Eidolons: NFG

Ch. 70: The Savior of Pie

2013-02-08T19:33:00.000-06:00

The world was muted as Sven’s light screamed past my earlobe.

Had it been a few inches right, I’d have swallowed it. The laser would’ve pierced my spinal cord or gone down my esophagus or turned me into a puff of spirit. But he had missed. Just a few feet away and the big lug had missed! Was that why I was still smiling?

He turned and left. His sneakers squeaked on the wet grass. He stepped in a row of mud meant for tulips then scraped his soles on the curb, kicking till it hurt his size-37 foot. He headed the opposite direction of the school and soon the misty horizon swallowed him.

I lay on my back, but still I was a ghost and so I floated above the concrete, staring up at the stars. “What a screwed-up night,” I muttered. “Do I really have to go back now and be yelled at by Jenna? Too much stress. I nearly died. I did die apparently, but almost double-died. I should quit.” Gravity took me into her painful embrace and I dropped to the sidewalk.

“Are you just going to lie there all night?” Anita asked, standing over me. Her ghostly face was lit despite the shadows.

“I’ve had a hard day. Let me sleep for a week then you can fetch me for the next errand.” I rolled over into the grass and a cricket bounced off my nose. I had it trapped between my hand and my cheek and it pelted me persistently till it found a crack in my fingers.

“What are you complaining about?”

“Maybe you came late to the viewing, but in that last scene I nearly got my ghostly little head shot off by a friggin laser! It was a lame laser too. It didn’t make those cool pewpew sounds.”

“That kid saved you,” Anita said, “you ungrateful blueberry.” She started off toward the moon.

I chased, running along the street to keep under her and hopping hoping to float upward too but switching from living to ghost was harder than snapping my fingers. Can you do it willy-nilly? You can’t do it at all I bet! So don’t go judging me for not being an expert just yet. “HEY!” I screamed. “What do you mean? How’d that poor-aiming bastard save me? And why am I a blueberry?”

“He didn’t miss, TK. Look around. Where’s the poltergeist?”

It was true that the trash had stopped raining down from his telekinesis. And the ooze had cleared up. And I didn’t see him or feel him anywhere. I shrugged.

“You should thank him next time you see him.”

I stood in the dark street, staring at nothing, processing. A traffic light turned green and the coming fog dispersed the color. “That still doesn’t explain why I’m a blueberry!” I shouted at the night sky, but Anita was gone .

Ch. 69: A Ghost’s Got a Chance

2013-02-01T20:26:00.001-06:00

“Technically,” she added.

“Technically?”

“Yes, technically.”

“what the hell does that mean?” I screamed in a raspy whisper. I hid in the shadows with my elbow inside the windmill bank. My soles hovered inches from the deck.

The poltergeist launched wood chips into one of the sails of the mill and they sprung from the canvas only to clatter on the observation deck. Sven shielded himself with a metal trash can lid. A fuzzy apple core banged it like a gong. The juices splattered Sven.

He yelled to me, “Totally got this and everything, but it’d be good training if you gave it a go.”

“I’M BUSY!” I shouted back. Then to Anita, “Either I’m a ghost or I’m alive. None of this ‘technically’ crap. Which is it?”

“Both.”

I went for her pale throat but I’d forgotten how to move as a ghost so while I leapt, I hadn’t moved, and my arms were short. I flailed, kicked, stomped, grunted, gurgled, cursed, raked my hair, and boiled with frustration. “No more of this mysterious-grim-reaper crap. Am I dead?”

“No.”

“So I’m alive.”

“Sort of.”

“GOD!” I threw another tantrum. I went wild since all my flailing sent my limbs through the wall instead of crashing into it.

Sven called from the ground, “I’ve got him worn down. Time for you to make your move. I can critique you later if you like. Correct your form. Share my wisdom.” A popcorn bag sailed over his head, dumping burnt kernels on him.

“I’ll be there in a minute! How am I sort of alive?” I barked at Anita.

She pulled out her magic book from the pocket in her smock. Whichever page naturally fell open, she read then summarized, “We never got you back in your body. It was already closed in the casket and embalmed and pretty beat up. You’d be put in the hospital just to die again. Turning your spirit into physical form was just simpler.”

I sank through the floorboards and couldn’t stop. I tilted my chin up so I could still see her. Unfortunately she was wearing pants, and not a skirt. “This isn’t exactly simple.”

She admitted, “It had some complications.”

“You think?” I was completely under the deck and I reached a hand through. “How do I go back to being solid?”

“How would I teach you that? It’s like teaching you to urinate. You just do it. Or you hold it. You learn through experience.” Did that little book tell her I wetted the bed till I was seven?

I concentrated. I ignored the sounds of Sven scraping his knees on the pavement as he dove out of the trajectory of roadkill. I remembered a week ago – it wasn’t so long passed that I should’ve forgotten my experiences as a ghost, though it felt like a nine months. How had I moved then? How had I floated higher and forward and down and wherever I wanted? How had I planted myself on the ground and phased through walls? How had I spied on the showers?

I started upward. I could see Anita’s shoes!

But my excitement killed my concentration and I stopped. The floor boards were in my waist. I tried pulling myself out, but my hands just passed through.

Then I felt heavy. Blood pooled in my toes. My knees stretched. Gravity was affecting me. And I couldn’t move my arms. My left elbow was under the deck but the hand was in it. My right was by my waist and the shoulder was in the wood. I was solid again. And I was stuck. “ANITA! Did you do this?” I shrieked.

“You assume I do anything.” She bent down so we were nose-to-nose. Her glasses slid forward. “I don’t.”

“Could you start doing something? Could you get me out of the stocks?”

Her gaze tracked a distraction into the windmill bank. She forgot about my predicament, despite the abuses I shouted.

My legs were tired of dangling. I tried wriggling free, swinging my legs so they could rest on the supports, even breaking the beams around my head, but nothing worked. I was stuck.

Then I fell.

I was a ghost long enough to get free of the prison then solid again. And I plummeted. But I landed in the air as I went back to being a ghost. Even if it saved my “sort of life” and freedom, I was still annoyed.

Anita had gone through the mill, so I did too. I went through the wall and came out in a poster of rewards kids got for opening an account: a Frisbee, a thermos, and a hat (each labeled with the windmill bank’s logo and initials and slogan). Everything inside was marked with the logo, initials, and slogan. Pens. Posters. Computers. Desks. Coffee mugs. Deposit slips. Only the customers already inside would see the advertising.

I didn’t see Anita.

So I poked my head out the wall. She wasn’t straight-ahead. She wasn’t above. She wasn’t to the left. And she wasn’t to the right.

But Sven was.

That giant’s face when he saw me sticking through a wall with my body in the bank – I wish I could draw it for you. I too might’ve been shocked, so shocked that I had an accident: I went solid again and was stuck in the wall.

“Hi. Could you take those sledgehammer-sized fists and bust me out of the wall?” I asked very politely since, thinking the presence he felt behind the wall had been the poltergeist, he was pointing a glowing finger at me.

And it kept glowing.

“Unless that thing has a blow torch function, mind putting it away?” I asked, backing up till my legs reached the tether set by my neck.

“I knew you were a ghost.”

The finger-gun hummed. I passed through the wall and lost sight of it before it fired. Luckily, I also lost my balance and fell, so the glowing bullet streaked over my head, though a computer and into the vault. It probably kept going.

At least he couldn’t see me now. I darted for the door on the other side of the room so I’d exit with a building between me and Sven, the Big not-so-Friendly Giant. But another shot pierced the wall, just inches from my nose. I thanked my lazy life for keeping me a split-second slower.

“He can sense you through walls. Don’t get hit by one of those things or you’ll wind up like that other spirit. Just a puff of fog, a soul. I can’t bring you back from that,” said Anita, who had just popped in through the ceiling. She sat on the chandelier. “Are you getting the hang of things yet?”

I hid behind a desk but then realized if his finger-lasers can go through the wall, a desk from IKEA wouldn’t be a proper barricade either. “Why is this happening now?”

She shrugged.

“Can’t you tell him I’m not a ghost? I’m only ‘sort of’ a ghost, right? Go tell him that. I’ll wait here.”

“I could go out and say it, but he’d still shoot at you.” She landed with her toe on the LCD monitor. She stepped down onto a loan application. “He can’t see me, remember?”

I ran my fingers through my hair from hairline to hairline. It stood up like it did after waking from a nap.

“Go out there and talk to him,” she suggested, traipsing across the air above desks.

“He’s got a gun attached to his hand. I don’t think it has a safety either.”

She shrugged and floated upwards. “We all have to make sacrifices.” Her empty sleeve dangled through the ceiling then disappeared.

I was already dead – technically. What could it hurt to die again?

In the soggy night air, Sven skulked around the mill, cupping his off-hand around his gun-hand. The finger pointed at his chin and I wanted it to misfire. He saw me. He lined up his sights. His body was square to me. One hand braced the other. His breathing was steady. He’d shoot me and sleep well, happy to get two ghosts in a night.

I held my hands up and hovered over the cement. I stared down his finger, past his thumb which was like the hammer of the gun, straight into his eyes. And I smiled. I smiled at the giant.

He pulled the trigger.

It lit up my night.

Ch. 68: Nobody’s Nowhere

2013-01-25T20:29:00.001-06:00

“You’re the only one who can do it,” I said.

“I’m not sure it’d hit.”

“Have faith in yourself.”

“I might miss. I might shoot you.”

“Keep your mind clear and your aim will be true.”

“It’s pretty high though.”

“JUST SHOOT HIM!” I yelled from a chunk of shadows within shadows where the mill blocked the moonlight. The air was damp and my shirt sticky. The poltergeist hung about overhead. The light passing through him fell on Sven. “Go to the other side so I’m not blocking your shot and shoot its duodenum. That’s obviously the weak point.”

“You won’t get mad if I miss?” Sven asked. His speaking voice was enough to boom up three stories but he yelled anyway and probably woke the neighborhood. Though I had heard that women don’t register deep voices while asleep because of evolution and babies. So maybe they slept peacefully despite his ruckus. The men had to suffer it though.

“Just do your best.”

You probably guessed this already, but he shot and missed.

“Next time line up your sights before firing from the hip, you clunge!”

“You said you wouldn’t get mad!”

“Shut up, you blindfolded ninny. I figured you’d at least graze him, give him a haircut. You practically shot in the wrong direction. Next time maybe just close your eyes and shoot one off. You might have a chance that way.”

He pointed his glowing finger at me.

“Doesn’t scare me after you just shot the ground.”

While Sven and I bickered about his incompetence, the way-off bullet had angered the poltergeist and his slobber radiated with hatred. It made our argument more enraged than the tiff it should’ve been. He even fired another round at me, though it missed. And the more intense our squabble, the more frequent and filthy curses we used, the more intense the poltergeist. It sucked our negativity from the air till it glowed. No longer translucent, it shined like a red-hot poker about to stab someone’s eye out.

