It was just a little red-and-brown smear on the white tile of the shower wall, but it wouldn’t come off. Lisa tried with her thumb, then she licked her thumb, then she spritzed it with tile cleaner, then she swore at it, and finally she lost her temper and started chanting, whereupon a tattered, shrieking form clad in its own dissolving flesh lurched through her wall and halted an inch from her face, eyes boiling in its sockets.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” said Lisa.
She tried exorcisms first, of course, starting with gentle rebukes and moving up to firm nudges and stern commands before concluding in fiery demands to Get The Hell Out Of My Shower.
None of them worked, they just made the spectre soggier and more desperate. Its wails intensified and heightened in pitch, reminding Lisa of her childhood music lessons before mom had given up and admitted her daughter couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. With a lid.
So after the sixteenth failed effort (it cost her the last of her mistletoe, too) Lisa swallowed her pride and picked up her phone and dialed a number that was marked very firmly with an EMERGENCIES label.
“Hello?”
“Hi, grandma.”
“Oh, Lisa, darling. How’ve you been?”
“Bad, grandma.”
“Oh no honey, you always seem to have problems when you phone. What’s wrong?”
“Ghost in my bathroom.”
“Well that’s not appropriate.”
“I think it was a lady.”
“Still, she should’ve asked. Manners cost nothing, for fuck’s sake.”
“She’s tied to the tile on the shower wall and I can’t seem to exorcise her.”
“Is it ceramic?”
“I think so?”
“Well, that’s nice nonweathering material, sweetie. Ceramics last for ages, that’s why your brother won’t shut up about them, most of what he digs are the damned things.”
“Grandma, please.”
“Oh come on honey, you’ve got to admit he’s a bit of a bore.”
“He’s got tenure.”
“And a fat lot of good that’ll do him if anyone looks in his basement. Material possessions are a weight and a burden, honey.”
“Speaking of, my shower…”
“Oh, right. Well, the only thing to be done is either renovation or killing the one who wronged her. I’m guessing you’ve got a factory worker, so you’ll need to hex her boss – ooh, or better yet, her boss’s boss. Generally blame for this sort of thing is like a tree: it gets bigger farther up. Aim high and you’ll be sure to kill the whole thing.”
“Trees are cut at ground level.”
“Oh shut up. Do you want a hand? You know I love a good hexing.”
“No entrails.”
“What? Why? I have some on hand, you wouldn’t have to chop them yourself.”
“I’m a vegan.”
“Shit. You’re going to have to get over that someday.”
“Thanks, grandma.”
“Aim for the guts, mind you. Capitalists tend to be susceptible to blows in the digestive tract.”
“Thanks, grandma.”
“Good luck!”
“Thanks grandma.”
“And call more of-“
“Thanksgrandma,” said Lisa, and she hung up.
Guts. Right.
She could work with those. Sort of.
There were no entrails. There were, however, many pulverized cashews. The seed of potential life in them wasn’t very big but if you got a big enough bowl together and boiled it into a thick mush it was both a convincing entrails substitute AND easier to work with.
Lisa had told her grandma this a dozen times. She continued to insist she was being childish.
The tile was tricky; the diagrams kept dripping off. Finally she used a combination of cellophane and duct tape to strap everything in as she drew it, and even if it did end up being the ugliest hex she’d ever scrawled at least it stuck to the damned wall.
The ghost was behind her again; her back hair was standing up.
“Quit fussing,” she said. And she bit her thumb and jammed it just off the center of the diagram, in the stomach.
The ghost shivered, hummed, and stopped existing.
“Great,” said Lisa.
And she washed the wall off and had her first shower in three days. It felt like creaky and faintly tin-scented victory, and she was in there for at least forty minutes before she realized the phone was ringing.
“Hello?”
“Lisa!” The voice was enthusiastic, with pauses in odd places and a hint of sandpaper wrapped around a dried bone.
“Hi grandpa, how’ve you been?”
“Just peachy, but there’s something I need your help with.”
“Me?”
“Yes. You see, I was at a meeting just now-”
“I don’t think I can help with that.”
“-and the dean’s stomach erupted across the table.”
“He had the flu?”
“He had every organ in his abdomen escape at once.”
Lisa winced. “Oh.”
“Now, Lisa, you wouldn’t know anything about this, would you?”
“Uh…was the dean an investor in any tile-making businesses?”
“Just one.”
“Oh.”
“Joint partner.”
“Oh.”
“Lisa, I’m the other partner. And now I’ve got buboes on my groin.”
Lisa winced. “Grandpa!”
“Think carefully: DID you have anything to do with this?”
“Grandpa, it wasn’t personal. My shower was haunted.”
“Well, that’s pretty bad luck. Did you know ninty-nine thousand times out of a hundred thousand times it just makes the tiles more stain-resistant?”
“Grandpa that’s just ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”
“This isn’t about math. This is about practicality and quality and the buboes you’ve cursed onto my groin.”
“It wasn’t intentional!”
“Well, that’s not how the real world works. Consequences don’t care about your intentions, Lisa.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Won’t do the job. I’m greasing up the table.”
“Grandpa that’s dangerous.”
“That’s the POINT.”
“No I mean with your back.”
“My back’s fine!”
“You can’t walk around the block without taking a sit down.”
“So hoisting a small goat onto a table should be easy-peasy.”
“You’re going to throw out your back and the goat is going to stand on your chest and make it worse.”
“Don’t give me your lip, it’ll only make this worse for you.”
Lisa hung up.
Then she drew some circles around her bed – just in case – and passed out.
The phone woke her, vibrating with petulant force against her nightstand.
“H’lo?”
“Hey. Grandpa’s in the hospital.”
“Hi bro how are you.”
“Oh? Fine. I guess. Maybe. Anyways, it’s his back.”
“Yeah, he threw it out trying to curse me.”
“What?”
“I told him not to.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t intend to give him buboes on his groin. He was collateral damage.”
Her brother hung up, and Lisa slept through the morning with the peace of the righteous.
And her shower didn’t even smell that much like tin anymore.