Verwandte Artikel zu I Am the Ghost Here: Stories

I Am the Ghost Here: Stories - Hardcover

Samek, Kim

 
9798217153572: I Am the Ghost Here: Stories
Hardcover
ISBN 13: 9798217153572
Verlag: Dial Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

Twelve women confront the mounting existential terrors of modernity--climate change, unbridled capitalism and greed, an entertainment industry that will go to surreal lengths to stay relevant--in this debut story collection set in a slightly off-kilter version of reality.

A woman's limbs disappear into "the cloud" during wildfire-induced power outages. A lonely DoorDasher accidentally becomes the star of someone else's reality show, forced to resolve her fraught relationship with her immigrant mother for the narrative. Succumbing to a widely denied pandemic, a gymnastics coach must carry her heart around in a Mason jar, using her disability to become an influencer. Two chronically single, chronically ill people become soulmates, only to discover their meeting was algorithmically orchestrated by ad tech. Other dramas unfold as icebergs melt and island-sized trash heaps burn.

Threaded with sharp social commentary, these stories question the engineering of human connection through technology, social media, and reality television. Warm, endlessly strange, and filled with dark yet hopeful humor, I Am the Ghost Here casts familiar crises of contemporary life in a wholly unique light, offering a pathway towards our shared humanity even as reality comes crumbling down.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kim Samek is a half-Thai Emmy-nominated writer and television producer with credits including MTV's Catfish and PBS' WordGirl. She studied German Literature and creative writing at Stanford University. Her stories appear in Guernica, Ecotone, Electric Literature, The North American Review, The Chicago Quarterly Review, swamp pink, Gulf Coast, The Southern Humanities Review, The Threepenny Review, Story, and ZYZZYVA. Her short fiction has won a Pushcart Prize. A native of Seattle, she lives in Los Angeles.

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I Am the Ghost Here

It is not until my older brother is thirty-­three that I learn he’s controlled by a puppeteer. The truth comes out after a family emergency, when Jeff is unable to summon the puppeteer on short notice and must appear as himself for the first time. I don’t immediately recognize my brother as he hurries through the automatic doors of the hospital. He’s usually an alpha male, a tech founder who takes big strides and has a deep, booming voice, but this man is nervous, twitchy, weird.

Normally my brother greets me with a compliment about my appearance. “Looking good, SunnyD,” he’d say. “Really fit. You’ve made some gains?” He nicknamed me for the drink I chugged after judo practice as a kid. I am no longer a jock, but the nickname stuck. This man doesn’t use my nickname. He doesn’t greet me at all. He slinks up to me with his head down, like I am unfamiliar, except he is the one who is unfamiliar.

“Is Dad okay?” he asks, sitting down next to me not far from the triage window.

“I don’t know,” I reply. “I’m waiting for an update. Mom’s in the back with him. We should know something in a few hours. Are you okay?”

“Fine, fine,” he says brusquely.

I ask my brother what is going on, why he is so unfriendly. He says that now is not the best time to get into it, that we should focus on my father’s surgery and forget about how weird he is acting. He slumps over in his seat as we wait for news. The hospital is noisy with other emergencies. I hear what sounds like a seizure. I hear the aftermath of surgery, screaming that sounds naked in its timbre. I thought a hospital would have better walls. I hope my father will not be screaming like that when he wakes up from his surgery.

“Remember when Dad accidentally ate one of your magic mushrooms and thought he went to Jupiter?” I ask Jeff, attempting to conjure a happier mood. My mother had found these mushrooms in Jeff’s backpack and put them into a salad.

“The only time I saw Dad relaxed,” Jeff says, nodding. “Maybe if he’d tried a few more shrooms, he wouldn’t have had a heart attack.”

A few hours later, the doctor emerges. My father has survived the operation and is expected to make a full recovery.

