How I’ve Been Dying {Prologue}
This is the prologue to a horribly haunted novel about a small town with a big, twisted soul publishing on Medium and my Substack newsletter. Wherever you read it, you can support me on Patreon to help bring this story to life.
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The Support Group for People with I-Want-To-Fucking-Die Disease met biweekly in the cafeteria of the local middle school, canceled only for real bad weather or if somebody fucking died.
The middle school that hosted this regular cry-fest was tucked back in a suburban neighborhood sprawled lazily along the outer edges of Baltimore. This sporadic, unclaimed space had been suffocating on its own liminality for decades, grasping for permanence under an unrelenting wave of development. One year it was family homes, the next corner stores and fast-food chains. A cycle of growth dictated by passing interest had produced a place eternally moving on from itself.
And, in turn, this place churned out people like listless, out-of-focus Lily. There were ten or eleven more just like her waiting in the school, dressed in chains and made to walk the Earth while they still lived. They were all either ghosts or they carried ghosts with them. Lily’s ghost was her youth, potential wasted in a flash of bitterness that had killed the future and the past with one needle. One mistake had created a ghost and left her trapped within her own devolving narrative. Still, she commended herself on the power of her spite, that it was enough to wake her up each morning to turn the page.
Waiting outside the school, taking her traditional pre-shit-show smoke to dull the noise, Lily watched strangers file in and out of a neon convenience store across the street. It gave her comfort, this place’s commitment to a vague unreality. Every car drove straight through, every person was simply stopping by, every family just living for the next day’s news. No homes, only houses.
Standing on the street corner, it was a gift to be overlooked, spotted briefly through a car window and forgotten by the next stop light.
Lily relished these smokes. They gave her a few minutes to relinquish her personhood, before she had to go in there and think and talk about who she really was. She knew who she was well enough; it wasn’t nearly as difficult as Dirk made it out to be.
My name’s Lily Silvestri and I used to have beautiful locks of deep, black hair that now resemble a pile of dead spider legs.
Checking her appearance in the reflection of a parked car, she was disappointed once again by the face of the corpse staring back at her. The half-shadow of the suburban night made her angled features almost ghastly, throwing darkness over blues eyes slowly sinking to the back of her skull. She sniffed at her clothes, wrinkling her nose at the potent stench of cheap weed — the only way to get through this.
The butt of the joint, still smoking, rolled into the road as Lily ended her moment of anonymity and prepared for the night ahead. She wiped ash from her clothes, pulled her hair back into a bun, and her sleeves into the palms of her hands.
Lily’s psycho-somatic transition into the kind of person who actually wanted to get help was almost complete when she spotted Nancy speed-walking across the parking lot.
“Lily!” Nancy called out, careening toward her at a speed only a three-time divorcée could muster at this hour.
Lily barely had time to adopt an entirely new persona before Nancy was upon her.
“How are you, girl!” Nancy pulled her in for a hug, which always came with a few deep whiffs and the passage of silent judgement.
“I’m doing good, Nance,” Lily said, wiggling out of the hug. “How are the kids?”
Nancy could only see her kids every third weekend. “Oh, they’re great,” she lied, wiping a bit of ash off Lily’s jacket. “You know my Michael just got accepted to college, if you’d believe that.”
Lily had dropped out of college after a week.
“Amazing, Nancy.” Lily coughed, saving the look on Nancy’s face as a deluge of rotten lung hit her for later. “You must be so proud.”
“What mother wouldn’t be?” Nancy said, smiling through her teeth. Lily returned the favor and silently wished for Nancy to die violently before her son’s graduation.
“Are y’all ready?” Zeke shouted across the lot, needlessly jogging past. “It’s time for the Support Group for People with I-Want-to-Fucking-Die Disease!”
Lily flashed Zeke a real smile. He was her biggest fan, only because he liked taking advantage of vulnerable girls and Lily liked hurting people. Nancy just shook her head, disappointed. “What a terrible name for this group,” she clucked. “It’s really nothing to joke about.”
