After Kuroneko
by Linnie Greene
Twelve brothers started the fire that made us ghosts. The Chi Lambda house sat like a beacon overlooking campus. There were many hills; this was the tallest. There were many brothers; these were hardly the worst.
Hiking up the sloping lawn, we joked among ourselves. Our voices lapped over and between each other like waves.
Surely this trek would burn the caloric equivalent of at least one tequila shot?
This is the third pair of Steve Maddens I’ve ruined on a frat house lawn this year and it’s not even June.
We were Maddi, Everli, Emma, Stefani, Abbi, and Blair; Ashli and Kari and Lauren. We were sisters, reared together on secret songs and commemorative 5Ks. We were buzzed on fresh air and Fireball. We were pulling the heels of our stilettos out of the aerated grass.
I think of the morning we did not get; the stumble back to sorority row at daybreak. Then, a trip to Waffle House in Lauren’s Volkswagen Jetta, comparing the size of Chad and Benji’s dicks, inhaling hash browns we’d repent for later at PureBarre.
It was Benji who handed us the trash can punch, Lauren’s ex, with whom she’d reached what she believed was a friendly detente after their breakup two months earlier.
“You girls,” he said, all pearly veneers, face floating like a moon over his Lacoste. “Thick as thieves, huh?”
We accepted the solo cups he proffered and downed them like water before we found ourselves upstairs, with Chad and Max and Nat and Will Jr. and other Will and Ted. Time simply disappeared—there was only the confusing present. We’d made it three years and six months until our first roofie. There was one of us for each of them, the members of the senior class. The night moved image to image, like a reel: a pair of eyes fixed on my forehead, a hand bracing on my arm.
The last thing I remember is the overwhelming scent of cologne, then metallic smoke. It was Bear (né Mark) who fell asleep with a cigarette downstairs, and everyone fled. Everyone but us. We exited the world just as we lived in it: side-by-side, on twin beds squeezed into a series of rooms.
Now, we just want hash browns. Blood will have to do.
⦿
If you cross North Campus late at night, as one day bleeds into the next, there will be a woman in a mini dress. She can explain: maybe she went to print a paper at the library on the way home from the bar. She might’ve lurched off the bus a few stops too soon with a dead phone. The night retains a chill, even as the days have grown stifling. Ten months since that fire, and there are still ribbons tied to all the trees.
You offer her your Barbour jacket. You feign interest in her complaints about the journalism school. On the walk to her house, where you escort her because you have manners, you notice the shapely curve of her calves, the way her dress stops just short of her ass. Pilates, you decide; that’s a Pilates ass.
The little town is silent by now. You’re eight drinks in and you monkey around in the road to amuse her.
“What’s your name?”
She turns to giggle, “Who’s asking?”
You sense you’re going to get lucky tonight. You have already been so lucky tonight. $1 Coors at Panama Al’s; IPAs on the roof at Lucky’s, arms spread on the patio that overlooks your campus on the hill. You’ll graduate soon, but on these nights—sweeter for their impending expiration—you consume your kingdom like someone tapping a well. You down every drop; you lick the skin of any woman who’ll submit, ankle to eyeball, insatiable for this perfect, fleeting spring. There are thirty names in a note in your phone, women who’ve let you between their legs. Your dad’s friends always talk about these days, the halcyon ones that glow so golden from the lamplight of their real estate offices, their desks on Wall Street.
“I could use a nightcap,” she says. You moved into an apartment with your boys this year, a grandfathered craftsman within spitting distance of the frat’s front yard, the place you’ve thrown up and grown up for four perfect years. Not far now—you steady your walk, mindful of the old bricks.
“I got some Japanese whisky for graduation,” you slur at her, hoping to bite her ass like a peach. “But if you’re not into that I think I have Stoli and juice or something.”
She leads the way like she knows where she’s going, but how could she? She’s a stranger. In the sodium light, she nearly floats. Dew gathers on the grass but you’re uninterested in sleep, afraid to miss a single moment of what might be the best night of your life.
