The Ghost
Even in death we aren't free from a disappointing life. This is a work of fiction
Hi. Some notes at the top:
I’ve had a bit of the ol’ writer’s block lately. I’ve still managed to do my job every day, which is writing, and I’ve done a few freelance things here and there with more on the way. But when it comes up to thinking of things, pulling them out of the ether to write about, I’ve been coming up blank.
I’ve been reading Stephen King’s "On Writing,” and it’s had a pretty profound effect on me. It’s fun to get all sparked up about writing, even when I look up from the page and remember the journalism/publishing industries are toast. I’d put it up there with Steve Martin’s “Born Standing Up” as books that have changed the way I approach [pause for vomit break] MY CRAFT.
It’s cool having a guy with such an insanely long and celebrated body of work tell you that it’s OK to just be simple and, more than that, to lead his memoir reflecting on the work of his lifetime with a chapter about getting farted on by his babysitter. It’s silly but it really did make me think, “Wow, most of this really is just writing whatever, huh?”
A lot of the stuff I write on here is silly, but some of it is very not silly, or at least has real emotion peppered in amongst silly. It might not be conscious, but the silly is 100% a mechanism to protect myself from you, the reader, lest you actually see my vulnerable side. Jokes in a serious essay are the “haha” at the end of a text professing your love for the girl at school. Am I joking? Who’s to say?
Anyway, I had this whole essay about the album COPE by Manchester Orchestra and tied it into some real rich emotional shit. But it just never felt right. It wasn’t what I wanted to put out. When I really sat with that feeling for a minute, I realized that I didn’t want to bum anyone out or even try to get attention (because that’s all this is) for seeming emotionally deep and capable of feeling intense feelings alongside music.
When I asked myself what I wanted to do, at the end of the day, I really just like making people laugh. That’s the real magic trick here.
So, at the risk of appearing vulnerable, I have decided to dust off something I wrote that had mostly been kept top secret — unless you were one of my friends I showed this to/talked to about this. I am very good at keeping secrets.
This shit is made up. It’s fiction. I battled on and on about whether or not to publish it, or how to publish it if I ever did. I’m not sure why a work of fiction should make me feel any more embarrassed than a story about My Feelings — or even my ass, which I have written about at length without a modicum of shame.
So, yeah, here you go. It turns out when you are at a loss for mining your lived experiences for internet publication fodder, the easiest route is just to make stuff up.
Enjoy. And if you don’t, please don’t ever tell me because I’ll delete this and deny that I ever wrote it. Haha.
The Ghost
Her first night in the house was a shitty night’s sleep. She was exhausted mentally and physically, but a full, restful sleep never found her. She was still pissed off about the movers, who broke one of her good plates like movers often do, and that meant she was going to have to get a whole new set. What would she do with five plates anyway? It would drive her crazy.
She had spent the afternoon getting things as close to ready as she could with what she had. There was a couch and a few chairs in the living room, but it faced a blank wall. Only one towel hung in the bathroom, and aside from a bouquet of flowers with a nice note sent from her mother, which she placed on the kitchen counter for the time being, there wasn’t much in the way of decoration anywhere.
It was a lot of house and her life from her old apartment didn’t fill it yet. Especially since it was now up to her to fill it with all her own stuff – no one else was there to contribute anymore. The closets, at least, were all hers now. No big jackets or size 12 sneakers to take up real estate and remind her who she shared her home, her life, with.
She tried her best to tell herself that it was a process, and that she shouldn’t – couldn’t – expect a fully finished end-product after one night. So she shut her eyes as tight as she could, turned on the noise machine resting for now on a cardboard box while the new nightstands she ordered were still in transit, and tried to force sleep to come.
It came in fleeting moments – quick fast-forwards in 20 or 30-minute increments rather than anything where a dream might even pop up. She kept waking up confused as to where she was, like the first night in a hotel. Humans are wired to feel on edge their first night somewhere else. They can recognize that it’s not their cave, so they keep their guard up against potential threats.
So she just kept her eyes closed, trying to tune out the cracks and pops of a big old house at night time with the aid of electric ocean sounds.
