The Preta
We are hungry ghosts.
I was reborn into the realm of insatiability as a preta, and found myself collapsed like an empty, pried open freshwater mussel on the parched earth, all convex stomach and chiseled out limbs. “Please,” I used to plead with the air. “I just need something to drink,” I’d say, curling myself into a logarithmic spiral like some sort of nautilus shell. I knew it wouldn’t be long before the other skeletal demons around me would start gnawing away at my skin and bone, feasting on my corpse, fighting to quench their own hunger. I was ready to fall prey to these hyenas; I was ready to give up trying to sustain myself on human feces and carcasses.
If there was any real nutriment in that hell, I didn’t know where to find it. I used to watch one of the other nameless, mummified women in her forage for food. She would claw at the barren soil in search of worms, shoots of grass, bacteria - anything. She would climb wilting trees, struggling to catch squirrels, breaking off bits of bark and reaching for handfuls of leaves. Relentless: whenever she came close to obtaining nourishment, the critters and plant-life would dissolve before the pits of her eyes, and I’d gaze at her in all her helplessness, noticing how her slits turned to hollow caves when the food vanished. She never died. She never became someone new. She just withered up like a shrunken head under the rays of the scalding moon. There, the sun left us shivering, so that every afternoon, my irises would tear around the flat terrain, searching for another individual to huddle up to. I wanted to be near someone. I wanted to gather the rest of the ghouls up like firewood and light a match so that we could garner our own heat. There may as well have been no one. We were all Anatman - without soul - and when I tried to lend my touch to another being, my fingers would pass right through his body. We were loiterers, waiting to pass onto another world, another domain, and yet convergence with one another was impossible; there was no such thing as a lingering caress or brush or graze in the sphere of pretas.
All I ever received as one of those hungry ghosts was pity. Humans couldn’t see us, but they must have detected our presence, because there was a monastery nearby that used to leave out bits of bread and sometimes meat for us to binge on. I fell in love with one of the monks there, and I once splayed myself out on the stone steps leading up to the building, trying to keep cool and wishing he would walk out into the night and begin the downtempo strides of mindful meditation on my torso. I wanted him to pick blossoms from the trees that shrouded the outside walls of the temple and tuck them behind my ears. I wanted us to realize our escape together. I wanted to be able to touch him, but knew that even if our separate worlds were to intersect, I couldn’t, because I was a woman, and because it would fracture his lifelong vow to celibacy.
In the darkness, on the stairs, I remained, imagining my own resurrection. If I could only train myself to be inanimate, I might turn into a thyrsus - one of those ivy covered, pine cone tipped staffs wielded by characters of mythology. These wands are a symbol of fertility, with their phallus shaped fennel and seed-like woody fruit. If I learned the art of shapeshifting, and morphed into the thyrsus of Dionysus, maybe I could signal my own rebirth.
