Ghost cells are split into portions of fabric inside the body, and cigarette smoke makes holy apparitions like how people see Mary in water stains or tree bark. The fire escape at night is a rectory where I live two lives and am two people who share a shell. Inside the dwelling of my body, someone slopes against organs that create a barrier to keep away additional interlopers.
The two of us make nightly pilgrimages and visit relics of evenings cast in glass bottles. The casing of my shoes houses twin feet on a metal grate outside, smoking in a space where I’m meant to escape from fire. Echoes surround the small lake within the recyclable, where I drop the stems that are still burning. Wreathes bloom around a face that is both mine and a stranger’s. Both of us repeat motions I once knew very well from late nights, perfected over many years, until one evening the motions stopped; forced into a momentary pause the night I became two people.
Like pilgrims, she and I leave offerings in the same spot: a metal grate stairway with an empty Hi-Life. Or maybe I’m dead and she is leaving gifts for the pious departed. Maybe I’m the ghost inside the body in which she lives.
I wander in rooms leading her outdoors to take her to where bodies of water live in old beer bottles. Smoke is a cloud in the shape of a smile drifting above the rowhomes, meeting the rotating helicopters that I always used to think were stars.
Jane-Rebecca Cannarella (she/her) is a writer and editor living in West Philadelphia. She is the editor of HOOT Review and Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit and a former genre editor at Lunch Ticket. Jane-Rebecca is the author of Better Bones, published by Thirty West Publishing House; Thirst and Frost by Vegetarian Alcoholic Press; and others. She is the steward to a number of spoiled cats, and an appreciator of salt and nice looking rocks.
Serotonin 