The Ghost had been planning this all day – or, not so much “day.” A day is a construct for the living to make sense of things. We’ll just say he was looking forward to it for a while. He loved this part. Each time someone new moved into the house, he’d find new ways to drive them out. It was what he lived for – or, not so much “lived” for, but…
He watched her carry her unwieldy boxes in. He watched her put on a brave face to call the moving company and demand some sort of repayment for the broken plate, giving herself a little pep talk and reminding herself that she needs to take action and not let people walk all over her anymore, and then quietly crying after she hung up the phone, having spent emotional energy she didn’t really have to spare at the moment.
“This one will be easy,” he thought to himself – or, not so much thought. Thought requires a fleshy brain. “She’s already at a breaking point.”
This one would be short work. It was getting too easy for him anymore – he shows up, puts on his little show, they scream or cry or run or tremble with the blankets pulled up to their eyes like in the cartoons. You’d be surprised how many people do that – whether it’s learned behavior from cartoons or cartoons are just more accurate than people give them credit for. And, in the end, they leave and someone else moves in.
The ghost thought about how he wanted to approach this one exactly. He’d done this so many times, and he always wanted to make sure he was keeping things fresh if for no one else than himself. He fancied himself an artist in that way. It made him proud. Purely doing it for love of the game.
Would he come in and get her with one big scare, or would he slowly build tension? Terror versus dread, he considered. Maybe make some creepy noises, appear in a flash in the periphery of her sight line. That seemed fun. Sophisticated, as opposed to the gauche jump-scare. Maybe he’d even get a wimpy “H-hello?” and give her some time to really scare herself with her own imagination. The unknown did a lot of the heavy lifting for him.
So, he used his ghostly power to create a few extra creaks into the floorboards. He manifested the window shutters to clack against the old siding.
And then he waited for her to react.
She seemed to stir a little more than she already had been, but she was still determined to sleep. She clearly was dealing with some stuff right now, so he’d need more than creaks and cracks to break through the white noise in her head (and on her makeshift nightstand).
Cliche as it was, he found that a few ghostly groans or maybe even whispering gibberish – especially fake Latin – seemed to get people going, so he gave that a whirl, feigning a long, excruciating groan. He almost had to keep himself from laughing, like he was the Jimmy Fallon of ghosts, ruining the whole thing for everyone by laughing. It felt good in a way to still find joy in his work, but he also wanted to finish the job. The groaning was especially funny to him because it’s not like he even died painfully. There was no corporeal torture following him to limbo. There wasn’t any decapitation, where he’d be forced to wander this plane forever, searching for his head or something dramatic like that. No unjust murder or even a wrongful death at the hands of a negligent corporation’s faulty product. His death was his own dumb fault. He ate something with peanuts and he was allergic. Back then there weren’t so many guardrails against that sort of thing. It just happened.
The Ghost noticed her sit up in bed. The groan must have worked. She scanned the room as best she could in the light, the new corners all unfamiliar to her. Every shadow on every wall was a new experience. Her heartbeat picked up the pace a little.
Another groan, an added whimper.
“What the fuck,” she said, just loud enough to count as “out loud.”
He was in business. Now he just needed to ride the momentum and not blow it.
He appeared beside the window with another theatrical crack of the shutters. Standing – or, not so much standing, but upright, looking at her with a vacant, pained expression. He figured out that a blank expression was scarier than anger. He was a wildcard.
“WHAT THE FUCK,” she said, much louder this time. She reached for her phone flashlight and shined it on the wall, but it didn’t erase what she saw.
He walked a bit closer – or, not so much walked as floated while moving the apparition of legs in rhythmic pattern.
“Geeeeeet ooooooooout,” he droned.
She threw the covers off her and started to run. He followed. He had the benefit of cutting corners through walls and floors, so he could match her running pace pretty easily.
“Leeeeeeeave my hoooooooome.”
She had gotten to the bottom of the big staircase leading to the front door and was struggling with a shoe when she did something he didn’t expect – she stopped.