Lily could only offer her a “Mm-hmm,” as she finally made her way to the cafeteria.
In truth, Lily loved the name; it was an in-joke that she liked to take credit for, although the fear that whoever had actually thought it up might one day reveal themselves and cast her out of the group kept her up most nights. Those thoughts followed her into the fluorescent carven that hosted each of these meetings. Long lunch tables, sticky with the memory of children’s careless fingers, had all been folded up and stashed against the walls to form a linoleum clearing, where Dirk, their fearless leader, had set up the usual circle of folding chairs.
Maybe a year ago, she’d arrived too early and found Dirk straining to unload the chairs from his truck and haul them, one by one, into the meeting space. The moon was just beginning to crawl over the horizon, throwing a silver haze over him that revealed all of his deformities, down to the awful scars that patterned his thin wrists. Old scars like that, they still sweat red. Lily hated it. He looked so weak. She had watched from her car until he had brought all the chairs inside; she knew that she would enter the school and find Dirk, the group therapist with those painfully kind eyes, waiting, and not whatever shade she had just witnessed dragging chairs across the sidewalk.
She shook that image from her mind as she found her seat between Ryan and Leila like always. Her fingers brushed Ryan’s sloping shoulder, pulling his attention toward how gracefully she moved, sitting right where he couldn’t see Leila’s stupid face.
“Lily,” he breathed, in that quiet, earnest way. “I didn’t think you were coming tonight.”
She had broken down crying at their last session and, if her memory served her right, chairs might have been thrown and promises never to return made. But she was way too high to think about that right now, and one loose smirk seemed to wipe it all into the trash bin of the past.
“Like I would miss this,” Lily said, laughing. She reveled briefly in Leila’s look of shocked disdain before returning to Ryan. “So, do you still have it?”
Confusion was a resting state for Ryan, but the slight furrowing of his brow showed that he had truly no idea what Lily was talking about. “Have what?”
Lily’s heart caught in her throat as it clambered for release. “You know,” she said. “Come on, Ry… it… you know…”
Ryan didn’t just look confused now, he looked… uncomfortable. Bored, even. The corners of Lily’s mouth fought to maintain her casual smile as her mind raced to find the perfect reply.
“I-Want-To-Fucking-Die…” Lily almost forgot the rest of her joke and caught the beginnings of a look of serious concern on his face. “…Disease.”
There was a moment of silence followed by a few awkward chuckles. Maybe Ryan said something about that being funny, or maybe he said nothing and just turned away; Lily didn’t remember. She was in the hallway now, throwing up into a trash can.
How long she had been there and when she fled the circle were all forgotten in a haze of writhing mental static. Once her breathing was under control and she wasn’t hacking up bile every few seconds, Lily opened her eyes to find that her hair, undone, had been catching the vomit this entire time. The sight of her mother’s wasted pride, now dressed in a shameful and toxic shawl, made Lily want to vomit again. That it would only be more to fall into her hair was the only thing that kept Lily’s throat shut, and instead she was pushed to the floor in a weeping mess that reeked of stomach acid.
“Has anyone seen Lily?” Dirk’s soft voice floated down the hallway, pursuing Lily like a phantom. Whatever response the circle offered was lost as she scrambled away, a ragged mass of hair and limbs that heaved and begged and stank.
I just need to find a closet, any place dark, and wait for the meeting to end, Lily thought frantically, barely able to form a full sentence out of the chaos. No one can see me, no one can see me, no one can see –
“Excuse me,” a new voice sprung out from behind Lily, suddenly trapping her in the perception of a stranger.
She had not asked for this. Being perceived against your will is an awful thing, and Lily couldn’t stand it. While her ragged breathing caused her frame to shake in a fragile rhythm, the rest of her refused to move and recognize this invasion of her private horror.
“I’m sorry,” the voice came again, cold, like ice melting in her hand. Legs crossed her peripheral vision. “It seems like you’re having a moment right now.”
Now the legs were in front of her, so thin. Slowly the voice arrived upon its words, waiting upon each one as if they had to be thawed.
