logo of a television show embroidered on the front. The same apron the ghost hung around her neck and tied behind her waist when Gordon Ramsay insulted the best quiche she’d ever baked. She is brittle.
When I begin stretching before a run in the somber stages of the morning, the ghost whispers to not set my goals too high. She runs too, she says. A mile one day. Five miles another. One time, she ran most of a marathon but blacked out a mile from the finish line and shattered her elbow on the half-melted asphalt. Dehydration’s why it happened, she claims. She’s always thirsty.
When I select kale at the market, turning the crisp leaves in my hands, moisture spreading over the callous where I hold the knife in my palm when I prep food at work, the ghost tells me a story about the first time she put kale in soup. She didn’t separate the stems very well, so her husband complained about how crunchy the soup was. He’s picky, she says.
When I open the door to the café, the ghost follows me in, sits on a barstool. She watches as I dice a carrot and place it in a steel storage tray. Chop chop chop, she laughs, no one will eat that. They’ll walk in and ask for fried chicken and mashed potatoes, and all you’ll have is salad and smoothies and tea, she says. She doesn’t understand that she’s a better cook than she thinks.
When I untie the apron from the ghost’s waist and breathe in the fabric softener still wafting from the weekend’s washing, the ghost tells me about walking off that cooking show, back into a reality undefined by set dressing, where she could breathe without worrying about how the exhale might be edited. She thinks herself a failure, a Georgia woman with no backbone, who will ever only cook for her kids, if she were to even bear any, and no longer feigns an interest in men anyway. She believes herself to be what Gordon Ramsay once claimed she is: a fuck muppet.
When I tie the apron around myself, the ghost repeats abstract adages because they are all she knows to speak anymore. Between Ramsay’s words and her husband’s belt, her vocabulary has melted with time. Once, she says, her husband tied a chain to the front door of their house to pull it off with his truck after she locked the deadbolt to keep him out. He still says she was rude for kicking him out.
When I speak with customers inquiring about my salads and smoothies and teas and the methods I’ve developed to create them, the ghost straightens her back and slices tomatoes next to me. She’s the one who taught me to speak and cook at the same time as though cameras were aimed for unflattering angles. She’s great at that part—the theater of cooking for an audience.
When I sweep up at the end of the day, bits of mango and spinach and apple tangle into the straw of my broom. The ghost lays down, pale and exhausted and bored. I reach for a bottle of pinot noir from the cabinet above the ghost, pour myself a glass. She traces her initials in the dried celery dust on the counter and asks if I’m ready to give up, to go home forever.
When I sip red wine from a cabinet above the sink, my head feels warm and woozy. I feel the urge to call the woman who gave me her number during the lunch rush. The ghost’s eyes freeze blue and she says I’m a slut. Asks, with a scalding stare reflected through a stainless steel tray, if I’m really ready to try something with a woman for the first time?
When I leave the apron half-folded on the bench at the end of my bed, the ghost slips it on and stands at the door of the closet only inches from my head. She giggles, and her eyes turn green then red then black. I retrieve a box of matches from the kitchen, strike one against the comb. As the ghost fades to bright blue flame and then to ash, she screams at me, says I’m a fucking lost cause. But a future self nourishes me as the heat rises and I think for the first time about what I am, of what I will become. Of the radishes I will chop and the woman whose number I will call and the shades of violet and orange on the apron I will wear.
About the author:
Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal (they/them) writes queer, working-class stories and poems. Winner of the Plaza Short Story Prize, their creative work can be found in Story, The Masters Review, Fairy Tale Review, Hole in the Head Review, F(r)iction, South Carolina Review, and elsewhere. Other writing appears in The Rumpus, Barrelhouse, and additional journals.
Find Clayton:
Website
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Threads
Bluesky
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