Chapter Text
The blurry lights shined down onto the carpeted floor that smelled of years of spilled soft drinks
Nora knew this because she had been lying on it for approximately four minutes, flat on her back, staring at the water-stained ceiling tiles. Her pink bow had come loose during her shift, the exact colour of a Valentine’s Day candy heart. And now it sat on her stomach, rising and falling with each breath. She should get up. There were returns to restock, a box of The Dark Knight that needed shelving, and a customer in aisle three who had been holding "American Beauty" for an uncomfortable amount of time.
But the carpet was almost comfortable in its filth. Like a hug from someone who hadn't showered in a decade, but you still loved dearly.
“Nora.”
She closed her eyes. Marcus’s voice had that particular tremor, the one that meant he’d hit his vape pen in the breakroom again.
“Nora, get up. I’m serious. It’s doing it again.”
She opened one eye. Marcus stood over her, gangly in his blue polo shirt, his dreadlocks shoved under a baseball cap that said Jamaica Mon. His pupils were the size of dinner plates. He was pointing at the employee computer behind the counter with a trembling finger.
“It said,” Marcus whispered, “and I quote-‘Your mother will find your body.’”
Nora sat up slowly. The bow slid into her lap. “Marcus, we’ve talked about this. You can’t hit the pen before close.”
“I didn’t!” He was practically vibrating. “I was sober for once. I was trying to do the fucking inventory report. And then the screen went static. STATIC, Nora! Like The Ring, and that just appeared. In Comic Sans. That font haunts my fuckin' dreams, man!”
She couldn’t help it. She snorted.
“Don’t laugh!” Marcus looked genuinely hurt. “You weren’t here last week when it put up a timer counting down from ten. Ten seconds of nothing, and then it just said ‘BOO.’ I almost pissed myself.”
Nora pushed herself off the floor, brushing carpet lint from her black skirt. Her uniform was technically the Blockbuster polo, but her manager had long stopped enforcing dress code on night shift. So Nora wore what she wanted: a-line skirts in soft pastels, cream-colored cardigans, and always, always a bow. Today’s was lavender, clipped into her coily hair just above her left ear. Her grandmother had once told her that bows made her look like a present. Nora had never stopped wanting to feel like something someone might want to open.
“Marcus,” she said gently, “it’s a fifteen-year-old computer running Windows XP. It crashes if you try to open more than two tabs. It’s not haunted.”
“Then explain the messages.” He folded his arms. “They’re not the same for everyone. Carol says it showed her a recipe for banana bread once. Just a really aggressive recipe. All caps. ‘BAKE AT 350 DEGREES OR ELSE.’”
Nora walked past him to the counter. The computer sat there, innocent as a computer could be, its CRT monitor humming a low, steady note. The screen saver logi bounced lazily around the screen. She pulled out the stool and sat down, her thighs spreading comfortably over the worn cushion. She’d gained some weight over the past year. It was good for hugging. Not that anyone had hugged her lately, except Garbage the cat, and he only did that when she had tuna.
“Show me,” she said.
Marcus hovered behind her shoulder. “It won’t do it now. It only does it when you’re not looking.”
“Then don’t look.”
She tapped the spacebar. The screen flickered to life, displaying the Blockbuster inventory dashboard. a clunky green-and-black interface that looked like it had been designed in 1997 by someone who hated joy. Nora clicked through the tabs: new releases, returns, late fees. Everything was normal.
Then she tabbed over to the employee notes section, which no one used except to write passive-aggressive comments like “WHO LEFT THE MICROWAVE POPCORN IN FOR 8 MINUTES” and “Carol, the AC is broken again.”
There was a new note.
She blinked.
It read: “Marcus is scared of everything. But you’re not, are you, Nora?”
Her breath caught. Not from fear. From something else. Something that felt like being known.
Marcus hadn’t seen it. He was looking over his shoulder at the empty store, where the fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered like dying fireflies. The customer in aisle three had finally given up on American Beauty and left.
“Marcus,” Nora said quietly. “Did you write this?”
He turned. Read the screen. Turned white as the office printer paper. “No. No, no, no. I’m out. I’m done. I quit.”
“What?! You can’t quit! We’re the only ones here!”
“Watch me.” He pulled off his polo shirt in one motion, revealing a tie-dye t-shirt underneath that said "Legalize It". He threw the polo onto the returns bin. “Tell Carol I died. Tell her the computer ate my soul. I don’t care. I’m going to go work at the GameStop!”
He grabbed his backpack from under the counter and was halfway to the door before Nora called out, “What about the keys?”
“You have a set!”
“I mean the security keys. For the alarm.”
Marcus paused with his hand on the glass door. Outside, the parking lot was a black ocean, empty except for Nora’s beat-up Corolla and Marcus’s skateboard. The streetlights cast orange halos on the asphalt.