“Your home?” she asked? She still had just one shoe on, the other sort of dangling off of her toes sideways from trying to put it on in a panic.
This didn’t usually happen, but the Ghost figured he could improv a little. He wanted things to still feel fresh from time to time, right?
“Yeeeees. You are in my hooooooouuuuuse,” he said with as convincing a voice as he could, not letting on that this was now jazz.
Still on the floor, she sat up a little, like an elementary school student who had a few follow-up questions for the teacher after story time.
“So this is where you lived when you were alive?” she asked.
“I’ve lived here a looooong tiiiiiiime and do not want visitooooors.”
,: “So wait,” she broke her gaze with the Ghost and looked down and slightly to the left, as if she was doing long division in her head. “You’re dead. Ghosts are real.”
She looked back up at him, still sitting on the floor.
“Are you trapped here? Are you, I don’t know, cosmically rooted to this house because of some unfinished Earthly business or some trauma that followed you into the afterlife?”
He stared back at her – or, not so much stared, since that requires eyes. He ghosted in her direction. And suddenly it didn’t feel necessary to him to elongate his words so much to be spooky.
“No, I’m not trapped here. I chose to come back here.”
“Oh.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“No, what?”
“I don’t know. It’s just … “ she trailed off. She hesitated. On one hand, she was tired of fighting with people – men specifically – men who lacked initiative and drive even more specifically, who made her feel like the bad person for wanting more out of life and expecting someone to try as hard as she was trying. Did she really want to do that again on what was supposed to be the first night of a new start, and with a ghost of all people – or, not so much people, but….
On the other hand, she wanted to live by her new set of rules and speak her mind more freely.
“So when you die, you get to pick where you go?” she asked.
“Well, it’s tough to explain to someone who’s still alive, but you don’t so much ‘go’ anywhere,” he replied. “But for the sake of conversation, yes, you can ‘go’ anywhere you want, as you understand it.”
“Can you travel through time?”
“Again, I can’t really get into the logistics of how time actually works to the living, but yes, once again for all intensive purposes”
“Intents and purposes.”
He sighed. This time not a scary sigh or a scary groan. Just a regular one. It brought him back to when he was alive for a second, honestly. A novelty. He was still annoyed, though.
“Yes, for all of those, time is fair game. I can go wherever and whenever I want.”
“Even the future?”
“Sure. Again, time doesn’t actually exist like you think it does so ‘the future’ and ‘the past’ are meaningless to me.”
“And,” she stopped to choose her words as diplomatically as possible, thinking about how the therapist had told her and the guy whose shoes took up too much space in the closet to express their emotions to each other without name-calling or putting the other down, even if unintentional. “And you just … hang out in the house you grew up in?”
“Well, yeah,” he said. “It was my house.”
“Yeah, no, I got that. You said that earlier. I don’t know. It’s just … you have the entire timeline of human history and presumably any other history that I can’t even fathom. I literally can’t even wrap my brain around everything you can do and everywhere you can go in time and space. It’s just a little … never mind.”
He sat down. Or – not so much sat as ghosted himself in half next to a cardboard box sitting along the wall in what would eventually be the dining room once she got more plates.
“It’s what?”
She winced as if her own word would smack her in the face when she said it.
“Kind of pathetic?”
He blinked. Or, not so much blinked, but…
She had never considered if she could hurt a ghost’s feelings before tonight, but now she was afraid she had – more afraid than when she thought the ghost was about to get her.
That’s the thing with ghosts and ghouls and all of the supernatural things of that nature in movies. They never explain exactly how they kill you. Someone like Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers or the clown from the Terrorizer movies makes sense. They stab you or shred you to pieces with a chainsaw. That tracks. But a ghost just gets you. They get you to death? AH! BOO! Got.
“It’s like when you graduate high school,” she continued. “There are those people who hang around at the football games even after they’ve left. Sure, they have their car keys on a lanyard with the name of whatever college they’re going to, but it’s like, dude, if you love college so much why don’t you stay there on the weekends? Why are you back here, you know? It’s even worse if they come back to go to prom with someone who’s still 17 or whatever.”
