Charleston Green by Stephanie Alexander

Author:Stephanie Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: N/A
Publisher: Bublish, Inc.
Published: 2020-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

Tipsy woke with her head on the kitchen table. Her mouth hung open, and she’d drooled on the scratchy woven placemat below her cheek. Her arms were asleep. Jane sat in the chair across from her. As Tipsy closed her gaping pie-hole, Jane started chattering.

“My word, you gave me a fright. Moaning and groaning and what not.”

“Sorry, I…” Tipsy lunged toward the Formica counter. Saliva filled her back of her throat. She braced herself, and vomited into the kitchen sink.

“Good gracious!” Jane fluttered around Tipsy, helplessly wringing her hands. “Help! Help!”

“Shush, Jane, please.” Tipsy spit into the sink. Her stomach rolled again, and she gagged. She had nothing left to puke up, so her midsection clenched in the painful, ineffective cramps of the dry heaves. “Oh, god,” she moaned. This was worse than the other night in her bedroom. She hadn’t puked like this since college, after a night of too many shots of Evan Williams Green Label bourbon.

“Evil Evan,” she gasped. That long gone night, Shelby had done her the consummate girlfriend favor of holding her hair. She choked on a few giggles, imagining Jane trying to do the same, and accidentally killing her.

“What? Who? Tipsy!” Jane said. “We need help!”

Tipsy rested her forehead on the edge of the counter. “Only Henry can hear you. I don’t need to listen to y’all rippin’ into each other while I’m trying to barf.”

“Bark? Bart? Does that mean vomit? What about your son? He can call a doctor—”

“No.” Tipsy collapsed into the nearest chair. “He can’t see me like this.”

“What happened—”

“Jane.” Tipsy gave Jane a wan smile. She ran water into the sink to wash away the nasty remains of her puking session. She dumped some Lysol in for good measure and turned on the garbage disposal. “Thank you, really, but I’m okay. Probably ate some bad lettuce. There’s a lot of bad lettuce going around.”

Jane’s brow furrowed, but Tipsy didn’t have the energy to explain e-coli contamination to someone who had lived before the discovery of antibiotics. “Thank you for being sweet to me. I’m going to get some water and go to bed.”

She bid Jane goodnight before the ghost could ask anymore questions, or touch her again. In the moment, she’d found some perverse humor in the idea that Jane could unintentionally do her serious harm. But she really wasn’t sure she could tolerate another psychic interaction between them so soon on the heels of hurling her guts into the kitchen sink.

She walked up the stairs on marshmallow legs, checked on the sleeping children, and retreated to her room. She fell asleep straightaway, without having much time to think about Jane’s memory. Her alarm blasted her out of a deep, dreamless sleep the next morning. She got up, drank a huge glass of water, ate two bananas, and took some more Tylenol before she woke the kids.

Her efforts to stave off another supernatural hangover failed epically. If anything, this one was worse than the last time. She threw up again at work, and the Tylenol didn’t put so much as a dent in her headache.

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