“Leave the alarm off,” he said. “What’s the worst that could happen? A ghost breaks in? We already have one.”
And then he was gone, the door chiming behind him, leaving Nora alone in the blue glow of the dying Blockbuster.
She sat there for a long moment. Then she looked back at the computer screen.
The note had changed.
Now it read: “I didn’t mean to scare him. I just get lonely.”
Nora’s heart did something strange. It didn’t race with fear. It softened.
She typed back. “Who are you?”
The cursor blinked. Blinked again.
Then: “Someone who used to be alive. But not anymore. I’ve been here for a while. You’re the only one who doesn’t scream.”
Nora’s throat tightened. She thought about Marcus, about Carol, about the teenage stock boys who came and went every few weeks. How many people had seen this thing—this presence—and run? How long had it been typing into the void, trying to be heard?
“I’m not going to scream,” she typed. “What do you want?”
A longer pause this time. The DVD logo bounced. The air conditioner kicked on, rattling like a death rattle. The store smelled like dust and old plastic.
Then: “To get out.”
Nora didn’t sleep that night. She finished her shift in a fog, restocking the horror section (the only genre anyone still rented, because nothing made you feel more alive than watching other people die, am I right?), vacuuming the blue and yellow carpet, and eating a bag of sour gummy worms from the candy display.
At 2 AM, she locked up, set the alarm anyway (she wasn’t stupid, ghost or no ghost), and walked to her car. The October air was cold enough to see her breath. She wrapped her cardigan tighter and thought about the computer screen.
~
“To get out.”
She’d responded before leaving, her fingers shaking slightly: “How?”
The answer had appeared instantly, as if it had been waiting:
“I’ll tell you tomorrow. Come back. Please.”
~
She was definitely coming back. That was the problem.
Nora’s apartment was a one-bedroom above a laundromat, accessible by a staircase that smelled like dryer sheets and mildew. She climbed it slowly, her thighs burning, and unlocked the deadbolt. Inside, Garbage was waiting.
Garbage was an orange tabby with a torn ear, one cloudy eye, and the general disposition of a small, furry gremlin. He was sitting on the kitchen counter; a surface he knew he wasn’t supposed to be on, and he did not look sorry.
“You’re not Tegan,” Nora told him, setting down her tote bag. “You don’t have to act like her.”
Garbage meowed. It sounded accusatory.
Tegan. Nora’s only real friend in this strip-mall suburb. Tegan, who had been in county jail for three months now, ever since the museum incident. Tegan, who had cut off her own finger in a fit of psychotic devotion and put it in a mason jar labeled with a heart. Nora still couldn’t quite believe that had happened. She had visited Tegan twice through the plexiglass.
“It’s fine,” Tegan had said, twirling her unwashed hair. “I didn’t need that finger. And besides, it’s an offering. She knows I love her.”
Nora had nodded like that made sense. She was good at nodding. She’d been nodding at things that didn’t make sense her whole life.
She fed Garbage a can of wet food and watched him eat with the desperate hunger of an animal who remembered being feral. Tegan had found him in a dumpster behind a Pizza Hut, hence the name. She’d named him Garbage not out of cruelty but out of a strange, fierce affection. Tegan loved broken things. She collected them. She was one herself.
Nora sat on her bed, resting her back on the many pillows. It was a composition notebook she’d covered in stickers: strawberries, hearts, a cartoon cat that said “Meowdy.” She wrote by lamplight, her handwriting round and careful:
Tonight the computer talked to me. Not like before, not the reminders or the compliments. A real conversation. It said it’s lonely. It said it wants to get out.
I don’t know what that means. I don’t know if I should be scared.
But I’m not. I’m curious. I want to help.
Is that stupid?
She stared at the last sentence. Then she added:
"Probably."
The next night, Nora arrived at Blockbuster at 9 PM. Carol was there for the shift change, her gray ponytail askew, a coffee stain on her collar. She looked like she hadn’t slept since 2005.
“Marcus quit,” Nora said.
“I know. He texted me a picture of his middle finger and the word ‘Fuck this shit’” Carol sighed. She looked like she hadn't sleep in years. “You okay working alone tonight? I can’t afford to hire anyone else, and honestly, no one’s applying. They’d rather work at the Walmart.”
“I’m fine,” Nora said. And she meant it.
Carol left. The store fell silent. Nora locked the front door. They closed at 10 now, due to low traffic. Nora flipped the sign to CLOSED. The blue light of the open sign stayed on, buzzing softly. She walked to the employee computer and sat down.
The screen was already on.
It said: “You came back.”
“I said I would,” Nora typed.
“People say things they don’t mean. I remember that.”