“Shut up,” I said.

“Don’t tell me to shut up or I’ll shoot you again.”

“You missed. But seriously, stop seething.”

“Then stop being stupid.”

Before Sven and I could pick up the spat, the poltergeist picked up a the windmill’s bench (the one with the windmill carved into it) and chucked it at me. I ducked. It scraped over the edge and Sven dove. Barrels, flower pots, trash, whatever it could lift, it hurled at us. It tossed a paper plate like a Frisbee. It threw plastic tulip like a javelin. It pelted us with gravel. Nothing hit me though. I had nowhere to dodge and I was unscathed while Sven held a banged-up elbow. It even flung a book that someone must’ve thrown away by accident; I tried catching it and was sure I would, but I missed the grab. I didn’t even feel the paperback flap against my fingertips.

And the more the poltergeist threw, the more it sank. It heaved a trash can at Sven and its feet dangled into the roof of the mill.

Noticing this, I slunk into the shadows and watched. I got very quiet, shushing even my breath. I crouched on the observation deck and removed my shoes that thudded on the knotted wood. I crept slowly to the other side where Sven wasn’t. Soon I’d be able to reach.

“Hello.” Anita came up through the floor and surprised me into yelping.

I stumbled back to the edge. My foot stepped and missed the floor. Gravity grabbed my back and yanked so my head tumbled toward the street. My hand shot out for something, anything.

I caught the railing.

Salvation! Nothing will make you believe in miracles and the supernatural more than salvation and brainwashing – not even being dead for a few days. But as the universe is never kind for long, nothing will make you believe in its cruelty quicker than a reversal of fortune.

In my panic, I lost track of the whirling storm that harassed Sven. The poltergeist, Anita, TGG, jam, Poptarts, everything that had harried me today faded in the face of a third chance at life. And so I didn’t see it till it was hurtling toward me, pointy end first, the neck of a guitar broken from the body in a jagged split.

I let go of the railing. With a giant splinter up my nose and in my brain, a broken back didn’t matter much. I closed my eyes and let the wind carry me to my death.

The rattle of battle echoed as a trash bin skidded across the pavement. The breeze whistled against my cheek. The stench of my pits wafted into my nose; there could be no nobler of a death than this. Not with my luck anyway.

I peeked with one eye. Then the other. I was still at the top of the ladder; no hands clutched the railing, and I had no bloody wooden piercing that’d catch the attention of my alternative classmates. I looked down and the neck of the guitar had blunted against the sidewalk. A I spun to look at it, I was parallel to the ground with only my toes touching the observation deck. Actually, they were in the observation deck.

Where was my body? Where was the gore? I had missed it last time but it had only been seconds since this second death so where was the carnage?

Nowhere.

Where?!

Nowhere.

“How did that just happen?” I mumbled. Last week when the car smacked me in the gob, I died. As onlookers scrutinized my body, I popped out as a ghost. That made sense. But here, no body! No blood!

“It’s because you’re still a spirit,” Anita said.

Ch. 67: Furlong Forever

2013-01-18T19:44:00.002-06:00

The wind blew through the muck dripping from the sail to the observation deck where I urged TGG to descend the rickety ladder. She was bothered. Was it my tone? Was it the negative vibes the poltergeist put out? I didn’t know but I wished they’d chase her away, send her storming off to her room where she’d slam the door and make a voodoo doll of me to stab during class tomorrow. But she wasn’t Jenna.

“What’s wrong, TK?” She elbowed me. Our BO mingled.

What should I have said? What would get her running from my presence but still shield her from the awful truth of my new life with this new job where sometimes I had to put down rabid businessmen wearing their underpants backwards or else they might throw a glass jar at her head and kill her?

“I’m living with Jenna!”

The breeze whistled and the growl of the poltergeist kept my attention and eyes focused on him, though they wished to wander to the girl, to remember her face when I crushed her so I could obsess tonight while in bed with my snoring redheaded roommate.

“She moved in yesterday,” I said and walked behind the mill where the streetlights didn’t reach and shadows covered my worry. “Before you and Kevin put the kibosh on things.”

“Just till he gets back.”

“Right.” I sat on the wooden bench with windmills engraved on the backrest. A bench on a windmill’s observation deck with windmills carved in it. Meta.

The sludge plopped off the roof and landed on a fire hydrant. Tomorrow, a dog would sniff it and go home and his buddy, his best friend, a kid who just got off the school bus after a long day learning long division, who just wanted to chase Puppy through the house, both squealing with delight, would get nipped. The psychic sludge would suck away the pup’s happiness. I had to stop that.

“I’m happy for you!” she said. “Isn’t your dorm a little small?”

“We’ve been checking The Reserves for mansions to rent.” That was the swanky neighborhood I had abandoned Jenna in once.

The ghost-guy crept closer, from the peak of the roof, down the pitch, across a patch of missing shingles. His ooze tangled the blades of the mill forming webs that’d catch flies and flying Dutchmen in a net of depression, but that did not stop the mill’s slow spin.

“I can’t see you anymore.” I flipped open my brick of a phone and whipped it closed. You can’t do that with smart phones. You can’t fiddle with smart phones. You’re always crying on expensive touch screens because you can’t distract yourself with smart phone. “Jenna wanted me to text you all this. Save myself some drama.”

“So you sneaked out to see me?” She even used the proper past tense of “sneak!”

But the ghost loomed over us, dripping. Soon it’d land in our hair. Even shampoo meant for delousing wouldn’t get out this gunk so you’d have to find a bottle with the de-ghosting label but those hadn’t been approved by the FDA and were only available in Bangkok.

“I’m not Romeo. I ran into you on a walk by accident. Or rather, you plowed into me. You’ve got pistons for legs.”

She started down the ladder. She didn’t peek around the corner and say “Goodbye” or give me one last hug or fight about it because that was unfair of Jenna to demand so much from me. Even more unfair than making Jenna the villain in this ruse to protect TGG from a ghost that loomed. She just left. No stomping down the rungs. No sound effects like “tch,” “pft,” “ugh.” She just left. She didn’t look back. The observation deck wasn’t spotted every few feet with salty droplets that had stained her face. She just left.

I watched her down the path until she was just another shadow. Then I turned for the ghost. My hand glowed. It lit the cracks in the boards and lit the stains on my jeans. Tonight would be my first exorcism.

But the damn thing floated a furlong over my head with his butt hanging out of his briefs! I hopped and hollered and flailed but failed. I might as well have swung for the birds that aimed for my head. The poltergeist was too high.

“What you doing up there?” Sven bellowed from below. “Get him!”

“How the hell am I supposed to reach something that’s twenty feet higher than I can swing my fist?” I screamed at the giant. “Get your peashooter up here!”

“It won’t reach.” Sven slammed a foot on the ladder and it wobbled, as did the whole mill from the impact. “I’ll let you figure it out. It’ll be good training.”

“WHAT?! What happened to this thing being a danger with jar-chucking capabilities? And didn’t it put drivers in the hospital? This is no time for training!” I reached for the gutter, jumping, grabbing, stretching my core and arms but I couldn’t reach.

He put his hand on a rung of the ladder and tugged to test its durability. It held despite his monstrous size. “Maybe you can lure him down here.”

“I don’t have any Ghouly Ghoodies so somehow I don’t think that’ll work! Why are you hesitating?” I ranted.

Sven examined how the ladder was held to the observation deck but couldn’t see the screws three stories above him and so determined it was inertia, gravity, angles, friction and whatever other sciency magic kept things in place. He didn’t like that. “But it’s—it’s so high!”

Ch. 66: What the Stars See

2013-01-11T12:37:00.002-06:00

“Where do you think you’re going?” Jenna stopped me in the doorway. I was just headed to the toilet.

We had spent my afternoon watching an NCIS marathon. Or maybe it was Law & Order. Or The Mentalist. Or Bones. Or Psych. Or Blue Bloods. Or Hawaii Five-O. Or Castle. It had guns, a dude and a chick who were probably going to get frisky before the series finale (if people tuned in long enough), and the bad guy was always one of the first people they interviewed. She gabbed between commercials or asked me who I thought the killer was or asked how people could be so screwed up? We watched from my bed, between bags of dry groceries that rustled when our knees grew stiff and we had to shift positions. The barriers of bags forced us into close quarters so our elbows knocked together – it wasn’t romantic. Usually she’d shriek, “OW!” and call me abusive and if I protested, she’d remind me of the Poptarts that caused a goose-egg to sprout. She often nursed it, rubbing her scalp, but it seemed that the goose-egg migrated. Probably due to the cool night.

After emptying my bladder, I went outside in a T-shirt and sweats stained at the cuffs from stepping on them with muddy heels. I hadn’t thought of a good excuse for Jenna. Would she believe Chem club met twice a week? No. Maybe. I didn’t feel like lying. Sven was nagging me; he was probably a mile away (on the far side of town) and yet he tortured my thoughts with those words: “What if it’d thrown glass?”

I guess she’d be crying for real. I don’t know. How much did it hurt to get hit with a jar of jam? More than a baseball? I’ve been hit in the face with one of those and I had to get checked out at the hospital to make sure I didn’t need surgery before my skull stabbed my brain. They were rightfully fearful because it’d be a loss to cripple even a single brain cell of my superior mind. Or something. I didn’t need the surgery. Just pain killers and time and it healed.

Is the back of the head thicker? It seems like it should be. I don’t know why but it seems like it should be. Years of sleeping on pillows should callous the skin and build up the bone. And the cerebellum was back there. That was important. Without it, you’d die. Phineas Gage got a railroad spike through his prefrontal cortex and lived. Admittedly, he wasn’t the same after the accident but tortured life is better than none. Love is the same way.

I only include these thoughts because I was wandering the town with no regard for direction or my goosebumps and these popped into my head. Maybe my sixth sense led me or it was dumb luck or divine intervention of some great thinker, but TGG ran into me. For a tiny girl, she sure can move and she barreled into me with nearly the same force as the car that killed me. We fell and in the panic and darkness, we tumbled over the lawn across a row of dirt reserved for tulips in the spring.

She ended on top, just sitting on my chest with sweaty thighs, pale but gleaming in the moonlight.

I squeezed her calf. “Massage?” I asked.

She hadn’t realized it was me and stomped her feet with a squeal of panic. Her shoes slammed my hand but she was light enough that it didn’t hurt much, except the pebbles caught in her treads – those were like spikes.

I twisted and she fell off me. “Relax,” I said. “It’s me!”

It was dark enough that we couldn’t see much but she recognized my voice finally. “OH! Sorry. I was—” She sucked in a big breath through her nose and let it squeeze out her mouth. “I’m getting in shape.”

“We could run together. Anita wants me to. I guess conditioning helps with fighting ghosts.” I offered a hand to help her up but hers slipped from mine.

“Oof!” Her butt hit the grass. “Funny,” she said, “funny guy.” She was still panting.