“But… I’m just horribly lost in this very strange place.”
And now the owner of the voice gingerly sat criss-cross on the floor, eye-level. The voice had a body after all, and a face, and one eye the color of curdled milk, the other so sunken and dark that it held Lily’s reflection.
“I just need to know where the cafeteria is, or where the group counseling is, whichever you get first,” the voice with the face said, awkwardly offering a frail hand. “My name’s Adrian, by the way.”
Lily could see herself throwing up in the shine of Adrian’s black eye before she realized what was happening.
Outside the middle school, only a few feet from the remnants of an ineffective pre-therapy joint, Adrian draped his tattered denim jacket around Lily’s trembling shoulders. He had seen enough movies to know that putting a jacket on a shivering person was a social custom he dared not cross. Most of what Adrian knew about being nice to other people he had learned from movies.
“You don’t have to do that,” the girl whose vomit was currently drying on Adrian’s shoes said. “It’s not even that cold.”
Adrian smiled meekly and offered no reply. There was a mild chill, but he had given her his jacket because she looked like she needed one. Though he’d never known how to say something like that. Instead, they shared the silence for a while longer. Cars drifted down the street, carrying nameless passengers to listless futures.
Adrian liked to count how many ghosts he saw.
Sometimes they were clinging to the roof, or screaming in the driver’s ear. A few were crammed into backseats, writhing in-between fidgety children or giggling teenagers. There were more shuffling down the sidewalk, and a gathering waiting outside the middle school. They had parted for him when he helped the girl outside — scurrying away like a school of fish disrupted by a passing shark — but now they’d regrouped, waiting.
When he had first seen her, Adrian had thought the girl now huddled on the curb was a ghost of some kind, too, the way she shuddered and wretched. He was now mostly convinced that she was alive. The vomit on his shoes served as a solid reminder of her corporeality. And, he thought, the way the streetlights danced across her eyes. She was beautiful, in an earnest way. As if you might close your eyes for too long and she’d be gone, like a view from a car window frantically put to memory but lost moments later. For that, she demanded attention, at the very least so you might not forget her and how her eyes had captured the light so completely. Or how her hair, thin and damaged down to the roots, fell like lichen upon her cheeks, cradling her narrow face.
Adrian wondered what she saw when she looked at him. A rail-thin stranger with a nose turned an inch the wrong way, one eye left out in the sun for too long, and an ear that had been carved in half. A sick man with a face made of scars.
Two familiar hands grasped Adrian’s shoulders. In a passing car, a woman without eyes was telling the driver how and when they were going to die.
“Are you gonna sit down?” The girl’s voice broke Adrian’s focus and the world was underneath his feet again.
“Oh, right… sorry,” he stammered, a little shaken, as he sat on the curb and crossed his legs. “I was counting ghosts and got distracted.”
That made Lily laugh; Adrian tried to smile with her, suddenly self-conscious of the way the skin sagged around his bad eye.
“What, like that kid who saw Bruce Willis?” Lily joked. Adrian just stared at her. “Have you seen that movie?”
“The one where a kid sees Bruce Willis?” Adrian said, testing each word in his way. “I wish I knew what any of that was supposed to mean.”
Over the next five minutes, Lily did her best to explain a movie she had only ever seen halfway through, and Adrian listened with as much intent as he spoke, eye and ear both glued to her. The discussion of a movie neither was ever really interested in soon drifted well away from Bruce Willis, and they wasted the better part of the hour making sense of nothing.
Nothing became something and Lily found herself explaining the stupid name she’d made up for their ‘club’ with her fingers twirling through the frayed ends of her hair at a manic speed. Adrian listened and nodded, as he had been doing for most of this conversation.
His nose was crooked, like it had been hit hard and never made it back, and his right ear had been cut if half. A crooked nose and a bad eye could all be accidents, but Lily couldn’t take her eyes away from his ear. A knife had done that. The edges of the cut were ragged and poorly-healed, leaving the upper part of the whole construction a disfigured mass of flesh.