Nora’s chest ached. She didn’t know why. She didn’t even know who she was talking to. A ghost, supposedly. A dead person. But the words felt real. They felt like the kind of thing she would have written in her journal at fifteen, when her mother had just left and her father spent his evenings staring at the television with the volume off.
“What’s your name?” she typed.
“Clarity.”
“That’s pretty.”
A pause. Then: “It was ironic. I was never clear about anything.”
Nora smiled. She couldn’t help it. The ghost had a sense of humour.
“Tell me how to get you out,” she typed.
The computer hummed. The cursor blinked for a long time. Longer than before. When the response came, it was slower, as if Clarity was hesitating.
“There’s a ritual. I found it online, before. On a forum for people who wanted to talk to the dead. I never thought I’d be the one who needed it.”
“Tell me.”
Another pause. Then, line by line:
“You need a finger. Severed at the second knuckle. The fresher, the better, but preserved works.”
“A human finger?”
“Yes.”
Nora’s hands went cold. She pulled them back from the keyboard like it had burned her.
“Where am I supposed to get a human finger?”
“I don’t know,” Clarity replied. “But I can’t stay here forever. The computer is dying. The hard drive is failing. In a few months, maybe less, I’ll be gone. Just static. Just nothing.”
Nora stared at the screen. She thought about nothing. About static. About a voice that had been typing into the dark for years, hoping someone would answer.
She typed: “I know someone who has one.”
Tegan’s house was a split-level ranch on a cul-de-sac, beige and forgettable, with a basketball hoop in the driveway that had never been used. Tegan’s parents were both long-haul truckers—they were on the road for three weeks at a time, leaving Tegan alone with a credit card and a list of instructions that began with “Don’t burn the house down” and ended with “Feed the cat.” The cat, Garbage, was currently sitting on Nora’s lap in her car, purring like a rusty engine.
“You’re coming with me,” Nora told him. “Moral support.”
Garbage blinked his one good eye.
Nora had Tegan’s spare key, letting herself into the darkened house. The air inside was stale and cold. The thermostat read 58 degrees. Tegan had always kept it low, claiming she ran hot. Nora suspected she just liked the feeling of being cold.
The kitchen was messy but not too bad: dirty dishes in the sink, a box of cereal on the counter, a half-empty bottle of orange juice on its side. Nora walked past all of it to the freezer. The freezer was an ancient white box with a broken seal, frosted over like a miniature arctic wasteland. She pulled open the door.
The mason jar was on the top shelf, behind a bag of frozen peas.
It was labeled, in Tegan’s jagged handwriting: “♥ FINGER FOR YUKI ♥”
Nora picked it up. The glass was so cold it burned. Inside, floating in a murky solution that Nora refused to identify, was the finger. It had turned a waxy gray-brown, like an old apple left out too long. The nail was still painted black, chipped at the edges. Nora stared at it for a long time.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to Tegan, though Tegan was miles away in a concrete cell, probably dreaming about her precious Yuki. “I’ll bring it back. I swear.”
Garbage meowed from the doorway. It sounded like permission.
Back at Blockbuster, midnight was approaching. Nora had turned off all the lights except the ones behind the counter, so the store was a cavern of shadows and dark shelves. The horror section seemed to leer at her. A cardboard cutout of Heath Ledger’s Joker grinned from the New Releases wall, and for once, Nora found it unsettling.
She placed the mason jar on the counter next to the computer.
The screen flickered to life.
~
“You actually got it.”
“I did,” Nora typed. Her hands were shaking now. “What do I do?”
“Take it out of the jar. Place it on the F5 key, the middle of the finger, the severed end, pressed against the plastic."
“And then?”
“And then I come out."
~
Nora looked at the jar. Looked at the computer. Looked at the empty store around her, at the shelves full of movies no one would ever rent again, at the dim orange glow of the exit sign.
She thought: "I am about to steal my friend’s severed finger, use it in a ghost ritual, and possibly unleash something terrible into the world."
She thought: "I’m doing it anyway."
She unscrewed the lid.
The smell hit her first, brine and decay, like low tide on a hot day. She gagged, turned her head, breathed through her mouth. Then she reached in. The finger was slimy and cold, the texture of a boiled hot dog left out too long. She tried not to think about whose hand it had once belonged to. She tried not to think about Tegan, making a choice that Nora would never fully understand.
She pressed the severed end onto the F5 key. The plastic was warm from the computer’s constant hum. The contrast made her skin crawl.
Then nothing
Then the computer screamed.
It wasn’t a sound from the speakers, it was a sound from inside the machine, a grinding, screeching whine like metal tearing. Nora stumbled back, dropping the finger onto the counter. The screen went white. Pure, blinding white. The light spilled out of the monitor like water, flooding the counter, the floor, Nora’s shoes. She shielded her eyes.
