Conversation Partner
by Ross Showalter
I buy a Ouija board with no plans to use it. I don’t know if my friend is dead. I only know that it’s been a year and some weeks that we’ve spoken. I put the Ouija board atop the shelf in my closet.
I work weekdays with deaf kids and weeknights with hearing adults. Both struggle with language and communicating, in different ways. I help them both, in different ways. I teach the kids about English spelling, consonants, and structure. I teach the adults how to use their hands, spell out the alphabet using their fingers, and how two fingers meeting can mean “friend” or “shame”—it all depends on the way they meet.
“I don’t teach,” I remind the kids often. “I reinforce what you should have already learned. I’m not a teacher. I only assist in your education.”
I say the same thing to the ASL students at night. I’m a conversation partner, I tell them with my mouth when they first come to me. If you want any more than that, you have to tell me. Bring me what you want to review or work on.
The adults typically nod, even if they don’t understand. The kids protest.
I see the Ouija board when I clean my apartment. I clean the space around it. The third week I open the doors and look upon it, I take it down and wipe down the box’s surface and the dust that lies beneath. I don’t open it. I want to know if my friend is dead, but that want isn’t all-consuming yet. I am so, so afraid.
The ASL interpreters at both jobs are different. They are both loose-limbed, smiling individuals. The ones standing in sunlight talk to me only about what the English and science teachers want. The ones at night check in with me. Without the kids around to distract and uplift, something heavy settles in my sternum. The Ouija board has so many questions around it. It has so many questions about it. I don’t know if it’s worth it to answer anything.
“Are you okay?” one of the night interpreters asks in between students. “You look like you’re about to cry.”
I blink. How long has it been since I’ve had the Ouija board? The fluorescent lights started flickering a couple shifts ago (Three? Four?) and it only adds to the uncertainty of the answers and questions traded between the ASL students and me. I don’t know if I’ve caught everything correctly. The ASL interpreters have to lean forward with furrowed brows and outstretched hands. Still, we all do the best we can. We grin and bear it.
“I think someone I know is dead,” I tell the ASL interpreter after the shift ends, when we are about to go our separate ways for separate bus rides home. “We haven’t spoken in a while. I bought a Ouija board because I want to talk with him.”
One of the kids I work closest with is out sick for a week. He caught a particularly bad case of pinkeye; I find myself sitting taskless in a classroom corner for two hours, almost three. He comes back the following Monday, and another deaf kid hoots.
“Oh my God, I forgot about you!” he signs. He sees me flinch and his face pinches together with scorn. “Don’t be so uptight,” he scolds me.
The ASL interpreter at night waves and smiles that same day. There is no time before the first student comes, but I can tell by the bounce of their right knee that they have something they want to bring up.
“I asked around,” the interpreter tells me at the end of our shift together. “Your friend hasn’t been seen in a while. Last I heard, he was at a party. Bad things happen at parties.”
Images immediately crowd my mind, of smoking substances in tin foil, mangled car bumpers, falls from windows or down wooden stairs. I shake my head. “What if he just forgot about me?” The question hangs between us, taunting and thick like cigarette smoke.
The interpreter shakes their head, “This is your best friend. Best friends can’t disappear.”
The interpreter tells me to bring out the Ouija board. We will work a shift together tomorrow then go home on the bus together tomorrow. We will use the Ouija board to see if my friend is still alive. I will sign and the interpreter will talk, and we will see if anything comes back to us. I have so many questions already.
I open the closet door and close it without taking out anything.
The next day, I ask about velocity and speed. I ask about subject-verb-object order. What’s the subject? What does the subject have in their hand? How fast will that baseball travel?
At night, I ask questions to ASL students. Do you like dogs or cats? Have you ever owned a pet? Was that pet your best friend?
The ASL interpreter walks with me clutching a tote bag. Two shadows stretch under fading piss-yellow pools of streetlight. Something catches in my throat whenever I turn and see a familiar, friendly face but not the one that’s haunted my mind. The dark concrete underfoot could be an ocean. I want to stick to these thin pools of light. I am still afraid.
I take out the Ouija board when we get home. The interpreter sets up candles in my bedroom and flicks at a Bic lighter. My eyes burn; I don’t know whether from smoke or sadness.
We sit. The ASL interpreter signs, “You can sign. I can talk. We have hands on the planchette. We have everything set up.”
Surrounded by candles, by murky promise, I can only think of the years together, our first-grade class picture—the first picture of us—the scrapes from the playground, the loose teeth and the hoarded books from the other’s bookshelf. I remember the confidences traded under tent canvas and index fingers pressed up against our smiling mouths. I know the vibrancy of us, the history of us, the way we glowed and laughed together like a star vibrating into supernova. That can’t be gone. I can’t be forgotten. The years are too many to just throw away.
I don’t know the right questions to ask. I don’t know what I want to know. All that runs through my mind is: Twenty-five years. Twenty-five fucking years, and you dropped the love between us. Fuck you, you dropped the love between us. You dropped the love between us.
I want to sign all of this, but I cannot even lift my hands. They feel so heavy. They stay in my lap. The ASL interpreter watches me, and I cannot meet their gaze. I only stare at the candelight thrown against the closet doors. My eyes keep burning and my vision blurs. I let it happen. Beyond, there is only empty, deep darkness. There is only selfish hope.
Ross Showalter's work has appeared in Electric Literature, Strange Horizons, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. He lives and works in Seattle, Washington.