If Adrian noticed how she was staring, he didn’t say anything about it. He just watched her with the one eye, so still against the night that she worried some of the passing cars might think she was talking to herself.
Lily had been so fascinated by Adrian’s scars that she hadn’t even realized she’d finished her story. The silence of Adrian formulating a reply ran up at her like the ground at the end of a long fall; she would’ve choked on it if he hadn’t interjected.
“So when did you get it?” he asked, like a doctor practicing his bedside manner.
“Get…what?” Lily responded before she’d even considered his question. She was so caught up in her head that whatever she’d been saying was now completely out of mind. Adrian tried to redirect to an explanation with all the grace and speed of a beached whale, stuttering in painful slow motion. It was enough to jog Lily’s memory. “Do you mean the disease?”
The loose skin that hung from Adrian’s white eye sometimes quivered when he smiled, like there was still a bit of life behind it that could be roused into protest. Lily had started looking for that twitch of dead flesh to see if a joke had landed. “I-want-to-fucking-die disease, I think you called it,” Adrian offered, with a slight smile and a twitch below the eye. “If you’re here, you must have it. What’s the start date for this ordeal? And you can’t say when you were born, that’s a cop-out.”
It was Lily’s turn to smile, a real one. There was something about the way Adrian spoke, about the soft, slow tones that should put you to sleep, but instead caught your attention with every stressed silence. “But what if it does start when you’re born?” Lily countered. “How do we know some people aren’t just born a little wrong, a little sad?”
“I don’t know about that,” he said ponderously. Lily couldn’t ditch the feeling that he had more to say than he ever did. “I don’t think it’s a disease you’re born with, not that kind. That kind defines you, because it is you.”
“So it’s something you catch, then?”
“Only from certain people,” he said, responding quicker this time. His white eye rolled lazily to become glued to the street. “If that makes sense. Only from certain people. Like a ghost.”
They both noticed the meager crowd spilling out of the middle school at the same time. Lily’s face changed, all the light that her eyes clung to so dearly disappearing with the rhythm of her heaving chest. He knew it was only moments before these strangers reached them and she’d be washed over by that same wretched fear again.
“You want to walk?” he clamored to his feet and extended a hand. “The night’s nice, in a weird way. Let’s explore it.”
They outpaced the mass of strangers and their howling ghosts, finding themselves leaning over the edge of a simple bridge fording a nearby suburban creek and watching the water slip over the stones below. It was nothing but reflections at night, only real by connection with the rocks and shores it broke against.
“You wouldn’t have liked any of them anyway,” she muttered, much to herself. Adrian wondered if he should reply. But then she turned to him. “How’d you know I wanted to get out of there? Not the school, that was pretty obvious, but the parking lot. Them.”
“Your heart beats too loud,” he said, immediately regretting his honest answer. But Lily didn’t recoil, just stopped and considered.
“People always call me loud,” she mused. “I’ve spent a lifetime self-regulating my volume and people always call me loud.”
“People can be a lot of things.”
“People can be ghosts.”
A silence. Lily seemed transfixed by the movement of the creek, lost for this moment in the flow of the water and the infinite metamorphoses of light it created. Her hand, that had been poised around the bridge’s rusted iron rails, began to slide toward his, reaching out. Adrian froze. Just before she might’ve glanced his bare fingers, he shifted away and stashed his hand inside his pocket. Lily stopped, her hand hovering where his should’ve been. Her fingers, curled around the unfulfilled shape of a caress, shook slightly.
She didn’t look at him when she spoke, but he could feel her eyes reflected in the water below, rising up at him from all angles of the night.
“What did you mean…” she started, “what you… when you said it’s only from certain people? Certain people, like ghosts.” Her empty hand clenched down around the iron railing. “I-it’s like haunted houses, isn’t it? I was terrified of ghosts when I was a kid, but I always thought to myself, I would know if my house was haunted by now. That always brought me comfort. No ghosts without a haunted house.”
“Houses aren’t really haunted,” Adrian began. “Homes are.”
He shifted on his feet.
