A Haunting for Eliza Jane— By Elizabeth Conway

Artwork by Ziyi Huang

An ultrasound detected a grapefruit-sized tumor growing in Eliza Jane’s ovary. It had hair and teeth and bones — what the doctors call a teratoma. They said it had a deleterious effect on the baby that she was also growing. EJ asked what deleterious meant, they said it meant she had miscarried. EJ imagined the tumor as a character from Where the Wild Things Are, gnashing their terrible teeth, their terrible eyes, their terrible claws. EJ wonders why she was able to grow a monster that miscarries babies. EJ wonders if the baby had blond hair like hers. If the tumor did too.

EJ hates the smell of sweet yogurt. It reminds her of her dad’s death. Cancer, that took him quickly after diagnosis within a window of two-seasons. And how near the end — when he had started swapping words like pillow for other words like chandelier or champagne — he started smelling like yogurt. It was one of the last foods he could eat, that his body could still digest, and its smell coated his breath and seeped from his pores when EJ leaned down to kiss his forehead. EJ doesn’t ever remember kissing her father until he was dying. She knows she did, EJ loved her dad completely. Those memories have been substituted with sickness.

EJ grew up in a mid-sized Minnesota town on the Mississippi River surrounded by farmland. In fifth grade one of her classmates was kidnapped. The boy remained missing for twenty-two years until a local man finally confessed to snatching him off his bike and suffocating him hours later. The man led the police to what was left of the boy’s bones and what was left of a red rain jacket. It was enough for a burial. But that would take years and years and years. The boy lived missing until then. Growing up in computer generated photos. A familiar face on flyers that filled storefronts until bleached and faded into a phantasm by the sun. Storefronts where kidnappers shop too. EJ remembers wetting the bed, waking up from a dreamless sleep at a time when search parties still had hope and donations of coffee and donuts to fuel miles-wide searches in the farmland surrounding the Mississippi River. EJ read somewhere that statically, killers were bedwetters as children. She didn’t wet the bed often, but sometimes, enough that she had special sheets to protect her mattress. She hates that she has this in common with murderers. Hates that this communion pangs her with empathy. That statistically this means she is naturally a bad person. If that’s why she could grow a monster.

EJ’s sister says that she dreams of their dad often. That he visits her while she’s asleep and they carry on in peaceful, uneventful conversations. EJ’s sister says one time in church an unfamiliar man sparked up a conversation with her as if they were close, told her it was good to see her, almost as good as a how-do-you-do from beyond. “Just got a visit from Dad,” she said. EJ’s grandma was visited by ghosts, by her husband H specifically, catching quick glances of him in the hallway or crossing the kitchen of the house. She said it was enough to be comforting. EJ sometimes thinks of her grandparents and her dad together. She listens to her sister’s stories of frequent casual dream conversations. She sometimes says that is enough to be comforting.

But EJ’s nights are mostly dreamless. She rarely dreams of her dad. She’s never received such craved words – as good as a how-do-you-do -- from unfamiliar people at church. Not a comforting breeze or phantom touch or even a sour smell of sweetened dairy caught in the air. Nothing to hint that he’s trying to visit, even though she asked him to before the cancer spread like wild-fire, like wild-things — gnawing and gnashing their terrible. So far, nothing.

Instead, they’ve chosen to keep each other’s company: her dad, his dad, a lost baby, a wild thing, even a farm boy who disappeared and died in a red jacket. Content together without her. EJ used to call this abandonment, but the opposite is true. The absence haunts her. Visits relentlessly. In fact, it never ever leaves her alone.

Elizabeth Conway has her MFA from the University of Montana, Missoula. Her fiction has been a finalist in Glimmer Train's Open Fiction contest, Reed Magazine's John Steinbeck Award and The Southeast Review's World's Best Short-Short Story Contest. Other works are found in the 'Weird Sisters' Lilac City Fairy Tales anthology by Scabland Books, New Flash Fiction Review, Blue Earth Review, and Fractured Lit’s flash fiction anthology. Her debut novel, BIOLUMINESCENCE, is currently seeking representation.