After the mostly dull and uninspiring eulogy by whatever clergy member the funeral home was able to rustle up on short notice, the visitors (one can hardly call them mourners if they barely noticed I was gone) gratefully dispersed, returning to their humdrum lives and leaving me in limbo.
Funny how being alone never bothered me when I was alive. I suppose then it was a means of escape from people I had no wish to interact with, but now that the loneliness was enforced and permanent, I found myself unreasonably annoyed by it. Of course, there were other ghosts around, but most seemed busy watching over their families or haunting the dreams of those who wronged them, gleefully reporting the details of the nightmares they inspired as they returned from their exploits. Frankly, I was as uninterested in joining them in their escapades as I had been in joining my coworkers for a Friday night pub crawl.
The ability to be anywhere at will was at first intriguing. I went in and out of random people's houses, regardless of whether they were home or not, but that soon lost its novelty. There are only so many scenes of harried domesticity that one can witness without getting bored. Then I took to going in and out of high security buildings, art galleries, backrooms of stores I liked - visiting all those places I'd never gotten a chance to see in real life. The local hospital was interesting for a while, but it was always crowded with ghosts coming and going and the constant noise and activity grew tiresome.
Eventually I took to spending my nights in my favorite bookstore, floating up near the ceiling tiles and supervising the closing procedures of the staff. Some evenings I even snuck into the storage room, but the utter chaos of it annoyed me and somehow devalued the experience. I would have loved to rearrange some things and reorganize the shelves, especially the ones where books were piled haphazardly, causing pages to crease and lose the lustre of newness. I couldn't, though. Ghosts can't touch or move things. Well, it figures, doesn't it? Nothing is solid to us, otherwise how would we get through walls?
Anyway, there I was, hovering near the bestsellers stand, bored out of my mind and seriously wondering whether I should join some of the others in their nightly haunts of the local abandoned quarry when the light in the children's section went on. Near closing time the lights are always going on and off and doors are slamming, but it was near two in the morning. There was just no good reason for anyone to be in the store, well, other than me, that is. Staying near the walls (I never did get over the unreasonable dislike of having my back exposed, which is especially ironic considering how I ended up dying) I floated over to the children's section. At first, it looked like there was no one there, but then I saw her. Sitting cross-legged on the little storytime stage, hair falling into her face and almost touching the book in her lap. At first I thought she was reading, but then I realized that she was drawing. She had one of those How to Draw Anything books in her lap and the pencil in her hand was flying over the blank page on the right as she occasionally referred to the instructions on the left.
I moved above her to see better but her head was still in the way. It was almost like she was intent on hiding what she was doing from the light. Sighing to myself, I floated down until I was right in front of her and craned my head to the side. She had already finished a picture of a large, leafy tree and was now working on what looked like a... well, not a person, that's for sure, maybe a bear? sitting under the tree. I moved to the other side to see better and that's when it happened...
"Stop looking, it's not finished yet. And anyway, don't you know it's not polite to spy on people?" she said, looking straight at me.
No comments:
Post a Comment