Today on Midwest Weird: “Carnation” by Gabriella Paz Hoggatt.
Gabriella Paz Hoggatt is an MFA candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where they work as an Editorial Assistant for Ninth Letter Magazine. Their work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in BarBar and elsewhere.
Midwest Weird is an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions. We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.
Support more weird art in 2025! Join us at Patreon for behind the scenes bonuses, including author interviews.
Episode Transcript:
This is Midwest Weird, an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions.
We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.
Today’s episode: A short story by Gabriella Paz Hoggatt, titled “Carnation." Read by the author.
Carnation
The ghost prefers butter pecan, single scoop, waffle cone. No toppings. All through
Bree’s closing shift, the cone sits on a shelf between the single-ply toilet paper and Method antibac spray, stuck into a spare plastic stand meant to showcase the different sizes and dips. One of the managers scoops it after the post-school rush, before the post-dinner rush, and it stays there, dripping into the mop drain, until all the closing tasks are done and the staff files out the back door. Whoever’s on trash duty has to slop it into the last bag. The cloying scent of evaporated dairy is almost enough to mask the sharp rot the fills the back alley from the cans they share with the fusion restaurant next door. Manager Deb holds the lid up for Bree when it’s her turn, but no one holds it for Derrick, who might pull a knife on you. He doesn’t even have his learner’s permit yet.
Once she’s been hooked on the tips all these white suburban grandparents drop for their regular ice cream fix, and less likely to run, Assistant Manager Isaac walks Bree through it. The chain’s founder’s wife—or sister, or mother, or daughter—lives on in the walk-in, and if they don’t appease her, the hinges start sticking, and the floor behind the counter gets slick. He says the last time they forgot, some poor seasonal part-timer took a header into the minifridge where they keep the brownies and had to get four stitches. Also, the ghost is homophobic. Assistant Manager Isaac is a theater major, and his word is not to be taken at face value, so Bree googles it during a slow hour. Mrs. Franchise died of natural causes at the estimable age of 89, two states away. Bree isn’t sure why the Mrs. Franchise would ever choose to haunt a random branch location of her husbandbrother- father’s Midwestern ice cream empire. When Bree dies, she’s haunting the park she grew up by, so she can watch the maples turn red and the kids eat shit on the skate ramp. She tells Mom about the ghost, and Mom texts her a screenshot of a Facebook post that details three easy warding rituals against undead interactions that you can do with regular household items. None of them involve ice cream, although one mentions coconut oil. Maybe there’s a connection. They all take at least thirty minutes to prepare and cast, so she sticks with the cone.
Bree is leaning on the industrial sink in the back, because there’s only one chair for the
employees, and really that’s only for Manager Deb. Bree is scrolling through Violet’s Instagram like she promised her sister she wasn’t going to anymore, and pacifying her roiling stomach with a strawbanana smoothie, when a suspiciously loud thump
echoes from the walk-in. She’s paused over a picture of Violet’s new girl, trying to determine if she’s a freshman or actually still in high school, and the suddenness of the sound makes her thumb jerk in that most heinous of UI features—the double tap. The red heart appears. Jesus Christ. Maybe she should delete her account, do some ghosting of her own.
Bree glances up and makes eye contact with Assistant Manager Isaac, by the paper cups, and then Derrick, who’s been microwaving a Hot Pocket for way too long. If he starts another fire, Manager Deb might finally kick him to the curb. Derrick calls nose goes and Bree almost drops her phone in the bleach water in her rush to slam a finger to her face. Not it, Assistant Manager Isaac says a breath before she can. Derrick raises his thick eyebrows in that way he seems to think makes him look important, and jerks his chin from Bree to the freezer. She hopes his Hot Pocket burns and takes his eyebrows with it. As she slides over, she glances into the mop alcove. The ghost cone is still puddling away. When she presses a palm to the walk-in handle, there’s a noticeable sheen of frost. In fact, there is a thin layer of ice humming and shining across
the entire door. They’re going to have to scrape that off with used gift cards after close, and she just knows that Derrick won’t do jack, and she’s going to get carpal tunnel again.
Inside, the only thing out of place is a single pint of black cherry chip that’s rolling around on the linoleum. Manager Deb keeps telling her not to prop the door open while she restocks, because they don’t ever lock it, and there’s a crank to physically loosen the door off its hinges from the inside in case of emergency. She sticks one
heel in the crack anyway. They organize the pints and gallon barrels alphabetically, except for the bestsellers like vanilla and chocolate and cookies n’ cream which live right by the door, so she’s staring up high on the left wall when the blow hits her right behind the ear. She goes down. Her heel slips. There are raised voices outside, but more importantly, there are voices here in the cold, with her.