Suddenly the Ghost was the one playing defense, and he didn’t like it.
“Maybe I just like being here,” he responded. He was justifying it to himself as much as her at this point. “I like being here without people moving into my room or putting up new pictures on my wall. Is that so hard to grasp?”
“I get that,” she responded. “Change is scary. Believe me, I get it. But, I still think it’s healthy to escape your comfort zone.”
How concerned was he, a ghost, with health? Clearly even when he was alive he was not the most responsible steward of his flesh-and-bones form.
He said nothing. The kind of nothing that said, “I understand what you’re saying and understand that you’re right but I feel so bad right now that if I weren’t already dead I would wish I was.”
She knew she had struck a nerve – or, not so much a nerve, but….
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“No, no it’s fine,” he said, standing up again, or whatever his close approximation of it was. The box did not move. “You’re right. It just hurts, you know?”
She said nothing this time, too.
“Maybe that was always my problem during my life, too,” the Ghost continued, looking first out the window then back into his home. “I never took chances. I never expanded my horizons. I was so afraid of failure that I fulfilled the prophecy for myself. I accepted mediocre in my life and now I accept mediocre in my eternity, too.”
“You wasted life, why wouldn’t you waste the afterlife,” she sang quietly. She never used to sing around people so that made her smile a little. Little victories.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s a song.”
“I don’t know it,” he said.
“Forget it. I’m sorry to derail you. It seemed like you were having a breakthrough.”
“Yeah. I mean, is it possible to have a new lease on life even after death? Do you think I could try doing things in a new way?”
She smiled. They don’t usually smile, the Ghost thought, but the validation felt good, especially after she hit him with these home truths in his own home.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned recently,” she said, “it’s that it’s never too late to make a change in life. Or death I guess.”
“Yeah. Yeah. I’ll try to widen my range a little bit,” the Ghost said. He was getting excited now thinking of the possibilities he had taken for granted. He turned back around to face his new friend as she took off her one shoe and got back to her feet. “I won’t bother explaining exactly how that works, the cosmos and all, but just trust me that I’m gonna do it.”
“I trust you,” she said. “I’m glad to hear it.”
“Forget all of that ‘Get out of my house’ stuff. You can stay here. I’ll leave you be. It’s cool,” the Ghost said. “But I do have one request, if you don’t mind.”
“Shoot.”
“Can you maybe not tell anyone about this?”
She smiled again.
“Who would even believe me if I did?”
The TV commercial seemed louder than the rest of them somehow. An announcer who sounded more at home on an infomercial or a show where people fall off of giant obstacle courses into water than something called “The Education Channel” boomed over quick cuts of the interior of the house. There was more furniture in it now — nightstands, a few more pictures on the wall and an even number of plates on the meticulously set table. It looked more lived in.
“THIS WEEK ON GHOST BULLIES!” the announcer barked. “THE GUYS FOLLOW UP ON A TIP ABOUT A SUPERNATURAL ENTITY THAT HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING GOING FOR IT!”
On the screen, two guys in all black, one bald with a goatee and another in a tight-fitting beanie but also a goatee, carried around plastic devices that looked like answering machines and pointed them at different walls and fixtures.
It cut to the one in the beanie giving a testimony in front of a green screen. He somehow looked worse in studio lighting.
“If the reports from the homeowner are true, we might just have the biggest loser ghost we’ve ever found.”
It cut back as the two crept through the dark hallways of the house, illuminated green by the night vision camera.
“I’m gonna try to summon him,” the bald host said, turning into the darkness. “Hey! Loser!”
The announcers voice returned, still just as loud as before.
Tune in this week to find out whether you can still be as big of a waste of space in death as you were in life. Tuesday night at 7 PM Eastern on The Education Channel.
Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Craig Finn, who is now tied with The Clash for my favorite musical artist who mentions Harrisburg in a song.
I loved it! Everyone, not just writers, should read "On Writing. " It could be titled "On Creating," but it wouldn't sell as well. Honestly, that book elevated him from a writer I liked to a role model.