2021 Fiction Runner-up: "Imposter Syndrome" by Mary Winzer
Thumbnail photo credit: Stefano Pollio(@stefanopollio), obtained and licensed through Unsplash.
Imposter Syndrome
The ghost lives inside of his bones. He wonders, sometimes, where exactly it finds its home; if it’s his femur, or his metacarpals, the ghost could be cut away in one neat cleave. The separation would be clean. But, more often, he feels as if the ghost prefers his spine, winds its way around his vertebrae, dipping in and out of that critical cord. There is no way he can rip it free, if that’s the case. Trying would be fatal.
He thinks that he can be a home for a ghost if he needs to. The ghost helps him, after all.
He first feels the ghost when he’s ten years old and plays for an audience for the first time. His ten-year-old fingers are thin and smooth and a bit too short to stretch the way he needs them to, but the ghost helps him out. Whispers through his skull: Let me do the work. Settles with a chill in his distal phalanx, his proximals, and stretches his fingers for him. He plays Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and it sounds just like it did when he first heard the song warble through a cassette player.
The audience claps. His mother cries. The ghost recedes into his spine and hums softly, pleased.
The ghost turns up when he’s practicing, too. Lets him struggle for several minutes until it slides past his wrists and says, See what you can do, with me on your side. His teacher is often delighted. When he’s alone, though, at the upright in his bedroom, he wants to play by himself.
Let me have this, he says to the ghost. Chopin is my favorite.
The ghost laughs. You would butcher it. Chopin would be disgraced.
So the ghost plays, and he watches, and the melodies are almost enough to soothe him.
His mother likes to linger in the doorway to his bedroom when he’s like this. She thinks he can’t see her, but the ghost always knows, always stretches and preens when he has an audience. When the ghost wraps up a mazurka, she says, Chopin is my favorite.
Yeah, he says. Mine too.
When he’s seventeen he’s given an award. It’s manifested in a glittering golden mold, the silhouette of a grand piano, mounted atop a wooden base that smells sharply of the chemicals used to finish it. There’s a small plaque on its side with his name engraved into the metal. It doesn’t say: Ghost. He thinks that maybe it should.
The ghost crawls into his ribs and shakes them until he finds it hard to breathe. That’s mine, and you know it.
But no one else can see you, he says to the ghost.
Because you won’t let them. Because you like what lying brings you.
He thinks this is unfair, so he settles himself at his upright and vows to prove the ghost wrong. He tries In the Hall of the Mountain King. He tries Gymnopédie No. 1. He tries Moonlight Sonata. They all sound wrong. His fingers fumble over each other. His wrists are stiff, his elbows keep knocking into his side. He can’t remember the last time he practiced without the ghost’s help. He can’t remember how to fold and cross his hands so that he hits the keys in time. He can’t remember what andante or legato mean. The ghost just always did it, whatever the notes spelled out, and all he’d have to worry about was turning the page to the sheet music.
The ghost laughs at him, and he doesn’t need to be told, I told you so, he doesn’t need another show of the ghost’s vainglory, so he stops playing. I can’t change the plaque, he tells the ghost glumly.
The ghost shifts into his right arm. It doesn’t reach for the keys. It reaches for the trophy, instead, wraps his fingers around the gilded legs of the grand piano, raises it into the air. He barely registers what the ghost is trying to do before the bones in his wrist - the trapezium, the scaphoid, the triquetral - twitch and flick sharply at the ghost’s will.
The ghost throws the trophy at the mirror propped against the adjacent wall to the upright. The glass splinters. The trophy rolls on its side, unharmed, surrounded by slanted shards. He says, There’s an idea. He says, While you’re in my arm, I might as well cut you out.
The ghost doesn’t like this scheme. It rushes back to his spine, curls around the juncture at the base of his neck, hisses into the tendril of nerves. You won’t. You need me. You do.
He wakes up and does not feel the ghost. His bones are still. They do not talk.
When he sits up, he marvels at the fact that his spine is intact, that his vertebrae knock together with the ache of the awkward way he curled up in his bed, but the pain ends there. There is no exit point anywhere on his body, no hole where the ghost could’ve slipped out. He wiggles and prods at every joint.
After a while, his gaze slides over to his upright, warm in the morning sun, painted in a golden lacquer. The ivory bars are creamy white and uneven. Chopin: The Ultimate Collection is wedged on the music stand, already open. He moves across his room and sits at the bench. No chill finds him there. No voice, no bite, no echo.
He presses down on one note. And then another.
Touchstone Undergraduate Creative Writing Awards are an annual award series open to current undergraduate students at Kansas State University. In each of the following genres: poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction, two submissions are chosen by the editors at Touchstone. Winner in every genre receives a cash prize of $75, and the runner up receives $50.
Mary Winzer is a Literature and Creative Writing student in the Department of English, though she spent a few years in the College of Architecture, Planning, and Design studying Industrial Design. She is from Kansas City, Kansas.