“Your hand’s sweaty. Or something. I didn’t mean to. I wouldn’t drop you on purpose.” I wiped my hand on my already dirty sweatpants and gave it to her again. She reached but missed. I was sure our hands would touch! But mistakes happen in the moonlight. That’s why there are so many teen pregnancies.

She got up on her own because even nice people get impatient. We jogged down the road and turned from Independence to East Second and headed by Breadeaux’s pizzeria where they were closing. The aroma increased my leg’s willingness to continue until we passed then I wanted to stop, have a slice, and play the pinball machine. But TGG kept running so I did too. She huffed out her breaths after a block and it seemed we’d need to stop. Her breathing stayed labored, but she struggled through. If I had the same difficulty, I would’ve stopped.

Her steps grew longer; her feet hit the pavement more quickly; her breath stopped. She saw a goal in the distance and was making one last sprint for it: the Windmill Bank.

I’ve lived here my whole life and couldn’t tell you the official name of the bank. But they’re a bank with a windmill over them that serves pancakes on the second floor. The windmill might have other food too but I only ever heard about the pancakes.

She slowed before reaching it. Had she sprinted too soon? Was she taking that last hundred meters for a cool down? I don’t know. But halfway, she walked with her hands on her head till she got to the drive-thru’s Enter sign, where she lay down basking in the fluorescent light. Gnats, attracted to the light, found a new love in her nostrils – they were pretty nostril – but her panting kept them away.

The windmill was four stories tall. Only churches and the Tulip Time bells in the square and the big windmill were taller. The first level was the bank. The second had pancakes. And above that was just decoration. A ladder led to an observation deck. You could see the whole town between the sails. You could see my house on the other side of town. You could see all thirty-seven churches. You could see McDonald’s busy drive-thru or Dairy Queen’s empty parking lot. You could see DeScoop’s ice cream stand that was shaped like an ice cream cone. You could see windmills, suburbs with gambrel roofs, fences with dogs trapped, cars in driveways, empty streets, Wal-Mart lighting up the atmosphere, cornfields, cow fields, road kill, an empty interstate because who drives in Iowa? No one. You could see my car parked in the wrong spot. You could see Hoffman with the light on in 216 and if you had really good eyes you could see Jenna watching drivel still.

“I’ve lived here my whole life and never been up here.”

TGG was still lying in the fluorescent. “How do you have the energy to still move? Did you float up there, Ghosty?” She covered her mouth when she spoke because her breathing had calmed and gnats could get in now.

“Screw Khruschev for mucking through pig fields and calling it ugly. I missed this view,” I said, still taking in the town lit by streetlights and those light posts at Wal-Mart that belong in Yankee stadium. “I’ve missed it my whole life. I even missed it when I was dead. I just never saw it. I spent my teen years clamoring to get out of this boring hick town like every other high school kid. We all think our towns are boring, but what would we do in England? Australia? Hawaii? I wouldn’t surf. I wouldn’t hula dance. I wouldn’t even eat SPAM. I’d sit around and talk with friends because that’s life.” I stared at the town. “The good life anyway.”

TGG climbed the ladder. She leaned against the railing and stared at the mill’s stock, the arm that held the sails in place. “I like it here too.”

The observation deck went around the windmill and there was a bench and a telescope and some barrels that were supposed to be Dutch but they looked like regular American barrels. Probably made in China. On the barrels were vases with plastic tulips. Last year we had a mild winter and spring came early. The Dutchman’s trousers bloomed in March instead of April. And the tulips came in early April. They’d die before the first weekend in May, Tulip Time, the country’s largest festival without a beer tent. Some distinction, right? But without tulips, there could be no Tulip Time. So our brightest agricultural minds dumped vodka on the tulips to retard their growth so tourists could appreciate the lovely Dutch flowers that kids got fined a hundred bucks for picking, even if they just picked it for their girlfriend, or a child picking it for his mom. The vodka didn’t work. The tulips died. So they spent several thousand dollars shipping tulips from Holland. It was the first Tulip Time with anything authentically Dutch.

It was a beautiful night and I was with a girl who had fingernails that grew at an appropriate speed. And we were okay standing there in silence, feeling alive even in the humdrum of daily life.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“What? I could stay up all night. I finished my homework.”

“Showers prevent soreness. Cold then warm. Not the other way or you’ll cramp. Let’s go.”

“Do I stink?”

“You smell like flowers. And not just these phony plastic ones. You smell like hyacinths or something—let’s just go.”

“Why are you in a rush?

A barrel trembled and the breeze wasn’t strong.

“C’mon. You’ll miss your curfew. You’ll fall asleep in class and miss out on participation points and be doomed to teach sixth grade math for the rest of your life. You don’t want to deal with sixth graders forever, do you? Or math? That’s hell right there. Let’s get down.”

A vase fell over but it was plastic like the flowers but it scared me the same as if it had shattered.

“I’m too wobbly. I’ll fall if I try going down the ladder. Can’t we stay?”

“No.”

The poltergeist was here, drooling on the Windmill Bank.

Ch. 65: Flying Shards

2013-01-04T14:29:00.001-06:00

The plastic bags were loaded onto my wrists and forearms so the handles were tourniquets. The bottoms sagged under the weight of garlic cloves, garlic salt, salt, black peppercorn, cayenne pepper, sage, parsley, cinnamon, sugar, and a few spices that looked like river sediment – they probably just scooped and slapped on a label. Genius.

Jenna had bought two gallons of milk. Two big jugs. I like milk but my mini fridge could fit one jug and nothing else. Even with bags piled onto my arms, the trunk and the back and passenger seats were filled with groceries. My room was 8’ x 10’. A bed, a desk, and a fridge were squeezed between the walls and if I climbed on top of one, then I’d fit too.

“Why don’t you take them all at once?” Sven asked, looking around as he approached. He salivated when he heard the rustling of the potato-chip bag.

“That was the plan but my saddlebags broke last time I broke the bank with grocery shopping. You’d think after eating this much each week, I’d be your size. I must have nuclear fission for metabolism. That’s probably why I radiate. Maybe that’s just the awesomeness inside me. You’re helping so grab a bag. Grab the car if you can lug it up the stairs.”

Sven wasn’t looking at me or grabbing a bag or sizing up the tonnage of the car to see if he could heft it; instead, he was watching the birds fly by and shit on windshields.

I reached my hand up and snapped near his chin.

“Where’d it go?” he asked, his mouth gaping and waiting for bird-bombardment.

“The groceries are about six feet under your nose. Just sniff.” I handed him the milk jugs and he cradled each like babes, still without paying attention.

“The poltergeist. I felt it here.”

Jenna marched through the parking lot, yelling “HEY! Glad you got to hang with your bud but gab while you climb the stairs. I’m not forgiving you for knocking me with that Poptart box if you aren’t helping with the groceries. Now get your butt in gear.”

“Second gear or third?” I asked and grabbed a bag from the trunk to give to Sven.

“Don’t care; march! You too, Sasquatch,” she barked.

His great concentration was broken by her shrill voice. His voice quivered, “Where do you want them?”

“In the room, Lug-nut.” I think she scared Sven more than the poltergeist. Of course, we couldn’t purge her, but it was vital that we make the drooling ghost double-dead.

Sven hauled all he could up the stairs. Bags hung from his arms; one hand had the milk jugs; the other had a bag of pink lady apples; he bit a plastic handle; he cradled the loaves of bread. I suggested we hang more bags from his satellite ears but he refused. With what he carried, there had only been one bag left in the trunk. I took that. It only held toilet paper.

We left Jenna to unload the groceries piled in the backseat around the microwave.

“Why didn’t you take care of the poltergeist?” he whispered as we climbed the empty staircase. “I felt it giving off massive bloodlust then it quieted down. If you couldn’t finish the job, you should’ve held it for me.”

“I never saw him after last night when you messed things up.”

“You’re dense. Who pelted your girlfriend with the Poptarts? Was it you? Did you hit her?” he demanded, stopping so he blocked the stairway.

“How about you keep shuffling upstairs? Or are your feet too heavy?”

“Did you fucking hit her?” The bags rustled in his hands. He spun; one swung into my gut and knocked me back so I grabbed for his shirt. His sturdy frame saved me from tumbling, but I stretched the collar more than his watermelon-sized head.

“No! Calm your britches or they’ll get lit on fire by that rage.”

Asian ladybugs were dead on the painted concrete stairs. Their shells crunched under his foot till we got to the top where it was carpeted. I opened my dorm and let Sven in. He set his bags on the bed till there was no more room. He had to pile them on the desk chair, the desk, the bureau, the fridge, the bookshelf on the bureau, the drawers, and he was still holding the milk jugs in one massive hand. He also had a jar of jam with nowhere to set it. He asked, “What if it’d thrown glass instead of a cardboard box?”

Ch. 64: Fingertip Cancer

2012-12-28T14:08:00.002-06:00

When strolling through the parking lot outside Hoffman dorm, I always looked at my Lincoln Town Car, knowing the backseat was full of McDonald’s bags and taco trash. It was a boat. The back end stuck out so everyone could see the gashes of poor driving. Some bloke had backed out and rubbed their passenger door against my bumper, chafing the silver paint. A key had scratched a line beneath the driver door handle—I suspected Jenna. The headlights were cloudy with dirt and age and last time I got my oil changed, six months and a five-hundred miles ago, the mechanic offered to clean the gunk for my safety. When I refused to pay an extra twenty for his charity, he warned that driving at night could get dangerous with the little visibility my headlights gave off, but I told him I only drove where streetlamps showed every tar-covered crack in the road.

But my car was missing. A robin’s-egg blue VW bug sat in my usual parking spot. I often fantasized about keying vultures’ cars when they swiped my spot after I went to Wal-Mart and returned ten minutes later. I once borrowed a traffic cone from the maintenance department to save my spot while I fetched a vanilla milkshake from McDonald’s. From then on I thought I might be able to drive without fear! Which is what every American dreams of. I tried it again but the security van stole my placeholder and a truck stole my spot. Whenever my Lincoln wasn’t in its spot, its home, I kept a vigilant watch from my window, just waiting for the thief to move their car.

WHERE WAS MY CAR? When had I last driven it? It was move-in day about three weeks ago, when Dad had given me the 30-year-old microwave after replacing its burnt-out fuse. It was too heavy to carry by myself so we tag-teamed getting it from the garage to my car and he reminded me not to carry it to my room myself. He assumed since I was a senior, I was too old to have Daddy help me move in.

“Why you got a microwave in your car?” Jenna asked from behind. She had two plastic Wal-Mart bags in her hands, and my keys hung from her pinky.

“You took my car? Where’d you park?”

She had parked my baby on the other side of the lot, by Gaas, four rows away from the VW bug in my spot. Two spaces over from the bug was empty though. Why not park there? People are parking-logic challenged. “Why not ask a neighbor to help carry it up?” she asked.