***
The Ghost thinks the seasonal workers are the worst, so prone to cutting corners,
tentative where decisiveness and initiative are needed, greedy, slow, bad with the customers. The summer should be the height of business for an ice cream shop, but this is a college town, and since the dust settled in the 1820s, the only people whose outsourced dollars have dredged the Carnation local economy forward inch by beer-soaked inch are the students. Like the migrating Rufa red knot sweeping north in a supercell onto the Hudson Bay, a million mouths ready to swallow up the lawn of horseshoe crabs breeding in the shallows, the students swell in and out of the thin
borders of this town from impossible distances, starving, flighty, doe-eyed, and leave a sucking wound in their absence. But someone must actually live here. Haunt the ghost town as it stumbles along until fall registration. Professors’ families and postal workers and rednecks and everyone else who couldn’t escape—the people who pick the shattered Coors Light bottles out of their lawns before the kids go out to play. The people who buy ice cream in the summer.
***
Years past, Bree went back to her parents’ place for all her breaks. This time there’s the
rent to think about, because she’s finally out of the dorms and the lease started in June anyway, and she literally just had to walk in to get the job, and she’s got the whole apartment to herself until a week before classes when her three roommates show up. All good things. That’s what she tells Dad, when he asks if she’ll be camping with them this year. Assistant Manager Isaac asks if she’s been keeping up with Euphoria since he shared his HBO password with her, and she doesn’t say that most of the time when she gets back to her sterile apartment, she puts on random mukbang videos while she eats a cup noodle, and then stares at the wall for at least an hour just listening to electricity run through the building. Instead, she says Yeah, wasn’t that insane? and lets him regurgitate hot takes from Twitter at her until the next customer comes in. It’s her
favorite way to watch TV.
On Tuesdays there’s a half hour in the afternoon when it’s just the two of them manning
the counter. No, she’s manning the counter, Assistant Manager Isaac is eating pasta from
Domino’s in the back because he opened this morning, and they don’t give him a real lunch break. He tells her about the ghost at the Kroger twenty minutes out that makes the deli a little too hot, and about his ex-boyfriend that’s trying to recruit all their mutual friends into his senior thesis one-act play, and about the regular that comes in once a week to get a cup of coffee chip and furtively recommend Assistant Manager Isaac obscure sugar baby and/or porn websites. He waits to order until Assistant Manager Isaac is the one alone at the counter, so Bree only ever sees him holed up at his table by the front window, stirring his ice cream to soup.
The employee handbook is very big on attitude, and the impact a smile and high rising
intonation have on the guest experience. She never reads it, but all new team members are sat down at Manager Deb’s desktop to watch a series of orientation videos that prominently feature Pike Place even though management would have your head mounted to the wall if you started throwing banana splits over the customers’ heads. The implication is that they’re learning how to actively engage everyone who jingles the cowbell taped to the door, how to upsell, how to be genuine and enthusiastic, or just enthusiastic if genuine won’t make the margins. Bree mostly thinks about seeing the ocean. Just once would be nice, would sustain her for a good long while. The Great Lakes call like gravity in the summer, but she wants to dip her toes in salt, crust over,
stare out at the rest of the world, just once.
***
The ghost, peering for a dozen summers over a hundred different shoulders at the same
pixelized flying cod, mostly thinks about dark clouds churning over Erie’s algae blooms, and the fish dredged up from beneath them. She tastes alien bitterness at the back of her absent throat and keeps clawing her way back to the sacred dripping of butter pecan, the sodden cone barely holding the flood at bay, the altar and triage she demands. She wasn’t religious before she was this, but twenty years as very nearly nothing have taught her how to pray.
She doesn’t even like ice cream, is the crux of it all. It is the thing that he did, it is the thing that paid for her retirement, and it is the thing that has pinned her like a beetle to this godforsaken cornfield. She takes her relief where she can get it. Most days she pushes and pulls at the hydrogen bonds in the drums out front, making the product just too hard, just too soft. The high-strung post-teens that flit across these linoleum floors build strange muscles in their forearms, straining against her attentive work. She keeps them engaged.
This newest temp worker is neither the laziest nor the most devoted employee the ghost
has ever seen. She eats one bowl of cookie dough chip every shift, even when she forgets to bring Lactaid, and always wipes down the bathroom door handles, unlike the kid with the knife.
There wouldn’t be a problem at all if she would stop squirrelling away into the back room to mope over her cellular while there are customers queuing up. She spends too much time gossiping with the other pansy, the loud boy who smells like coconut. As the afternoon sun tips into the storefront, they perch on the counter, next to the microwave, despite the policy that the ghost spends hours sifting through and refining while he’s pinballing around the state “scouting new locations” as if they can expand the franchise without having a clearly established policy for sanitary standards, including a very explicit subsection on where and when they’re allowed to sit.
The store sits very near a downtown park, which she is reluctant to admit was a good
choice on his part, and so even in this dead season, there are always a handful of young parents and younger offspring drifting in to get a kid’s cup with the candy eyes and stuck-out tongue that makes them giggle and spill sprinkles everywhere. The faces were not her idea. She’s been in the ground for long enough that the franchise has loosened from the mold she made for it, and she suspects that the faces were one of her sons’ brainchildren. Nostalgic. Expensive. Foolish. At least the part-timers remember to wear gloves while they stick the candy features into the cone.