And then, a wet, sucking pop. The sound of something being born, or something dying, or both.
The light vanished.
Nora lowered her arm.
In front of the computer, a frail girl was sitting, like she was thrown out of the screen.
She was curled up, shivering. Her skin so pale it was almost translucent. Her hair was black and tangled, teased into something that might have been a scene haircut once, now just a mess of snarls and split ends. She was thin, painfully, frighteningly thin, with collarbones that jutted like knife blades and ribs that moved under her skin with every shallow breath.
She was crying.
Nora didn’t think. She took off her soft, pink cardigan and wrapped it around the girl’s shoulders. The girl flinched, then clutched the fabric like a lifeline.
“Hey,” Nora said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “Hey, it’s okay. You’re okay.”
The girl looked up. Her eyes were rimmed with black. She stared at Nora for a long moment.
Then she whispered, “Holy shit. You’re real.”
Nora laughed. It came out wet and hysterical, half-terrified, half-delighted.
“I’m Nora,” she said.
The girl pulled the cardigan tighter. Her lips were blue. “I’m Clarity.”
“I know.”
Clarity blinked. “You knew? Before?”
“The computer told me.” Nora crouched down so they were eye level. Up close, she could see the girl’s face properly: heart-shaped, with a small nose and a lip ring that had partially closed up. There was old mascara smeared under her eyes, and a faint scar on her chin. She looked exactly like the kind of girl Nora would have been too scared to talk to in high school—the kind who wore band tees and smoked behind the gym and seemed to exist in a different, sharper world.
But she was crying. And she was cold under Nora’s cardigan. And she had just fallen out of a computer.
“Can you stand?” Nora asked.
Clarity tried. Her legs buckled immediately. Nora caught her, one arm around her waist, steadying her. Clarity was lighter than she looked, which was saying something. She smelled like old dust and something else, something sweet and chemical that Nora couldn’t place.
“I haven’t used legs in two years,” Clarity muttered. “Give me a minute.”
“Take all the time you need.” Nora guided her to the stool, helped her sit. Clarity slumped forward, her forehead almost touching the counter.
Nora busied herself with cleaning up: the finger back in the jar, the jar back in her tote, the tote zipped closed. The computer was dead now. Like, really dead. The screen was cracked, the casing split. Carol would be furious. Nora didn’t care.
“Why did you help me?” Clarity asked. Her voice was muffled, her face still hidden.
Nora thought about it. She thought about the compliments the computer had given her over the past few months: “Pink really suits you.” “You have kind hands.” “Don’t forget to eat today.” She thought about how alone she’d felt, night after night, shelving movies for an empty store. She thought about her mother leaving, about the church girls calling her names, about all the times she’d wished someone would just see her.
“Because you asked,” she said finally. “And because no one else did.”
Clarity lifted her head. Her eyes were red, but she wasn’t crying anymore. She looked at Nora, taking in the coily hair, the lavender bow, the soft roundness of her cheeks and arms and hips. She looked at Nora like she was something precious. Something rare.
“You’re beautiful,” Clarity said.
Nora’s heart stopped. Then started again, twice as fast.
“You’re concussed,” she said. “Or whatever the ghost equivalent is. Computer-sick.”
“Maybe.” Clarity gave a small, wobbly smile “But I’m not wrong.”
Nora didn’t know what to say to that. So she did what she always did when she didn’t know what to say: she busied her hands. She found a spare hoodie in the breakroom, Some grey hoodie an old employee left before going missing, some remnants of her pink hair dye remain of the hood. Nora helped Clarity put it on over the cardigan. She found a pair of flip-flops in the lost and found. She turned off the remaining lights and set the alarm and locked the door behind them.
Outside, the parking lot was still empty. The October wind cut through Nora’s thin blouse, and she shivered.
“Where will you go?” she asked.
Clarity stood beside her, the hoodie swallowing her whole. She looked up at the sky, the first time she’d seen it in two years. Nora realized, and her breath caught.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t think I’d make it this far.”
Nora looked at her car. Looked at her apartment building in the distance, the light still on in her bedroom window. Looked at the ghost girl shivering beside her, fragile and real and terribly alive for someone who had died.
“Come home with me,” Nora said.
Clarity turned to her. Her eyes were wide, uncertain. “You don’t even know me.”
“I know you wrote me compliments for three months,” Nora said. “I know you like the colour pink. I know you’re lonely.” She paused. “I’m lonely too.”
The wind blew. The streetlights flickered. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked.
Clarity reached out and took Nora’s hand. Her fingers were cold, but they held on tightly.
“Okay,” she said.
And they walked to the car together, hand in hand, leaving the dying Blockbuster behind.