“I don’t talk to my neighbors.”

“Someone from your class then? You really have no friends, don’tchya?”

I rummaged through her bags. “What’d you get at the store? Great Value toaster pastries? You get a discount! Why not get Poptarts? They taste better. It’s all that extra lard.”

“We gotta think about the future. Save for it. I can’t be workin’ at Wal-Mart forever, ya hear? So find a good job, good starting salary, good benefits. Heck, it can be here in Iowa if it pays right but make sure they got offices near a beach. In case ya get transferred.”

Behind a Dodge Durango, rusted at the hubcaps, was the poltergeist. It had its backwards underpants in the engine and its gaping mouth drooled on the hood. The drool wasn’t the clear mucus it had dripped in the fountain, but instead thick orange muck coated the SUV’s hood. That had to be bad for the paint. The antenna thrummed like it had been flicked.

“But I got some good stuff,” Jenna said. “Cheesepuff balls. Saltines, low sodium. Honey Buzzer cereal – the big bag. I got name brand milk since Prairie Farms is actually cheaper than the off-brand.”

A pebble skidded across the lines of the parking lot and bounced off a tire. Another pinged a red Camaro.

“Why not take that off-brand junk inside? I’ll get the rest.” I pushed Jenna toward the dorm but she was heavy and stubborn and didn’t like being pushed so she used her heels as brakes.

“Hold it! I gotta get my purse from yer car. Oh, never mind. You get it. But don’t be peeking innit. And lock the car when you done. Can’t have anyone stealing nothing.”

A car door flung open, denting the neighboring car. Do you think the poltergeist left a note? No, sir!

“I’d hate if they stole nothing,” I said, dragging her by a jangling bracelet-covered wrist. “Go on, relax on my bed, maybe ice your feet with a Coke. They have to be sore from shopping. Even if you didn’t get the right brands.”

“I guess they are. But get used to how I shop. We’re saving for the future.”

A box of breakfast pastries floated from the bag in my hand. The ghost hurled it at me and I closed my eyes but felt only the air as it whizzed by, at Jenna; the cardboard corner crushed against her head.

“OW!” she shrieked. “I know you like that physical comedy but that wallop really smarted.” She stomped upstairs to my room, still holding my keys which locked me out of the building till her head stopped throbbing.

The ghost opened a pink box and launched tampons at me. It was bloody disgusting.

“Calm down, guy! Did Anita put you in a pissy mood? Don’t have a hissy fit. Just relax. That was a good shot with the Poptarts, but you missed my head because you were so mad you saw red. It rhymes so it’s true. If you calm down, you’ll hit me next time.”

His rage soothed when his drool turned clear and oozed no farther than his chin, but then he floated off.

I picked up the tampons, thankful they were in a plastic sheath but still holding them at arm’s length like they were radioactive. I was sure to get fingertip cancer.

“Where’d it go?” Anita rose from the concrete.

“I couldn’t see since he poked out my eye with these deadly tampon-missiles.” I held a hand over my eye like it was detached from the socket, attached to my brain only by the optic nerve which was too tenuous a connection and even the weight of a slimy eyeball could sever it so I had to keep the nerve slack.

“Don’t lie,” she said, examining the muck-trail that ended near me.

“Truth be told, my eye isn’t actually poked out. But he aimed for it. Soon there’ll be a warning on the box that says ‘Do not insert into the eye.’”

Ch. 63: A Chat between Violence

2012-12-21T17:06:00.003-06:00

Anita followed the poltergeist by his drool to the cobblestone streets by the sewage treatment pond where the geese often sought refuge when woken by Thursty Thursday parties but that was duck territory and it occasionally ended in a bloody bird bath.

With the violent spirits gone, I entered the café. The lunch rush had faded and TGG folded her apron. “I wondered when you’d drop by,” she said with a yawn. She apologized for it but that got interrupted by another. “I saw you through the window earlier but then you left. Did I scare you?”

“It was those vicious fangs of yours. And the scarf. Too bohemian for me.” I sat at a tall table with a tall chair and my feet didn’t reach the floor. My toes grazed the metal bars connecting the legs of the tall chair, but unless I kept my feet extended, they dangled. Who designed this crap? I hopped off. “Actually I had some odor problems. I was just about to envelope you in the perimeter of my stench when I realized I’d be charged with murdering your nose.”

While on the tall chair she could reach my shoulder and did so with her chin. It dug in but I didn’t rouse her. “I don’t smell anything now,” she said. “Did you get some deodorant?”

“Actually I bathed in the pond. Don’t worry – I took my clothes off first.”

“You had to. Who bathes with clothes?” She laid her head on her arms at the tall table with the tall chair that I didn’t like. She watched me with one eye.

I tucked her in with a few napkins over her face. “I used my sock as a wash cloth.”

“But wouldn’t the pond scum make you smell worse?” she mumbled into her arm hair. She used her blanket-napkins to wipe the crumbs from the table. Nap-time was over and she had to clean, but she bumped a seat with her elbow sending reverberations through the bones.

I reached to catch the chair, felt the cold metal, but it must’ve slipped from my fingers because suddenly I wasn’t touching it anymore and it banged the floor. I was awfully clumsy lately, missing all sorts of grabs. “Common misconception. See, body odor is an acid but pond scum is a base, so they neutralize each other. I’m a bit of a B.O.-ologist.”

“You should put that on your résumé.”

“I will. But when I interview, I’ll have to be clear that I’m not a bi-ologist. I don’t know anything about that stuff. Just B.O.”

“And chicken physics.” TGG cleared the counter of Styrofoam cups stained with lipstick the same shade as hers. One had a puddle of mochaccino at the bottom and she downed it then refilled with black coffee from the brown-handled pot, leaving the orange-handled one stewing on the burner.

“You remembered! Did you sleep okay?”

“I guess not. I don’t remember waking up or going to bed late. I just woke up still tired. But that’s college, right?”

“I get a full-night’s rest every night. Even yesterday on the Graham lounge couch. I dreamt of Klondike Bars and dental floss and woke up refreshed!”

“You were on our couch?”

“After my adventures with the ghosts, I was too tired to make it home,” I lied. “And I had forgotten my keys. So I crashed on your couch. Then I saw the ghost following me this morning; think he might’ve watched me sleep? Think he touched me inappropriately? Quick, get an anatomically correct doll so I can show you where I hope the ghosty didn’t touch me.”

TGG was napping against the mop in its bucket. I cleaned the café, wiping off tables, taking the trash to the Dumpster, scrubbing the burners of cooked-on coffee; I didn’t scrub the stains on the floor because I didn’t want to pull her pillow from under her, but I leaned her in the corner so she wouldn’t fall.

Ch. 62: Flies in Yours Eyes

2012-12-14T16:01:00.001-06:00

Kaylee and I were the second and third students into the room with Judd Christy arriving first because his Abnormal Psych class met in the room next door. Normally Kaylee beat him inside because he was still in his class when she arrived, but today she was second to him and it irked her. Actually, my constant reminders that she was second irked her. She probably wouldn’t have minded otherwise but she was studying and I was annoying.

I survived African & Caribbean Lit without saying much and American Horror Stories went the same way. Dr. Radulescu groaned and wiped chalk on his pleated pants and pointed to passages in the text that were important stylistic traits of Edgar Allen Poe. I followed along, looking off my neighbor’s packet of papers since I had just died when the professor had passed them out on Thursday.

After two hours of class and only five or ten minutes of sleeping during the lecture, I needed caffeine. I didn’t drink coffee, especially the swill on campus but the aroma woke me just the same so I thought I’d hang around the library’s café. Maybe TGG would be working.

I saw her through the glass windows. Her apron had long strings in back and she stepped on one as she cleaned the table of napkins and crumbs – a boy, seeing her stumble, offered to double-knot it for her, maybe even triple-knot it, but she refused. Her hair was straightened so the tips went past her scarf. She dragged trash along the floor and delivered a chai latte to a student while on her way to the Dumpsters.

Outside Geisler Library was a fountain that was dry 11 months a year, collectively. Only during graduation, orientation, and parents’ week was it full and functional. It was solar-powered and shot ten streams that arced to form a circle of splashes. Four more geysers sprayed diagonally towards the corners. The floor was painted aqua and there were purple and orange and green lights on the bottom that made it a spectacle at night. But now that parents and donors were home, the fountain was dry. The aqua paint chipped and it wouldn’t get another coat till the snow melted, a month before graduation.

Floating above the main fountain was the poltergeist in a suit jacket and backwards underpants. He was following me all over, it seemed. He drooled into the fountain.

TGG headed towards the glass door that was opposite a glass wall that students could see the fountain through.

Because the poltergeist was like Mary’s little lamb, I left for a bench near the pond and he was sure to go. He trailed me slowly with his mouth gaping and sticky as though he needed his dead mother to wipe it with a handkerchief. Before he reached me, he got stuck in a honeysuckle tree admiring a hornet’s nest or something – for whatever reason he stopped before coming through the leaves.

I stared over the pond as water sliders too small to see made ripples that broke against the brick sides. With the same gentleness, Anita descended upon the water but made no ripples. Her green smock hung loose about her neck as the strings in back were untied and dipped in the water without drenching. She had her magic book in her left hand and her other arm tucked inside her oversized sleeve.

“Is your hand cold or shy?” I asked. A fly bothered my ear then nose and finally blocked my sight even after waving it away.

“Both,” she mumbled. She floated cross-legged above the pond and watched fireflies pass through her knee. She reached for one with a pale finger – it didn’t flit away with any hurry. It was like she didn’t exist. She blew her platinum blond bangs from her eyes but her hair ignored her too and she had to use her hand to clear it from behind her glasses. “How’d the night go?”

“You don’t know?”

“I know,” she said. Her butt sank into the water – did that chill her? She didn’t mind if it did.

A gaggle of bikini-topped girls sauntered by with beach towels as I spoke to Anita, who was invisible to even Sven and so definitely to them. I nodded at a pudgy one who wore baggy jeans with her rainbow bikini. They lay on the grass using the rolled towels for pillows.

“He wasn’t hurting anyone,” I said. “I thought maybe your intel was wrong. Maybe he wasn’t a poltergeist. Maybe he’d had a little tantrum and would calm down with a bit of talking to, but then Sven came along and started shooting up the place. Does he even have a permit for that finger? It better allow concealed-carry too or he couldn’t stick his hands in his pockets. ”

“You’ll get it next time,” she said. She opened her book on her knee. The page looked blank to me but maybe there was some spiritual writing I was ignorant of. “Promise you will. I can’t always protect you if you screw up. You’ll get put in the ground.”

The fly still buzzed about my nostrils despite heavy puffs that sent it twirling. “I didn’t screw up. Sven did. You know me! I’m awesome. I can take on any challenge except anatomy. I failed that class, no excuses except laziness. And who needs to know the thirteen sections of the humerus? Knowing the proximal radial trochlea has never saved a man’s life. Did you have to learn those to be a grim reaper?”

