Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk (best time to read books txt) 📕

tarnished to dark brown. They each balance a black rice path of dried mouse shit.

Rocking his body, front to back, and holding his breath, the Matchmaker reaches around inside the tree and picks the peaches. He tosses each peach, still hot, down to where the Missing Link catches it in between two silk pillows. Our sports hero, the Missing Link. Mr. College Scholarship, with his single eyebrow thick as pubic hair. Mr. Champion Halfback, with his cleft chin big as two nuts in a sack.

From just this short toss, the peach is cool enough to touch. Mother Nature takes the peach from between the pillows and packs it into a hatbox of old wigs that Miss Sneezy carries, wrapped in both arms, in front of her waist.

Mother Nature, red henna designs smudge the back of her hands and outline the length of each finger. Her every head turn or nod, it rings the chain of brass bells around her neck. Her hair, the smell of sandalwood and patchouli and mint.

Miss Sneezy coughs. Poor Miss Sneezy is always coughing, her nose red and mashed toward one cheek from being wiped with her shirtsleeve. Her eyes bulging-big, swimming in tears, and shattered with red veins. Miss Sneezy coughs and coughs, tongue out, a hand on each knee, bent double.

Sometimes, the Matchmaker clutches the legs of chairs, the veined-marble edges of gold tables, to keep the ladder steady.

Sometimes, the Countess Foresight stands on her toes and holds the handle of a stiff, dusty broom in both hands, high over her head, and she pokes the tree, turning it enough to help you reach more of the “ripe” peaches. The ones still hot enough to boil copper. On her toes, her arms stretched out, you can see the security bracelet still sealed around her wrist. The tracking device dictated by the terms of her parole.

To the Countess Foresight, the ghost is an old-man antiques dealer, his throat slashed with a straight razor.

And with every peach the Matchmaker “picks,” the tree goes a little darker.

To Saint Gut-Free, the ghost is an aborted two-headed baby, both heads with his skinny face.

To the Baroness Frostbite, the ghost wears a white apron around his waist and curses God.

Sometimes, Sister Vigilante taps the face of her black wristwatch, saying, “Three hours, seventeen minutes, and thirty seconds until lights-out . . .”

To Sister Vigilante, the ghost is a hero with the side of his face caved in.

To Miss Sneezy, the ghost is her grandmother.

Standing this high up, the Matchmaker says, you can see the ceiling as an empty frontier where no one has ever set foot. That same way—when you were little and you'd sit upside down on the sofa, with your legs against the back cushions and your back against the seat cushions, so your head would hang down the front—that way the old family living room became some strange new place. Upside down, you could walk out across that flat painted floor and look up at the new ceiling, padded with carpet and cluttered with the stalactites of furniture hanging down.

The way, the Duke of Vandals says, an artist will turn his painting upside down, for the same reason, or look at it reversed in a mirror, to see it the way a stranger might. As something he doesn't know. Something new and novel. The reality of someone else.

It's the same way, Saint Gut-Free says, a pervert will turn his pornography upside down to make it new and exciting for a little bit longer.

In this way, each tree of glass leaves and peaches is rooted to the ground by the braided trunk of a thick chain, that trunk covered with a sleeve of dusty red velvet for bark.

When the tree is almost dark, we move our ladder, chair by chair, sofa by sofa, to the next tree. When the “orchard” is bare, we go through the door to the next room.

The harvested peaches we pack away in a hatbox.

No, not every day we're trapped here is filled with kidnapping and humiliation.

The Earl of Slander slips a notepad out of his shirt pocket. He scribbles on the blue-lined paper, saying, “Sixty-two bulbs still viable. With twenty-two held in reserve.”

Our last line of defense. Our last resort against the idea of dying alone, here, left in the dark with all the lights burned out. A world without a sun, the survivors left cold and clutching the pitch-dark. The damp wallpaper, growing slippery with mold.

Nobody wants that.

The ripe peaches you leave behind, as they go dark and rotten, and you build your furniture ladder again. You climb back up. Putting your head back into that canopy of glass and crystal leaves, that forest of tarnished brass branches. Dust and mouse turds and cobwebs. And you replace the dark peaches with a few peaches still ripe and burning bright-hot.

The dead peach in the Matchmaker's hand, it shows us not the way we are. More the way we were. The dark glass reflecting all of us, only fat in the curved side. The layer of tungsten atoms precipitated on the inside, the opposite of a pearl, the silver backing on a mirror. Blown glass, thin as a soap bubble.

Here's Mrs. Clark with her new wrinkles disguised behind a veil thick as chicken wire. Even starved-skinny, her lips still look silicone-fat, frozen mid–blow job. Her breasts swell, but full of nothing you'd want to suck. Her wig, powdery-white, it leans to one side. Her neck stringy and webbed with tendons.

Here's the Missing Link with the dark forest on his cheeks, the brush sunk into the deep canyons that run down from each eye.

Something needs to happen.

Something terrible needs to happen.

And—pop.

A peach has slipped and broke on the floor. A nest of glass needles. A mess of white slivers. The image of us as fat, now gone.

The Earl of Slander jots a line in his notepad and says, “Twenty-one viable lightbulbs held in reserve . . .”

Sister Vigilante taps her wristwatch and says, “Three hours