*  

A few weeks later, my mother holds a family dinner to celebrate my father’s return to health. She prepares stir-­fried rice noodles, papaya salad, chicken wings, and sticky rice. My brother decides this is the moment to introduce us to his puppeteer. He arrives as the brother we are familiar with, but after a few minutes of chitchat, a petite redheaded woman pops out from inside him and stands by his side. Her name is Michelle, she is Canadian, she is thirty-­six, and she has over fifteen years of puppeteering experience. She says she has been scripting Jeff’s dialogue since he was in college. I didn’t become close to my brother until after he left for Stanford. In the summer breaks, when he returned home, he seemed happier, interested in connection. I’d assumed he had simply grown up, that the time away from home had been good for him.

I can tell my parents are uneasy with Michelle. They’ve heard rumors of celebrities hiring puppeteers, but no one we know has mentioned using one. Using a puppeteer is not the kind of thing a well-­adjusted person should do. My parents don’t have to speak to make their opinions clear. As they take turns making faces at Michelle, I ask her polite questions, like how she ended up in puppeteering. She tells us that she is an empath and being other people comes naturally to her. She says that she always wanted to work in the arts, that puppeteering uses her writing and acting skills. She even tells us a long, boring story about her high school theater days. My brother and I nod along politely.

As Michelle talks, it becomes clear that tonight’s intro was her idea, not Jeff’s. She says she’s grown tired of doing her work anonymously. Unfortunately, no one is interested in offering the praise she seeks. We are preoccupied with noticing how my brother is diminished without her. He isn’t gregarious, his arms are crossed, and his lips are arranged in the same permanent frown that he wore through high school, back when he would take his dinner to his room and eat alone while blasting Jane’s Addiction.

I try to imagine the kind of relationship I would have with this unmanned brother who quietly broods over his noodles. This guy doesn’t seem capable of organizing pickleball games. Instead of accompanying him to concerts, I would see him only at holidays. I refill Jeff’s whiskey glass, but the alcohol does nothing to lubricate him. As he sits hunched over in his chair, I hold out hope that the brother I love is somewhere in there. My mother is wearing a sweater that features a panda bear made of Swarovski crystals. Michelle leans over to inspect her face in the crystals, as Jeff would. She pretends to pick food out of her teeth.

“Where do you get a sweater like that, anyway?” she asks. “Do you have to insure it?”

My mother only glares.

I know what Michelle is doing. She is showing off her ability to embody Jeff. She doesn’t care that we are upset. I tell her to read the room, but she won’t stop doing her Jeff bit. After another fifteen minutes, my mother has apparently held in her feelings as long as she can, and now she erupts. She is a small woman, just four-­foot-­ten, but the anger makes her tall. My father leans back as she leaps out of her chair.

“This is sick,” she shouts at Jeff. “This woman is a stranger! You let a stranger control you?”

“Let’s give her a chance,” I say. “He’s done well with Michelle. Look at what he’s accomplished!”

I don’t understand why my brother has chosen to be controlled, but after he went to college, he became a good older brother, more like a father or uncle at times. I think back to his holiday visits home when, during my parents’ explosive fights, he did his best to reassure me. He said their mutual dysfunction had created two puzzle pieces that could never fit with anyone else.

“It’s counterintuitive,” he told me. “When they say they want a divorce, what they actually mean is that they want to remain fighting with each other forever. If they really wanted to leave each other, they would have by now.” I would have run away from home if not for his assured tone.

“What if this lady drives you to murder someone?” my mother asks. “Only a weirdo would do this job.”

“You can trust Michelle,” he replies. “I checked her references.”

“Michelle seems like a trustworthy person,” I say, even though I don’t know if that’s true.

My mother is upset I am siding with my brother. She stomps out of the dining room, flinging her chicken bones at Michelle on her way out. My father follows, with a look that says, See what you’ve done? Michelle picks the bones out of her lap. My brother looks distraught.

“This was a mistake,” he says.

“Give them time,” I reply, even though I know time won’t help.

Michelle doesn’t bother popping back into him now that the evening is ruined. She leads Jeff out with her hand pressed against his back like she is still guiding him, even from outside. A few days later, I text my brother to ask if he wants to play darts. He doesn’t reply. The next weekend, he misses...

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Verlag
Dial Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 13 
9798217153572
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
224
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Verantwortliche Person
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