She pulled the pen from behind her ear and doodled invisibly on the page. Maybe her tip wasn’t touching or maybe the pen was out of ink. “Just do it next time he’s near.”

I glanced behind me at the honeysuckle with the hornet’s nest. His loafer hung from among the limbs. “Next time I see him, I’ll try my best. I don’t disappoint.”

She spun around, still cross-legged, to face me. “Thank you.” She flipped a few hundred pages forward. “Tonight I’ll join you as you prowl the town but if you don’t find him don’t worry. You’re still new to this and your senses aren’t keen yet.”

“They are too!” I shouted without thinking. “I felt that ghost-guy creeping on me this morning!” I was eager to prove that I had talent.

“You saw it again?” She leaped from the lake and closed the distance between us before I could flinch. The hard edge to her voice was back. “Did you at least try to exorcise it?”

“I would’ve but I was with someone. Jenna. She moved in with me – about ten tons of stuff, mostly lotion. And the ghost was outside the dorm, two stories up. I couldn’t defenestrate myself through glass to purge him. I’d probably miss anyway. I’d die for nothing but I kind of miss being a ghost, flying about the city, appreciating the Midwest from a new angle.”

“You have to tell me next time you see it. If you miss the poltergeist again—”

“What if he’s been stalking us during the conversation?”

“Huh?” She glanced with rapid eyes, spun full circle quickly then slowly. “Where?”

“He’s up in that tree.” A water slider skid across the pond making concentric circles that rammed each other and so they never reached to the brick wall. “The honeysuckle.”

“I don’t have time for jokes, TK.”

I turned around to look. “He was up there! Maybe he left for the Earth’s core. He probably got bored looking at you. Your beauty’s too subtle for most, always hidden by a scowl.”

She screamed, “You selfish pear-headed brat! Do you got flies in your eyes?” She scrunched up her right sleeve to a nub at the elbow. Her hand through forearm were gone. She gestured by flailing the fleshy stump through the air so it jiggled. “Do you see the whipping I suffered for you? They gave me the choice: my arm or my student and I chose you. I saw a hidden shine in an egg-sucker but it’s not worth chiseling through your stupidity if I cripple trying to show everyone. I got this nubbin till you clear out these childish fantasies from your head and do your damn job. But you can’t do that because you’re too busy crying ‘Woe is me! I’m bored!’ because you can’t jump through windows or fly now that I got you your life back. Has there ever been a more tragic hero than you? There’s never been one more self-involved.”

The water rippled beneath Anita’s feet. Dragonflies fled. The girls with beach-towel pillows bickered and ostracized the pudgy one for being a freckly ginger.

“Pear-headed?” I asked.

Ch. 61: Attempted Murder

2012-12-07T20:32:00.002-06:00

My first class on Tuesdays was African & Caribbean Lit, but that was at noon and when I left Jenna alone in my room it was still just past daylight. Students stumbled home from the library and teachers rode in on bicycles to grade papers in their offices before the first round of torture at 8 AM. They were always tardy to class though because they had to get coffee and a bagel at the café but it opened at 8 too and there was always a line of teachers, so the students waited outside the classroom till the door could be unlocked.

I sat on the railing of the bridge over the pond and stared at the scum beneath my reflection. As the angle of the sun changed with the passing of time, my image thickened then disappeared just before noon.

People passed as time did. Most whispered about my statue-like presence on the bridge. Some concocted plans to shove me so I’d splash in the scum. Most ignored me. They came at alternate quarters of the hours: first 8:45, then 10:15, then 11:45, and had I stayed longer, they’d come at 1:15, 2:45, and finally 4:15. Few students wandered the campus in the AM. Everyone had somewhere to go or else they wouldn’t be awake.

Kaylee passed without company at 11:40, before the rest of the students were off to class. She was headed to our classroom, eager to be early, to ask questions, to review, to get an A on a daily quiz that meant little compared to our five essays.

“How do you kiss him?” I asked. “You’re a hobbit and he’s an ogre.”

“Ogres aren’t in The Lord of the Rings. They’re mentioned once in The Hobbit but never seen. They could be Halfling-sized.” She kept walking. “And whom did I kiss?” Her book bag was full but she had a binder, folder, notebook, and her copy of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. What was in her bag? I pulled a zipper to find out but she whirled around and the zipper knocked my knuckle. I was sure it’d bleed and sucked on it before looking, but the skin was intact.

I let go of her book bag and she walked away so I grabbed it again. She dragged me till I clung to the railing. I said, “Everyone knows ogres are big, ugly monsters like Sven. But you’re more of a midget elf than a hobbit. Are your ears pointed? I don’t remember. Your hair’s always in the way.”

She faced the pond while I had a hold on her, but her eyes were on the Achebe text, skimming for highlighted passages. “How do you know Sven?” she mumbled and peeked up from her text.

How much did she know about him? “We’re a crime fighting duo. We take on super villains, jaywalkers, and ghosts.”

She kept reading.

“He’s my sidekick who dies eventually which marks a dark turning point in my character for a day then I go back to my lovable self.” I stared up at the sky till a bird passed. I put my head down, lest he bombarded me. “But how does Sven know you? I thought you never ventured from the—where do elves live? Forest?”

“They live where they want.” She closed her book, but a pen marked her place. “We lived in the same Minnesota town, Boy River. It was only for a summer since I moved around a lot because my dad wouldn’t let me be boring. I managed his restaurant in New York when I was 16. Before I hit puberty, he sent me to live in mud huts in Kanchanaburi.” She looked up from her book and informed me, “That’s in Thailand.”

“I know where Candelabra is. Their chief imports are cigarettes and semen.”

“And when I was 10, I lived in Boy River with 46 strangers and Sven. He was the only person who moved away from me – he got shipped off suddenly. But he kept contact. I never did that for anyone unless they emailed me first. Then I’d reply curtly and eventually they’d forget to respond and I’d forget about them. Till Facebook came around. Then everyone wanted to be friends again. Last time I was on, I had like 10 requests. I ignore them.” She flipped through her book. She hadn’t stopped reading as she spoke and she even marked important passages. “But Sven emailed me daily, even when he had a dial-up connection. I’d respond then he’d reply within an hour. I wonder if he ever left his computer. His summers were too busy for the internet though. He went camping and canoeing and trekking through the Rockies. But when he finished, he’d reply right away. He’d snap a picture and his face would be covered like he hadn’t washed in weeks. His shirt would be ragged too. The pictures showed him slowly filling his frame. He was always tall, though he got taller still, but it took him a while to get better filled. Better than a skeleton. Better filled out than you.”

I grabbed her highlighter from her teeth and marked her book. The neon yellow didn’t show on the orange cover. “I’m compact. So you came here to be with him? Are you living together? Are you pregnant? Does uh, everything line up properly since you’re an elf and all?” I brushed her golden hair behind her ear to get a look at its point. She let me. I flicked it to get the point erect. Nipples do it! Flick a nipple and five seconds later it’s pointy. Maybe elf ears are the same.

She closed her book and leaned over the edge of the bridge. The scummy water colored her hair green in the reflection. “It’s a good school. He just informed me of its existence.” She stood with her feet between the iron slats of the bridge so she was an few inches taller – still shorter than me. “And he doesn’t even live on campus. He lives in his grandma’s old house.”

“She die?” I asked.

“She moved back to Boy River with his parents.”

“So they ship him off to his grandma’s, then she leaves him on his own because he’s got ogre BO?”

She looked over at Jordan Hall, the humanities building. Dr. Radulescu had just entered. She looked at me but I grabbed her backpack again and she stayed put, with her feet between the slats of the bridge. “I don’t know why she left. I don’t know when she left. She just did. So Sven’s always inviting me over. My boyfriend hates it. But Sven’s lonely and I don’t want to hear his complaining so I go over for homework. It’s usually quiet there. In literature, love-seeking and loneliness are fine conflicts. But in real life, they get annoying. I like books, not people.”

“Books are people. They’re just condensed. Everyone’s doing a thousand movements a day, but a book narrows those down to actions, characterizing moments.”

“Maybe,” she mumbled. She opened her book again. I still had her highlighter so I marked her knuckle. She didn’t stop me so I rubbed the cap against her face, pretending to mark her. “Stop it already. I’m trying to study for the quiz.”

I let her have a minutes rest while the wind tossed her hair from its messy bun and into her face. When she was absorbed by Achebe’s prose, I shoved her hoping to scare her into thinking she’d fall into the scum but I kept a firm grasp on her shoulders. She and her hair shot forward then jerked back at the will of my hand. Her book, however, went flying.

I punched through the bars, grabbed it before it splashed. How did my hand make it through without my knuckles ringing the metal slats?

Kaylee didn’t care how the miracle happened; she was just grateful it did. “You saved it! Thank you.” Then she realized I was the one who had endangered it. “You nearly murdered Achebe!”

“He’s made it past 80. He’ll live forever, whether his book gets wet or not. Anyway, you have a boyfriend?”

“For now. He’s not very useful lately.”

An internal bell had rung in the mind of every student with a class at noon. They marched over the bridge, on the sidewalk, across the grass and into their classes. Kaylee saw them coming and bolted for Jordan Hall. I still had her highlighter.

Ch. 60: A Tale of Two Ladies

2012-11-30T21:40:00.001-06:00

The sun had risen over the misty cornfields. The soil was dry despite this and the harvesters were out, kicking up dust and corn husks which floated over the Dutch community, clogging gutter and pool drains.

I snoozed on the couch in Graham lounge. Beth, TGG’s southern roommate, stood over me in an oversized Hawkeye sweatshirt; the sleeves covered her hands and flopped as she crossed her arms. She scowled. “Is your fault!” she accused me of some crime that was apparently a capital offense so she had to yell in that southern drawl. “They were good together. You never saw ‘cause he’s in Austria or somewhere but they were real good together. He’s a nice guy and he treated her right. And they were happy. Then you come along and who knows? – maybe he git jealous of all that talk ‘bout you.”

“Did she mention my devilish good-looks?” I rubbed grit from my eyelashes and accidentally plucked a few. I made a wish that my pits didn’t stink after my night of ghost-hunting and sleep, lest Beth report to her roommates about the vagrant on the couch.

“Gih-OUT!” she yelled and tipped the couch so I rolled off and flailed and grabbed for stability, pulling a few couch cushions with me. I carried them to the door before dropping them.

I was still locked out of my dorm but I headed there anyway. I took off my shoe again, but this time I threw it at my window. I missed and hit the brick next to it, but it had the same effect and Jenna screamed through the screen, “Where you been all night?” Her red hair was frizzy and matted. “Tell me where you been now!”

“You have my keys! I couldn’t get in!” I had to yell to be heard.

“Then why didn’t you just throw your shoe up last night? Huh?”

