The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 by Karen Joy Fowler

children before bed. Instead, on our California king, they gather to hear him repeat a story he has heard podcasted by Lakota storytellers. My husband never speaks of his Sioux blood. He has never even visited the reservation. All the people who would have connected him to that place were taken long ago by liquor, accidents, time-released mayhem, and self-imposed exile.
    The story he tells is about a ghost horse that was prized by braves riding into battle because the horse, being already dead, could not be shot from under them. It was afraid of nothing; it reared high and counted its own coup. Only at the end of the clashes do the braves realize a ghost warrior had been riding bareback with them, guiding the horse’s every move. In this way the braves learn the gallop of death without having to leave this life.
    The horse-child asks, “Why didn’t the ghost horse just go to heaven?”
    I suddenly realize it’s the first time I’ve heard the horse-child speak in—how long?
    My daughter answers her. “The story’s really about the ghost warrior,” she says.
    The horse-child asks, “Why doesn’t the ghost warrior go to heaven, then?”
    My daughter says, “Because ghosts have unfinished business. Everybody knows that.”
    My son asks, “Did Mom leave unfinished business?”
    My husband tells them, “A mom’s work is never done.”
    A health issue can be hard on a family. And it breaks my heart to hear them talk like I no longer exist. If I’m so dead, where’s my grave, why isn’t there an urn full of ashes on the mantel? No, this is just a sign I’ve drifted too far from my family, that I need to pull my act together. If I want them to stop treating me like a ghost, I need to stop acting like one.
    Interesting fact: In TV movies, a ghost mom’s job is to help her husband find a suitable replacement. It’s a venerable trope—see Herodotus, Euripides, and Virgil. For recent examples, consult CBS’s
A Gifted Man,
NBC’s
Awake,
and
Safe Haven,
now in heavy rotation on USA. The TV ghost mom can see through the gold diggers and wicked stepmoms to find that heart-of-gold gal who can help those kiddos heal, who will clap at the piano recitals, provide much-needed cupcake pick-me-ups, and say things like, “Your mom would be proud.”
    I assure you that no such confectionary female exists. No new wife cares about the old wife’s kids. They’re just an unavoidable complication to the new wife’s own family-to-be. That’s what vasectomy reversals and Swiss boarding schools are for. If I were a ghost mom, my job would be to stab these rivals in the eyes, to dagger them all. Dagger, dagger, dagger.
    Â 
    The truth is, though, that you don’t need to die to know what it’s like to be a ghost. On the day my doctor called and gave me the diagnosis, we were at a party in New York. Our mission was to meet a young producer for
The Daily Show
who was considering a segment on my husband. She was tall and willowy in a too-tight black dress, and while her breasts may once have been perfect, she had dieted them down to nothing. Right away she greeted my husband with Euro kisses, laughed at nothing, then showed him her throat. I was standing right there! Talk about invisible. Then my phone rang—Kaiser Permanente with the biopsy results. I tried to talk, but words didn’t come out. I walked through things. I found myself in a bathroom, washing my face. Then I was twenty floors below, on 57th Street. I swear I didn’t take the elevator. I just appeared. Then I was on a bus in North Carolina, letting a hard-drinking preacher massage my shoulders while my friend was dying in Florida. Then it was my turn. I saw my own memorial: my parents’ lawn is covered with cars. They must buy a freezer to store all the HoneyBaked Hams that arrive. My family and friends gather next to the river that slowly makes