“What year did you say you were?” you ask. She ignores you, blushing under a curtain of gossamer blonde.
You fumble your keys; you finally insert one into the lock, a prelude of what’s to come. You drop a solo cup in the kitchen and it bounces across the floor. “Shit,” you mutter, unsure if your roommates are home. You slosh booze carelessly; you veer back to your bedroom with two drinks and she’s already prone on the covers, stripped to a pair of rhinestone panties. Her proportions are unfathomable and perfect, voluptuous and tasteful.
She’s the girl you’ll marry. She’s the girl you’ll bring to your father’s fundraiser. You’ll fuck her with her pearl necklace wound in your fist, you’ll fly her down to Hilton Head, you’ll impregnate her with tow-headed children that will grow up in seersucker and private schools.
The next day, they will find you alone. They will find you bloodless and slashed, like a hunted deer. You spent so much time consuming; you were delicious to consume.
⦿
The boys are disappearing. It was one thing when townies abandoned their usual barstools, but the children of lawyers and assemblymen are being gutted and arranged on lawns. Just last Thursday, the corpse of a varsity rower at the center of the semester’s most noteworthy chlamydia outbreak was discarded on the quad. His teammates wept, prostrate at his feet.
Tragedy has marked the campus like a bloody handprint. There’s no ignoring the stain. Admission rates have plummeted. A series of detectives and investigators scour nightclubs and dive bars for the perpetrator and come up empty.
We’re impossible to grasp. We are Maddi, Everli, Emma, Stefani, Abbi, and Blair; Ashli and Kari and Lauren, and we are no longer corporeal. Which sucks.
Between meals, we grow bored. Liquor streams out of vessels and straight through our ghostly bodies. We can’t get drunk, or order wraps, or decorate wooden paddles. We watch the entirety of the basement library’s VHS collection for want of other entertainment. We’re surprised to like the work of Ozu and Jim Jarmusch. We miss sex, contouring, and Waffle House.
A state senator whose nephew pledged Alpha Sigma Phi holds a press conference decrying the violence against young, promising men, allocating an additional $2 million to campus security and vowing to serve justice. Stefani interferes with the signal to his microphone so every other word gets muted: “-are-to-the safe-vibrant campus-been the crown jewel of-for centuries, and—.” A sweaty aide fiddles with the outlet. We giggle.
Even with nine of us, it’s impossible to depopulate the university of bad men. We’re left to choose the easiest targets, those whose erections guide them like weathervanes. “Here, kitty kitty,” we might as well say, pouring our collective energies into the mirage of a girl. We trap them; we eat them; we leave what’s inedible where it’ll be found. We have eaten eleven so far.
Twelve and we’ll be even, a meal for every girl. Where is Bear né Mark? Where is Benji? Where is Chad? We didn’t bother haunting them because we didn’t need to. They were medicated in expensive apartments up and down the East Coast, unable to sleep, watching the rooms burn behind their eyelids.
The ribbons on the trees are bleached white now, and we’re largely forgotten. Graduation approaches and soon the campus will empty. We’ll float through cinder block dormitories singing to ourselves, killing time until we disappear or fall arrives, whichever comes first.
“We need to eat,” Blair says. “We’re evaporating.”
Our ghostly pallor is less like a pearl and more like a soap bubble now. She’s right; we need sustenance, to dine on the blood and predation of some beefy athlete type. Who could power us through a hot, windless summer? Football players tasted bland; economics majors too salty.
“I have someone in mind,” I say. I have always been the quiet one, but in the afterlife, I’m finding my voice. Lauren tells everyone to hush. “Ethan Humphries. The freshman.”
We consider. He’d be a sophomore now. He rolled out of the first floor of the burning frat house last year partially aflame, waking drunk on a leather sofa to find his legs on fire. He wears compression leggings to cover his scars. He’d been a brand-new pledge, humiliated into loyalty by his big brother, Benji.
“You think he knew?” Everli asks.
“He knew,” we all say at once, together, like the words to a familiar song.