My Asian neighbor peeked through his blinds at the commotion. There were possibly other onlookers but I didn’t feel their eyes glaring at me for waking them just after daylight. Perhaps that was why Jenna shrieked. Probably not.

I waved to my neighbor, then explained to Jenna, “Sleeping beauty is to be woken with a kiss. Not a shoe.” A husk hit my foot and I kicked it to help it along.

“I’ll come let you in. Let me put on panties.”

I waved to my Asian neighbor again and waited. The dust swirling overhead settled in my bedhead, not combed since before my funeral except what I did with my fingers after showers. Even at the early hour, I sweated at my brow. The mist made the air soggy and when it evaporated in the pre-noon sun, it’d turn to humidity that made the air drinkable. After a walk around the quad anyone carrying around powder Kool-Aid would be able to drink it straight from the container. The apocalypse would come before Jenna.

I spotted someone hovering near the brick corner of Hoffman. He had on a suit jacket and tighty-whiteys, but those were backwards. It was the poltergeist I had let get away.

Jenna shoved open the door and demanded I hurry before someone saw her in short shorts that clung to her dancer’s butt and a cut-off tanktop that showed her lacy bra at the sides. I insisted she went first and stared at her butt the entire way up.

Back in my room, she wrapped my blanket about her shoulders and sat on the bed. She slowly tipped over. “How’d the study group go? What was it for again?”

“Chem.”

The poltergeist was outside the window, drooling ectoplasm or saliva – I don’t know which. He stared inside. Since Jenna was lying down, facing the wall with the blanket covering her face, I stuck my tongue out at the window. It wiggled and coated my mouth with spit and it stretched till it ached but never touched my nose. It was too short.

“You switched majors? You finally listened! There’s no money in English – everyone knows that. Every list about the best majors say so. But Chemistry now? So you’ll teach? You’d be a great teacher. I always said you would. And Chem kids need a great teacher, not like Mrs. Broccoli.” Mrs. Broeckling was a hoary spinster at our high school who kids often gossiped that she was a virgin even at sixty-plus.

I covered Jenna’s head with the pillow. “I had Miss Korte, being in AP and all.” I lifted my shirt and gasped as the poltergeist saw my nips. He was so entranced by them that he didn’t move. How could this guy be dangerous? How could he scare anyone?

“You’re smothering me,” she mumbled sleepily.

“With affection.”

“And a pillow.” She kicked the wall and the building shook – dancers had powerful legs.

The commotion intrigued the poltergeist and he floated towards us but I closed the blinds. He didn’t pass through them. They must’ve been ghost-proof. I spread the blinds and looked him in the eye. I winked, one eye, then the next, alternating, going faster till both eyes closed at once and I was just blinking.

“What are you doing?” Jenna had taken her head out from the covers and pillow.

“Signaling to a bird to launch an aerial bombardment. Or maybe I was saying good-bye. To the bird of course.”

“Come to bed. Let’s just sleep all day.”

“I’ve got class.”

Ch. 59: Illuminating the Nothing inside Us

2012-11-23T19:48:00.002-06:00

Walking to my dorm from Graham on the edge of campus, there was a dome of dim light enveloping Geisler Library up to CUIFS (Central University of Iowa Food Services, again pronounced ‘kweefs’). It was the kind of dome car dealerships and Super Wal-marts had. Ambient light.

Every ten feet was a light post with an orb around the bulb. They were filled with dead bugs. Some poor student had to scoop them out each week of summer so that at night, the campus was well lit, safe. Their light blocked out the stars. Maybe one day we’d get a power outage and I’d take TGG out to the park and point at the sky and make up constellations: “Bobo the Monkey,” and “Clown Theodore, Saint of Lost Children.”

But something drew me from my fantasy. A familiar presence behind me.

“I’ve got this sixth-sense down now! Only took me a day or two. I must be a genius. If you’re here to chastise me, go away. Sven was there too and he’s more experienced than me. But he’s got lousy aim. And no heart.” I whirled around.

“Why are you taking freshman classes with Sven Stein?” grumbled the geezer.

I turned. “OH! Dr. Radulescu. I didn’t hear your bones creaking as you snuck up on me. I thought you were a pretty girl. Wait—Sven’s a freshman? That BFG?” I asked. The F didn’t mean friendly in my mind.

The grandpa wore the same sweater-vest from earlier. There was a chalk handprint across the shoulder. The dust twinkled in the lamplight. “Sneaked. You should get the rod for using the barbarism ‘snuck.’” He pulled a worn and duct-taped copy of Gawain and the Green Knight from his back pocket and waved it at me, stopping before it hit.

I didn’t flinch; I feigned a yawn, keeping it going till my cheeks ached. “It’s too late for a lesson. But Sven’s really a freshman? That reincarnation of Beowulf?” I stretched my hand high above my bedhead but it still wasn’t tall enough for Sven so I hopped.

“You children draw up hierarchies as though God appointed the seniors and banished worthless souls to freshman status. But these lines that divide us are meaningless. Freshers, Freshies, fresh meat, call them what you will, you can’t recognize them.”

“I’ve never called anyone any of those,” I muttered.

We walked for a ways, past the foreign language house, following the pavement around a Tree of Heaven. He breathed hard and walked slow and I felt like I should walk slow too, in case he slid down the largest hill in Marion county (maybe five feet). It was a quiet night. Everyone was inside, studying, or drinking alone, or maybe getting a nap. They’d later wake while others were turning in for bed and text a friend, complaining of insomnia, hoping for a booty call.

“What are you doing out here anyway?” I asked. “Isn’t it a bit late for lessons? Shouldn’t you be asleep? You weren’t coming from a student’s room, were you? I know college is for all ages, but the dorms aren’t. You’re too old for these kids. Most of the people there can’t buy beer. Legally, anyway. Were you buying beer for them? Most have fake IDs or the cashiers don’t care. If they asked you to do it, they must be crushing on you. Lucky dog. No one ever asks me to buy them beer.”

He just let me talk.

So I kept on. “You won’t really dock me points for that quiz, right? Not that I care, but that’d be cold. I was dead. I was cold and almost in the ground. You were at my funeral. You know.”

“You’re fine,” he wheezed. Maybe he had kept silent to catch his breath. “A student forgot his assignment. He’s eager to please, too eager, annoyingly eager. He left ten messages on the machine. The tape was full of his blubbering but he still forgot to leave a number. I came down to say it was okay. It was actually your companion, Sven.”

Eventually we went into that dome of dim light without realizing it. At least, I didn’t. Maybe I should’ve noticed.

“I met him in the parking lot by KAC. Kaylee was there too. I permitted her to smack him if he ever worries like that again.”

Kaylee, the elfish girl in my Myth in Literature class, knew Sven too? I couldn’t see her smacking Sven without breaking a wrist. Even if he sat, he’d be taller than her. Did he pick her up to kiss her? Were they even together-together? He didn’t seem smooth enough or smart enough to ask her on a date. He might ask her to watch a movie in his room, but that’s not a date. Boys these days.

“Are they very much in love?” I asked, masking interest with an affectation straight from Dickens or Austen.

“You teens confuse everything. Did I assign the Salinger story ‘For Esmé - with Love and Squalor?’ Students often confuse the narrator’s interest in Esmé as romantic love. No. He’s healed by her love in the end, but it’s not a romantic love. You teens think when a man and woman of any age interact pleasantly it’s because they’re ‘very much in love.’ You confuse your own feelings as well. It’s why you swoon for your friends, teachers, even captors. Don’t let soap operas teach you teens a damn thing.”

“I’m twenty-one. Not a teen.”

“I forget that because of your behavior.”

We arrived at a crossroads near the chapel. One way led to the library and the other led to my room. I waited for him to say farewell. He didn’t. He kept walking and headed to the library to ask a student where the card catalog was. She’d ask “What’s that?” He’d groan and ask how to find the book he needed. She’d show him to a computer and he’d stare at her till she found the call number for him.

I headed to my room under the dome of light, not realizing anything was different. I didn’t even realize that I didn’t have my key to get into the building or my brick of a cellphone to call Jenna to let me in. I stood outside my window for a second and pulled off a shoe. But then I put it back on.

I returned to Graham.

Ch. 58: Waiting for a Break

2012-11-16T18:20:00.000-06:00

I wandered the dark streets waiting for Anita to pop in and yank my soul from my abdominals to torture me for letting the poltergeist escape. But she didn’t show. I waited on the corner of Skenk. I took in the scents of restaurants on Broadway. I prowled Washington. I went up West Third and came down West Fourth. I took the alleyway behind Jaarsma and chased away a stray tabby; I called to him, “Here, tomcat. I’ll get you some milk from the store, but you have to come here.” He scurried away.

It was nearly eleven when I gave up waiting in the humid air. I went to Graham, to TGG. Her door was cracked so I barged in. Before she could turn to see the intruder, I pulled her from the room, grunting “I want your money, not your life.”

“Hey, TK,” TGG mumbled with a toothbrush in her mouth. Light blue foam dribbled down her chin and she wiped it with the back of her hand.

“I know you needed to talk to me, but I need to talk to you too. If I don’t I’ll die. Again. Can I go first?” I still held her by the elbows so I spun her around and let go.

She put a hand over her mouth as she spoke so foam spat into her hand and not onto my shirt. “Sounds urgent, sure.”

“Okay, Jack died earlier and I realized life has to end or at least change. He dies, he floats up to Wherever, he continues hopping around and munching carrots as a spirit. He couldn’t stay here for whatever stupid reasons the universe has. But that’s not just for rabbit-ghosts, but people-ghosts too and people-non-ghosts. Life can’t be birthday parties and high school parties and college parties and post-college parties forever. You have to grow up, settle down, let new kids throw up at parties.” I leaned against the wall and sank to the floor. The back of my shirt was lifted to my neck. “You can’t be 57 and still having sex with anything that moves, right?”

She took the toothbrush from her mouth. The bristles were purple and orange. “Do you do that now?”

“Not animals.” I straightened out my shirt in the back. “I’m kidding. Not guys either. It’s just not my thing.”

She stuck her toothbrush back in her mouth and mumbled, “The ladies are glad for it.”

“Thank you.”

Foam dripped to the carpet and she rubbed it with her sock. It had a pattern of lips on it as though some woman with a fetish had caked on lipstick before kissing the sock.

“Anyway, part of my deal that got, as you said, ‘this fine piece of man’ back in human form.”

“I never said that.” She tilted back her head so she wouldn’t spill again.

“You could’ve.” I scratched a stain on the carpet. It was a sex stain, I’m sure of it.

“Maybe someday.”

“Thanks in advance for when you do. But, part of the deal is that I now exorcise ghosts.” I quickly added, “It’s not murder. I’m helping them move to the next stage of life. Though murderers might say the same.”

“You’re not a murderer.”

“I’m glad you think that. You might not be one day, but I’m glad my cover’s intact.”