The boy with the knife picks at the eyes, unable to get a grip on any of the edges where they stick to their wax paper, and eventually just gets the manager to do it for him. The ghost feels very like the knife boy, plucking with clumsy fingers at the soft parts of the moping girl’s frontal lobe as the two of them curl together on the non-slip floor of the walk-in freezer.
The Ghost isn’t sure why she’s here. In this purgatory, in this nowhere town, in this college
girl’s gray matter, combing her phantom fingers through and feeling electricity jump the
synapses. The cone has fed her for twenty years and could for another thousand, or at least the fifteen they have before her son’s ambition overreaches the franchise to bankruptcy and someone else swoops in to snatch this prime parkside location location location and who can say what will happen to her then, with no assistant managers and no mop closet and no butter pecan and sodden waffle cone and his name plastered in fancy swirling cursive on the awning and on the napkin dispensers and on the paper sleeves that hold the cones tight with their strange edible glue. All this to say the cone is very good, and she likes the cone, and she’s in the freezer, and the boys have started shouting now because they can’t get the door open even though it never locks. She pushes with one hand at the frost on the hinges, keeps the other digging past the
myelin sheaths. Becoming a ghost is both sudden and continuous, and there are many things she has always known to do without having ever learned.
Assistant Manager Isaac is looking up exorcism tutorials on YouTube. Derrick is prying
at the door seam with his switchblade, which is more effort than Bree ever expected to see from him. Manager Deb is out in the alley on a phone call with corporate and hasn’t noticed the commotion at the freezer.
Bree’s not in there anymore.
The ghost cards her from herself like wool, beaten and brushed into separable order. It’s almost nice.
The ghost pushes at the door handle. She forgot that she froze it over. She can’t reach the
hydrogen bonds anymore. That muscle has atrophied. She reaches for the emergency crank. She slumps out of the freezer and grabs the knife boy’s face with both fleshy hands, which isn’t right. She should know better. She’s held people before, she thinks. He swears, and doesn’t reach for the knife, because she was right and he’s full of hot air. She’s usually right.
That’s how the Ghost knows the moping girl is the best fit for this. The manager has a certain kind of assurance of self that would make the separation too messy. The loud boy does his rituals every morning alongside his seven-step skincare routine. The knife boy has a warding tattoo on his shoulder even though he’s not old enough and he didn’t get permission from his father. She lets him go, grabs the loud boy’s shoulder too hard, like the moping girl does when he’s kind to her and a hug would fit better, and moves out of the kitchen. The boys protest, but the ghost hasn’t figured out the muscles in the throat yet and she doesn’t want to talk to them. The loud one waves his cellular at her back as she plants herself behind the register, and then starts digging through his bag for something. She doesn’t care. She sticks a plastic spoon into the tub of butter pecan and suckles at it. It’s like a galaxy being born on the papillae reaching up from the muscle of her new tongue. It’s like absolution, and beatification, and sainthood. It’s like the vast swirling nothing of dollars in virtual space. It’s not quite enough to make her like ice cream. The bell rings, and a customer walks in. She smiles around the spoon.
***
There are a thousand black squirrels at the park she grew up by, foraging and fighting and fucking their way through the dried-up summer grass. They’re invasive. Bree doesn’t remember where they were introduced from, but they out compete everyone else and they’re the only squirrel she knows. One of them fell too far, or lost a fight, or got stung by a bee, and now she’s quietly rotting on the far side of the half pipe. Park staffing is thin this year, so no one’s come around to shovel her off into the grass, and the skaters adjust to steer around her. The flies went for the eyes first, and one enterprising young student takes pictures at every stage of decomposition for next year’s science fair. Her spine slowly unzips itself to the sky. Her flesh tans to leather.
Squirrels don’t get to be ghosts, even though Bree hears that rats do, sometimes, and geese. A lot of migratory birds.
The tall kid who rode the school bus with her comes to the park most days with his own kid, which Bree finds disconcerting. She feels so much like a tall child, still. She almost didn’t go to college. How is he already repopulating the planet?
She smells evaporating milk. Butter pecan. She wishes it was cookie dough chip. Or cup noodle. She doesn’t know how she got here. She doesn’t know if it’s still summer. She forgot to clock out.
Gabriella Paz Hoggatt is an MFA candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where they work as an Editorial Assistant for Ninth Letter Magazine. Their work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in BarBar and elsewhere.
We’ll be back in two weeks with more weird stories.
If you like what you hear, and would like to support writers of weird stories, check out our Patreon. You’ll get bonus episodes, early access to cool perks, and more. View the link in our show notes.
Big thanks to current supporters on Patreon, especially those at the "Make Me Famous" level, including: Haley Scarpino, Nick Thornton, Daniela Barzallo, Mathew Serback, and Last Name Greatest.
And if you want your fiction or nonfiction to appear on Midwest Weird, send us your work! Read the show notes for a submission link.
Thanks for joining us. And stay weird.
Comments