Ghostheart by Ananda Braxton-Smith

sky. The wheels clacked, the axles creaked, we turned Saltward.
    The rains had come heavy the night before, softening the ground for my brother’s planting. All the buckets were filled and the plots had become dubs, and the dubs become shining pools, and the pools become streams. Now the sky was dull and a misting rain was all that remained.
    All along the Saltward the blowholes and drenches sprayed rainbows. Close to the seacliff we dug his grave and laid him down in the oozy clay. Shovelled over, he was just a mound of dirt and when we put the sod back you’d hardly know he was there. We lined up over the mound but there didn’t seem anything to say.
    I was breaking up like new-dug clods. I was lopsided without him. My loneliness flapped around me like some oversized garment. Without Boson there was only the chores, and the turf, and these brooding parents.
    I crouched down by him.
    I laid myself down in the dirt.
    ‘What will we do about Pa?’ I whispered into the earth.
    ‘
What can we do
?’ said the voice from the plots.
    A frost fell on my skin and my belly turned over.
    ‘
He’s frighted of her,’
it said. I sidled a look, but my parents hadn’t heard anything. They were still faraway inside themselves.
    I wondered if other folk ever had voices plaguing at them from places other than the mouths of people.
    ‘Shut up,’ I said, testy, and Mungo shot me a surprised face.
    ‘Well, he is
,’ the voice said, and it was inside my head.
    Now I had a voice inside me that wasn’t mine. I had a bad feeling about it.
    Maybe this was how it started for my brother.
    ‘Who are you?’ I whispered and Mungo grumbled beside me.
    ‘Well, more to the point, who are
you?’ it said clearly.
    It might be some sort of haunting or body-theft, I thought, though I’d never heard of the Dead-ones moving into a body that was already tenanted. I would’ve thought that Boson was a more likely shell for such things, and his body was going begging. What had I done to deserve this?
    ‘Who are you?’ I thought again, hard into my head. I wasn’t going to let any old voice utter at me from inside my very own head without trying to find out who it was, or what it was up to.
    ‘
I’m nobody
,’ said the inside-voice. ‘
You’re the one
.’
    ‘The one what?’
    ‘
You’re the one who can still do things,
’ it said.
    I waited for more but that was all it had to say, for the time being.
    I closed my eyes. What could I do?
    On that first night, the night I found him in the boghole, Moo said she didn’t think Boson would be welcome anywhere but on an old Dead-isle. After the things he’d said and done in his short life, she said he’d probably be for some purgatory of beaks and claws in his death. She said God was a loving god but the first thing you had to know was not to ask questions. She said God gave you things and He took them away again and she said, like any loving pa, he was always right.
    She must’ve meant heavenly pas, not those who were right here. Ours wasn’t always right even when we’d all been together and happy. Now we were blasted anyhow in the sorrow about Boson, he didn’t seem to be right about anything at all.
    Poor Pa. He’d gone from the grave to stand alone at the cliff-edge, and I went and stood by him. His body rocked in salty gusts off the sea. He just staggered under the wallops, a few steps back and a few steps forth each time, and any of them could have tipped him off the cliff. I took his hand in both of mine, and pulled him back from the edge.
    We watched the whale-mam out in the channel as she fluked and spouted and circled the island.
    ‘Pa?’ I said. He didn’t stir. ‘What are we going to do?’ He shrugged and petted my head like I was some strange cat.
    I shook him off.
    ‘
Pa!
What will we do about Moo?’ His eyes flicked to my mother and I saw he’d settled in himself there was nothing to be done.
    ‘Well, then, what are we going to do about the thieving?’ I