I lay on my back and placed my heels against the wall. I stretched my hands above my head so they touched the other wall. I was a toll booth. Just then some girl came by carrying a book on parallel processing in today’s CPUs. It was a library book. The girl waited for me to move. I told her, “Gotta pay the toll. You don’t pay the toll, I don’t get donut holes.” She stepped over me. I grabbed at her shoes and clawed the rubber sole. The girl glanced back with a scrunched-up, angry face that said “WTF.” TGG mouthed an apology. I called after, “Watch for construction! There’s a detour around the quad that’ll save you thirty-seven seconds, but head past the Media Center and you’ll get jammed up and probably have to idle for an hour.” I was an excellent toll booth, informative and lenient.

“Anita, the grim reaper, tells me I have to do it, exorcise ghosts, or she’ll throw me in a casket again.” I hopped to my feet and grabbed TGG by the shoulders. “But what if some good-doer trying to purge the world of spiritual filth had attacked me when I was a spirit? I never would’ve come back to life. You would’ve been devastated!” I sat back down.

“A little. A little devastated.”

“I’ll take it! So yeah. That’s what I’m dealing with. I don’t expect you to solve it. There’s not much to solve, really. It’s not exactly romance or a financial crisis or an alien abduction or whatever most collegiates deal with, but I’ll figure it out.” I got up and pointed to my spot. “Your turn. I’ll be the therapist now, you whine about whatever. You still need to talk to me, right?”

“Yeah, but I can stand.”

“SIT! NOW!” I snapped my fingers and pointed.

Her mouth was full of spit. She pointed with her thumb to indicate that she was headed for a sink in the bathroom. I held open the door for her and put my hand on her back to gently guide her inside. She flinched, jumping. Maybe my pinky finger, by accident (though I’ll deny that), slid into the waist of her pants. It must’ve tickled that rarely touched skin. I followed her inside.

As she held her curly hair back, TGG’s mouthful splat into the sink. Her lips were colored blue and a strand connected her chin to the bits of pretzels pulled from between her teeth.

Meanwhile, I checked the shower stalls. There were four, all empty. The last had a wet towel hanging over the rack and I searched the bathroom for its owner. “Naked girl who just stepped from the shower without your towel, where are you?” I called. “Please still be here.”

“I’m still here,” TGG said from the sink. She was washing her face with foam from the dispenser. She had a bubble-goatee and bubble-eyebrows, but she was still cute. She rinsed.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

After hearing my booming, male voice, a girl in the toilet stall zipped her pants. She rushed from the bathroom, carrying her laptop. She didn’t need to wash. She rushed through the bathroom door and through the door directly across hall. Her roommate exclaimed, “Oh! There you are! Were you in the library or something? I thought you’d be calling Luke tonight! Isn’t it your one month anniversary? I marked it on the calendar so you wouldn’t forget.”

The girl that had been in the stall said, “We just finished talking.” The door swung shut on that conversation.

I sat on the sink near TGG. “I’m sick of seeing things differently than everyone else. Like Sven thought the poltergeist had fangs. I got a real good look at the ghostly guy—no fangs! He looked like a person. Maybe a dad or a young grandpa. He was missing his pants, but that’s no reason to shoot him. We don’t shoot streakers. We sometimes Taser them though. And Anita, she didn’t even notice the pencil on Stan’s ear. It was always there! It was an identifier. But no one notices those things. I don’t know if I’m hallucinating or if they are or what.” I turned the hot water on and let it go till steam rose and fogged the mirror. “Oh sorry, you were going to say something. What do you have to talk to me about?”

“No, I understand. Kevin and I see things differently all the time. Actually just today—”

“So you get it, right?” I pumped the paper towel dispenser as I spoke. “He probably sees the aboriginals as backwards, primitive bushmen, but they’re people too. They hurt; they whine; they get bored; they worry about their beauty; they can’t take compliments; they get jealous; they’d eat pizza everyday if they could. They’re people! So are ghosts. Dead people, but people still. They’ve got personalities, right? So a ghost is a person! You get it.” By the time I finished talking, I had a tapestry of brown paper towel. I handed it to TGG to dry her face.

“He hasn’t called them primitive or anything, but you’re right: they’re people. When we were talking earlier, we didn’t really cover that, but you’re right. I would assume ghosts are too; you were—are—whatever.”

“They are! I was! I am! Dying doesn’t change your personality. You don’t become a vicious monster out for blood and traffic accidents. You don’t become a sadist, torturing people nightly. You don’t become some creep who watches people in their sleep and in their showers unless you were already like that. They’re people!” I stared at myself in the mirror. TGG was just in the background. “Sorry, I’m too focused on myself. What were you saying before? Kevin and you were talking. He hates the aboriginals and…?”

“No, he doesn’t hate them. You said that. Basically we were talking and…” She rang the sink with her toothbrush. “We broke up.”

I turned from the mirror to her. She was all I saw. Her high cheek bones. Her pale skin, scrubbed red. Her thin eyebrows, natural but the strays plucked. Her lips shiny but with a spot of blood where she’d bitten.

“You did that for me?” I asked.

“No.”

I stared into the mirror again. My eyes were red. Veins crept towards the irises.

“He thought it’d be a good idea. You know, because of the distance and everything.”

“He’s an ass, an idiot. It was the worst idea ever to break up with you. Worse than the atom bomb, worse than ivory poached from elephants, worse than most Disney sequels.”

Ch. 57: …Tear It Down”

2012-11-09T11:10:00.001-06:00

Sven was dressed like a candy cane still. He had slathered on deodorant though so at least I didn’t smell his sour pits anymore. His massive sneaker crunched ceramic shards to dust that speckled the carpet. “I guess you really are one of us,” he muttered but his quiet-voice still boomed in D’Arcy’s pub. “It’s hard to believe you found the place before me though. It was just luck.”

“My keen instinct followed the trail of goo to the crime scene. I was like a goo-sniffing hound,” I said. Orange muck covered the fork I had stabbed Sven with. The muck was fluffy. It hardly felt like it was there. But it made funny fart sounds when I squished it.

“What goo?”

Taut strings stretched from the ceiling to the counter by the register. A few chairs were encased in the orange, like it was gelatin. It filled the corners. It formed a web near the neon jukebox. Sven had stepped through it and it tangled his legs. But he didn’t notice. Looking down, I had a string dragging from my shoe. It was so light I hadn’t noticed. “What do you mean ‘What goo’?” I chucked a squishy orange ball at his head. It bounced off and joined with another puddle. “It’s covering the room.”

“You’re nuts,” he said and looked about. “You’re hallucinating.”

“I HATE THIS! Everyone but me can find ghosts, even if that ghost is in Montana. But the moment I see some ectoplasmy-goo, I get called nuts. How do you not see this stuff?!”

“Quiet. I hear the poltergeist still rattling. Sounds like he wore himself out.” Sven was a mouth-breather. His jaw hung as he listened for the ghost.

So while he gaped, I tossed a few orange balls into his mouth. I missed a few times and others bounced off his teeth but one made it in. I wonder what nutrients these had. Probably tryptophan and riboflavin. Maybe phenylalanine too.

Sven spoke and the ball fell from his mouth. “It sounds like it’s coming from the kitchen.”

“It’s messier than my room in there. But I didn’t see a ghost.”

“My senses are a bit keener than your newb-skills.” Sven headed for the kitchen and I didn’t tell him to duck under an oozing string. It wrapped around his neck and should’ve strangled him. But no. He went through the swinging doors, still breathing. “Looks like it tuckered itself out causing this mess. It’ll be easy to handle.”

An oven’s knob was twisted and gas hissed as it leaked around the burner. The sparker spun and recoiled as it tried to ignite, but it seemed broken. Sven reached for the gas to turn it off. The burner flared up, engulfing his arm. The hairs were singed. He stopped-dropped-and-rolled.

“Quit it, drama queen,” I said, giving him a quick kick in the back. “You’re not on fire.”

Sven got up and patted himself off. Mashed potatoes were smashed on his shirt. Sven went looking for the poltergeist that had burned him.

The burner hummed. I lay a frying pan on it and went looking for bacon.

A big metal door was cold to touch. The little window was frosted. I opened the freezer, using my entire body weight to pull the door. Inside was a man in a suit. Threads stuck up from the seams. The button on the left cuff was plastic and the other cuff’s button was missing. The material was scratchy. The lapel was permanently creased. It wasn’t an expensive suit. The tie was too long and hung down in his crotch. It was yellow and too bright for the dark red of the suit jacket. He didn’t have on a belt, or pants. His white socks were to his knees and stretched over the curly hairs on his legs. His tighty-whiteys were loose in the front because he had put them on backwards—I prayed he didn’t turn his back on me.

“Hello,” I said.

He was very pale. Especially his legs. Too much time in his suit (and the missing pants) and not enough time at the pool, I suppose. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t even see me. He was hunched over with his arms dangling and mouth gaping, drooling. His hair was thin but there, save a few receded millimeters. He must’ve been forty. The orange goo gathered around his feet.

“Move,” Sven commanded from behind. He pointed a finger at my back, and as I turned around, my face.

“You’re out of bullets so put your little BB-gun away.”

“I recharged. Now move.” He sounded very serious.

I gave him the finger and turned back to the ghost. “Can you tell me your name?”

The ghost mumbled and moaned like a sleep-walker.

“And how do you spell that?”

“Stop talking to it and move.”

“He’s harmless.” I stepped across the threshold of the freezer. It was covered in goo and the boxes of pasta were frozen. Why would they freeze pasta?

“Get out of the pantry or I’ll shoot you too.”

I waved Sven off. I scanned the shelves for bacon, but didn’t step out of Sven’s line of fire. The shelves of the freezer were full of dry food: rice, potato chips, pasta, flour, salt, pepper, cinnamon. I even spotted a quesadilla press on the top shelf. And frost coated all of it.

“Out of the pantry, NOW!” Sven’s voice boomed in the frozen closet.

“Seventeen over there thinks he’s scary when he yells,” I told the ghost. “He’s kind of like a baby throwing a tantrum. Normally he’s very quiet so I bet he cried a lot as a baby. Most fussy babies grow into quiet adults. Did you know that, Mister…? Sorry, what’s your name again? I’m TK.” I held out my hand for the ghost, but realized I shouldn’t be touching him so I waved.

“Out of the way so I can blast its fanged-face off.”

I bent over to get a look at its mouth. I didn’t see fangs. Maybe the canines were a bit pointed but so were mine. Sven’s eyes were screwy.

A laser shot over my head.

I spun towards Sven and grabbed his finger, bending it back. “You already killed Stan! You’re not killing this guy without a reason,” I said.

“Just look at it!” Sven yelled.

“Poor fashion sense isn’t enough reason to blow someone’s face off with a laser!” I kept bending his finger. I’d break it if I could! But it was thick and must’ve been made of titanium so it wouldn’t break. “You’re just mad he burned you. Let your grudge go. It was like two minutes ago.”