“A ghost can be so many things, but it only needs a home. And sometimes people are homes. Broken ones. Dark ones. Haunted ones.” He trailed off, waiting for Lily to react, but her eyes didn’t leave the water. “Who was your home, then? You can call it a disease if you want, we can say you caught something. But I just want to know, who’s haunting you?”
Two hands, liver-spotted skin the texture of old leather stretched over thinning bones and nails, twisted around the edges of her scalp. Pencil-thin wrists ended in jagged stumps and impossibly long fingers lost themselves in the thickness of her suffering hair. The hands were constantly moving, pulling and curling every strand they could grab, petting her head, tugging on her ears.
“Maybe when she shaved my head, or beat me ’til I bled for the first time, maybe…” Lily caught the rest and kept it for herself.
A sharpness came to life inside Adrian, pried at his scars from underneath the skin. A hunger pooled behind his white eye. The hands in Lily’s hair had worked themselves into a frenzy.
Lily’s hand slipped off the railing, relinquishing its grip. It briefly groped the stillness between them before falling back to her side, having found nothing but the chill of a late darkness.
Adrian wanted to reach back, to bring her comfort. He found himself feeling it without doing it, the tenderness of a single hand on her shoulder, two fingers meeting over the frigid creek.
Warmth landed on Lily’s shoulder, spreading flat like an open palm. Adrian was still just standing there, hands hidden inside of pockets, watching her. The sight of him was starting to upset her: how he could speak with such concern and tenderness, while his whole being progressively raised every alarm in her body. He made her want to open her heart with a butcher’s knife.
“Who are you?” she almost begged, finding his good eye. “Why can’t you just say something? I just met you and now I’ve told you all my secrets and we’re standing on this stupid bridge and you just look right through me, you know that? Every time.” Her words stuck in her throat for just a moment before she forced them through. “How did you know my heart beats too loudly? I know that, I hear it like it’s inside my fucking skull everyday. But how’d you know that?”
Adrian retreated a little further down the bridge, just far enough into the shadows that he looked to be missing his good eye. It was so black that Lily could see her reflection in it from where she was standing, like a full-sized mirror in the middle of these woods. But that didn’t make sense.
“I hear a lot of things I shouldn’t be able to hear.” Adrian’s voice reached from around the mirror, where she swore he’d been standing a second ago. All she could see now was herself, consumed by a reflection, alone on an impossibly dark night. “I’m sorry, Lily.”
Her heart lost a few beats when the hands came into view. Not the ones she remembered, different hands. Coal-black hands with papery, oozing, wrong skin. She remembered the warmth on her shoulder and wanted to cry.
“I think it helps people in the end,” he said, his voice reaching for her again. “I can eat what you don’t want. All the ghosts you don’t need.”
The greatest fear Lily had ever known blossomed hard against her ribs. But, within that terror, she found an unknown part of herself returning a silent, but resounding, yes.
“I can take the hands away, Lily.”
His voice was everywhere and right behind her. The warm, black hands clasped around her shoulders slid up to her neck, cradling the back of her head. They were unbearable against her skin, cloyingly warm and slick with some constant greasy perspiration. Hot breath tickled her neck, but there was still no sound other than Adrian’s slow voice, so hushed and thoughtful he was almost humming.
“I can make her leave your hair alone.”
And then Adrian stood in front of her, just close enough that she didn’t lose her reflection in his black eye. He looked so sad, like an executioner without his hood.
“Adrian,” she stammered, tears of frustration and fear streaming down her cheeks. “You never told me who’s haunting you. Please, I don’t know what’s happening, can you tell me? Can you tell me, Adrian?”
She grabbed his face — and shrieked when the flesh peeled right off the distorted, blackened scowl beneath.
Beneath the bridge, a man with a crooked nose, half an ear and one eye the color of midnight crouched with his knees tucked tightly between his arms. He watched the moon’s shattered reflection dance frantically upon the creek’s surface, admiring how much motion it made and how little it moved — trying not to listen to the woman weeping for her mom just a few feet above him.