⦿
Your mother suspects you have not been right since the fire, but your disquietude started weeks before; months, maybe. That ember started glowing the moment you committed to Chi Lambda. The moment you locked eyes with Benji wondering if he’d maim you or mentor you. It was always a little of both. The remaining brothers worry about you openly, paternally.
You’ve taken to drinking outrageously and staying out all hours. Your grades tank, predictably, and your parents—gastroenterologists at the same metropolitan hospital—threaten to unenroll you if you can’t eke through the semester. If you survive the spring, it’ll be by the good graces of sympathetic women who share their notes, who pretend not to stare at your scar tissue. Some of them let you in bed—pity sex, you know but don’t acknowledge.
At 3 a.m. on a Sunday the only ones left on Main St. are a handful of homeless men and the bartenders locking the doors. You’ve reverted to the harder stuff as a way to blunt the memories. The lone employee at the empty dive bar had been silent while you snorted lines off the counter. This is the hardest time of night, but you can whittle it to dawn if you keep yourself busy. You put in a pair of headphones and start the running playlist that will last until you’ve walked to the other side of town.
She’s right outside the football stadium, consulting a map on her phone in the vast parking lot. The closer you get, the more familiar she looks, although you can’t match her to a class or a basement party. You nod and keep walking.
“Excuse me?” she asks behind you. “Could you help me find McClure Street?”
Your teeth are grinding against each other like a piece of machinery wound too tight. The last thing you wanted tonight was an obligation, but here it is, glowing on the sidewalk.
“Yeah. I’m heading that way,” you lie.
She peppers you with questions from South Campus to fraternity row, past the colonnades and towards the featureless apartment building where you live alone.
“What’s your major?” she asks.
“Communications,” you say. “Are you in my Wednesday psych lecture?”
She demurs. You hadn’t been headed toward home, but you are now. Her voice sounds like wind chimes. She tells you she’s from the beach. She tells you she broke up with her boyfriend last month and needs to reel it in.
“So late,” she sighs, birds chirping in the nearby hedges. “I’ve been partying way too much.”
“Same,” you say.
“Really?” She becomes attentive in a different way.
McClure Street is just past your complex, and you stop at the entrance and gesture ahead.
“Sorry. Can I use your bathroom?” she asks.
You’re both inside before you think to wonder how she knew that’s where you lived. You’re cranked, you think to yourself; she probably asked and you probably told her.
You lie down on the bed with your eyes wide open, staring at the popcorn ceiling. You hear the toilet flush. She comes into the room and lays down beside you. She starts touching you with no preamble. You don’t move as she unzips your fly, delicately tugs down your jeans.
She doesn’t bother removing your shirt before she situates herself on top. When you lift onto your elbows to look at her, the face rearranges and you recognize it for the first time—her but not her, a faded, gauzy version of the women who burned in the house, all of them together.
“It’s you,” you say between breaths, the feeling of her moving over you. She stares back, no effort on her face.
“It’s us,” she says.
The movements become quicker, the pressure deeper. You feel something cracking open inside you like a geode. The girls were beautiful in a way that troubled Benji and Chad and Bear (né Mark). They denigrated them all the time, to reassure themselves that they could discard the girls when they pleased.
They could be alive today if you weren’t such a pussy, if you hadn’t cowered under Benji and the others like a stray dog.
“I’m sorry,” you say, cresting some powerful wave. “I’m sorry.”
Tears form and fall unbidden. You’d be embarrassed if you weren’t so tired, cold suddenly to your marrow. She opens her mouth and licks your cheeks. You hear a bright, keening sound. It’s coming from your chest; it’s coming from your chests pressed together.
You wail, and then you sleep. You let it consume you, like a flame.
Linnie Greene is a writer in Jersey City, NJ. She’s Clement’s mom. You can find her work in Hobart, Fast Company, The New York Times, and elsewhere, and she contributes regularly at Pitchfork. She’s a Capricorn sun/moon, Gemini rising.
