vignette from "Strawberry Milk" Ouija
Death is nothing at all. Sitting legs crossed, parallel to her mother’s tomb, she thought about the unbroken continuity that is always there. Death felt like a shadowy interval, a void without edges. The thought spiraled, coiling tightly around her mind like barbed wire. Closing her eyes, she imagined colors beyond the gray-blue palette of the cemetery. What’s the first thing one sees when they die? Is it fog, stairs, doors, rooms—no. Death is darkness. Death is nothing. But what is nothing?
Shaking her head she banished the thoughts. From her tote bag, Lola pulled the Ouija board, its edges scuffed and softened by time, placing it gently on the cold earth. She lit three black candles around the board to ward off any evil. As she lit each flame she set the intention of communicating only with her mother. Their flames stretched thin in the chill air. Her black hoodie hung loose on her frame, sleeves fraying at the edges. The child who once played with dollhouses now sat among gravestones. She placed her fingers on the heart shaped planchette, the wood cool beneath her touch.
“Are you here?” she asked softly, she was fifteen now and her voice was lower and steadier.
“Do you hear me?”
The graveyard answered with the creak of skeletal branches and the rustle of dead leaves. The world beyond the cemetery seemed to fall away, leaving her suspended in a cocoon of silence.
“Will we ever see each other again?” she asked, her words falling like stones into a bottomless well. The planchette trembled, nudging to the edge of the board. A faint warmth rose in her chest, hoping to fight against reason.
“Is it you?”
The candles snuffed out in unison, a sharp, unnatural finality that plunged the cemetery into darkness. The planchette moved—slowly, deliberately—toward the upper left corner of the board. A faint, breathless hope swelled in her chest. The hollow of the planchette encircled the words “Yes” inscribed in deep black letters.
Her stomach dropped. She recoiled, flinging the board aside as though it had burned her. Pressing herself flat against the damp soil, she stretched her fingers into the earth, as if reaching for something deeper, something hidden beneath the weight of the grave. The wind howled, dragging brittle leaves across her skin.
Spider lilies. Periwinkles. The names drifted through her mind unbidden, whispered remnants of her growing fascination with curative plants. Plants that held the cure to cancers. Their delicate petals rose like specters in her thoughts, sharp against the cemetery’s muted grays.
Her fingers brushed something hard, round. She pulled it free—a button, its surface cool and worn. She turned it in her palm, the edges smooth, tactile, oddly comforting. Shrugging, she dropped it into her tote bag and stood, brushing soil from her knees.
On the bus, jaundiced lights buzzed overhead, their glow smearing her reflection across the grimy window, her hollowed cheeks and weary eyes stared back at her. She watched the cemetery shrink through the window. Dirt clung beneath her fingernails and in her stringy black hair. The hum of the engine pulsed in her skull, numbing her to the world outside. She put her headphones in and nodded off for the half hour bus ride.
At home, her father sat slouched at the table, fingers coiled around the neck of a sweating beer bottle. His eyes met hers briefly as she stepped inside. He took a big swig and thudded the beer bottle against the table.
Slowly, he rose to his feet, losing his balance for a brief moment. Lola didn’t flinch, but her breath quickened, her pulse loud and insistent in her ears. The last six years had worn the man down, his skin had the quality of tree bark and his eyes had sunken deep into his skull.
"What's in the bag?" he asked, his voice low and frayed, rasping through the tension like a dull blade.
Before she could answer, he lunged for the tote bag slung over her shoulder. The strap caught briefly on her arm before it ripped free, the fabric tearing slightly at the seam. He turned it upside down and shook its contents onto the floor. The Ouija board clattered against the tiles and the candles rolled into the dim corners of the room. He stared at the board for a moment, as if expecting it to spring to life, then let out a bitter laugh.
“This again?” he muttered, his words steeped in disgust. “Why can’t you give this crap a rest?” The sour tang of beer and sweat clung to the air around him, filling the room like a miasma.
She froze, her gaze first on the scattered candles, a thin trail of wax clung to one of them like a scar, then she turned her gaze to the beer bottle on the table, its condensation had melted into a pool of water around it. Snapping out of it, she bent down silently to retrieve her things, fingers fumbling and trembling across the cold tiles, she had gathered everything except the button, which she couldn’t find. Her father didn’t move to stop her, but his gaze burned into her back, heavy and unrelenting.
“You think you’re talking to her?” he said, his voice quieter now, almost a whisper. There was no warmth in it—only derision, sharp as broken glass. “She’s gone. You can’t bring her back.”
Desperate to flee the scene, she gave up on finding the button. Her father had returned to his seat, staring into his beer as though it held answers. He didn’t look at her again as she slipped away to her room.
She sat on the edge of the bed, tracing the dirt under her nails and wondering if her mother had heard her at all. The wind outside her window howled softly, carrying whispers she couldn’t decipher. She pressed her palms against her ears, her heart pounding to a beat she couldn’t quite place, a rhythm that felt both familiar and terrifying.