“It put two people in the hospital. It threw a traffic barrel into the road, smashed a windshield; the driver swerved into a mom’s minivan. Her baby was fine but she’s got a broken jaw from where her face smacked the steering wheel. The airbag didn’t deploy.” Sven’s finger was quite muscular and resisted my torture by curling forward. His finger overpowered me. “What more reason do I need? I’m protecting people.”

I whipped back to see if the ghost had disappeared. He had.

But I caught a glimpse of his loafer floating through the ceiling. Sven’s shot had missed.

Sven pointed his finger to shoot through the ceiling and finish the job, but I slapped his hand as he pulled the trigger and missed.

“That was my last shot! What’s your problem? You gonna let it terrorize the town? Put more people in danger?”

“He’s just scared. It’s scary being a ghost,” I told him.

“How would you know?”

Ch. 56: "Raise a Temple...

2012-11-02T16:05:00.001-05:00

Before heading out to hunt poltergeists, I went to my room to change socks. Pee had soaked mine. I also needed shoes. I couldn’t walk through town, looking for a poltergeist, stepping on gravel with pee-stained socks—it’d hurt!

Jenna was pantsless in my room. Her big dancer’s butt pointed at me, covered in elephant covered underpants. Each elephant and its mate had their trunks shaped like a heart. “Don’t you knock?” She stood on her skinny jeans and couldn’t yank the part of the jeans that went over the thigh past her calf. Her butt twerked as she yanked.

“That’s no fun. But I can’t stay to admire the view.”

“Why not?” She gave up on the jeans and just walked around in her elephant underpants.

“It’s a good view and all! But I’ve got a study group.”

“Don’t lie.”

“No, really. I just joined. Really I did!”

“I woulda heard you in the hall.” She knocked on the wall. “These are thin enough I heard your neighbor fart.”

My shoes were hidden by Jenna’s sweatpants. They said “JUICY” on the butt. Truth in advertising. “I joined in the bathroom. I was in the stall, doing my duty, when someone kicked the door in! He forced me to join his Chem study group—I’m not even in Chem! It was a real press-gang.”

“Can’t you stay? It’s my first night here.”

“I wish I could. I wish I could stay to listen to why you’re even here. But I can’t.”

“Fine. Go.” She sprawled out on the bed, covering herself in a blanket. It was old though and had a hole so I could still see her elephants. “Leave your keys. I don’t wanna get locked out.”

Anita had given me a block where the poltergeist might be. She last felt it between East 12^th and East 13^thand then Oskaloosa and Skenk. She could’ve just said it was near McDonalds, under the light cast by the golden arches.

The night was quiet till a Jeep came swerving down the road, the driver with a Big Mac in mouth and fries warming his thighs. It splashed a puddle of muck.

As I jogged across Oskie Street, in the brights of a pick-up, I got nauseous. I suppose my steak quesadilla hadn’t been made with high-quality sirloin. The nausea would pass.

The air was muggy, humid, drinkable. But a slurp came with a serving of gnats and I was watching my figure.

I stepped over a gutter puddle—where from?—and my foot landed in another—had it rained? My soaked pant-leg dragged across the gutter. I took another step and the other foot got suctioned by mud or something—between the streetlights, it was too dark to see what exactly. The mud puckered as I pulled out my shoe. It nearly slipped off but I had the laces double-knotted.

Every step was through mud. I trudged, shuffling my soles on the grass, only to find more after a few paces.

Under the circle of the streetlight’s glare, I saw the mess I’d been sloshing through.

Ooze.

I wiped the burnt-orange goo on the curb. Maybe it was clay, but it was wetter than that, like pudding. I touched it with my fingers and it slid to the silt. It sat on top of it, but didn’t pick up any. Uncontrollably, my fingers bumped one another. I heaved my feet upwards for a few steps. They were so heavy with the ooze on them. My whole body felt drowned in it.

Had I gone two feet to the left, I’d’ve been on the concrete. Had I gone two feet to the right, I’d be on freshly-cut grass. But instead, my instincts had led me to the poltergeist’s trail!

I followed it to D’Arcy’s Irish “pub.” It was a family establishment that closed around three. It didn’t serve beer. But on the weekends, it stayed open till ten and the local bands could warble bad poetry for an audience whose hands were occupied by chicken tenders or else they’d clap. Lyrics like “Cracked open my chest, tore out my heart, replaced it with a ticking bomb! A terrorist’s love!” made bad food taste delicious. Tonight it was empty.

I entered the back doors. They swung open with a push. No lock at all. The kitchen was overturned. Trays of dirty dishes had slid across the floor. Plates were smashed against grease-stained floors. Shredded dish-towels soaked in the overflowing sink. The trap from the garbage disposal had flooded and its content emptied into the sink. Lettuce, cheese, and what looked like vomit floated among the ripped rags. The hose used to blast grime from dishes fired upwards, spraying the ceiling. The door of the dishwasher, after being wrenched from its hinges, sat against the oven. Orange muck was everywhere.

A dragging caught my attention. I left through a swinging door for the eating area. The lights were on. A fork picked at the carpet by an overturned table. The handle was covered in goo. The fork scratched dried gum from the underside of the table as it carried itself over. The fork ripped four lines through paper napkins that had fallen from their canister. Salt poured out its tipped shaker then was blown to dust. Seat cushions were hacked at so the yellow foam was exposed. The fork continued across the carpet till a tine got caught in the carpet fiber. It wrenched for freedom, then fell, now lifeless.

Through the windows at the front, I saw porch lights turn on. The foggy glass made it difficult to see specifics though. I could only pick out shapes and guess at their source. Fire hydrant or trash bin? Bike rack or escaped pig? I couldn’t tell.

A cloth napkin smacked my face, blinding me. It tasted like cinnamon and ketchup.

I pulled it from my face. Through the glass, a hulking figure approached the front door. I grabbed the gooey fork. The chimes rang out. I stabbed at the intruder!

Sven threw me to the ground. “What are you doing here?” he exclaimed, rubbing the four red points on his arm, proof of my bravery.

“Hunting poltergeist.”

“So you planned on stabbing it with a fork?”

“No. I stabbed you with one.”

Ch. 55: Miracles from Minimum Wage

2012-10-26T16:04:00.002-05:00

Seventy-five pounds.

Seventy-five pounds were spread among three rolling sky-blue suitcase with TPE airport tags still on them (Jenna was born in Taiwan). They were filled with, as I soon discovered, seventy pounds of crap.

A curling iron, a straightening iron, shampoo for curly hair, shampoo for straight hair, shampoo for wavy hair, conditioner to go along with each. Face crème that moisturized and crème that fought acne, and another was oil-control, then one was just oil-free. The smallest bottle advertised sun protection but only 10 SPF. Pre-shave lotions, post-shave lotions, lotions that help with shaving. Orange-scented hand lotion, lavender face lotion, vanilla body lotion, and foot lotion with aloe. Notebooks with the first ten pages full of doodles of bloody crucifixes and sunflowers and smileys, then the next 110 college-ruled pages were blank. A cowboy hat with a large belt buckle, a newsboy’s cap, a baseball cap for a football team, a fedora, a fuzzy winter cap with fluffy balls hanging by braids from the ears flaps. Socks for every holiday, but mismatched so turkeys were paired with fireworks. Wadded Christmas socks reeked of foot. Sweatpants and jeans—so many jeans! Acid-washed, pre-worn, pre-torn, stone-washed, skinny jeans, baggy jeans, flare jeans, low-riders. Each pair unrolled and in the middle was a bottle of lotion. A cache of Halloween candy was stuffed in the shoes—though Wal-Mart didn’t start selling those treats for weeks. Three Halloween costumes were identical in design: black, mid-drift, sparkles, faux fur. The only distinguishing feature of each was the headband—cat ears, dog ears, or tiger ears.

I didn’t know it at that moment, but that’s why they were so heavy. And soon it’d be spread amongst my eighty-one-square-foot room.

Jenna swiped the keys from my hands. “Which room you in?”

“Same as last year. The year before that too. But before that I roomed with a kid who was afraid to shower in the dorms. He went home every weekend to shower and on Mondays, he smelled like an angel, but between Monday and Friday, it was hell for my nose.”

“What number?” she snapped.

“217.”

“Gawd, couldn’t you-a just told me that?” She stomped up the stairs, letting the front door swing close behind her.

At my command, Sven held out his arms. I laid one suitcase across, stacked the second, and, before he could take off, piled on the third. He didn’t complain. Even when the top one slid and bashed his nose, he struggled in silence. He could just see over the top.

I opened the door for him to go through and he stumbled over my foot but held onto the bags. As he ventured up the stairs, his spine bent and I set my hand between his shoulder blades to steady him. Though if he fell, I’d be crushed. I walked in front of him after that.

“You really going to let her live with you?” he asked in the lounge. His conversation delayed the end of his trial as he still held the baggage.

“Sure, why not?” I sprawled across the lounge’s sofa and put my feet up on the armrest.

“There isn’t much room.”

I told him, “We’ll share a bed.”

“Oh. OH! You two are—you know, together?” he asked, awkwardly avoiding labels.

“Nope.”

Jenna poked her head out my doorway, scowling. “Where are my bags at?” she demanded. “I need a tissue. Though my nose might as well stay clogged so I can’t smell your room. When was the last time you carpet scrubbed?”

“Never.”

Jenna emptied my trash can then went into the bathroom to wash her hands of the filth she’d gotten by touching the outside of the can.

Sven set her bags on my bed and the springs compressed like a child were on them.

Jenna returned and blocked the door as she rummaged through her bags. There wasn’t room for the three of us to stand in the alley between my desk and my bed. Sven stepped back till he was pressed against the venetian blinds. His shoe crushed a cocoa puff to powder.

“Would you two move?” Jenna growled. “I gotta unpack!” She pulled out a teal bra and set in on the bed by Sven. He couldn’t take his eye off it but made a great effort to find anything more interesting, like the ceiling.

Jenna cleared out my underwear drawer of Shakespeare essays. She tossed them in the litter bin. Then she stuck her jeans in the underwear drawer—girls are crazy like that. As my clothes were under the bed, in the dirty laundry tub, or hanging from the door of the armoire, the drawers were empty. Still, there wasn’t enough room for all of hers and she opened the armoire to find three hangers. “Don’tcha have hangers? That’s why your clothes are always wrinkly.” She tossed my silk pants, tailored button-up shirt, and cashmere sweater—funeral clothes—to Sven who caught them with his face. Then she hung two pairs of jeans on a plastic hanger. It snapped in the middle and her pants fell off. She shrieked and slammed the doors.

Meanwhile, I lounged in rocking chair every dorm room had.

Sven stood in his corner, still pressed against the blinds. “I should go,” he said.

“Finally,” I scoffed.

He grabbed his gym bag and stepped over Jenna’s row of high heels. Jenna tried passing him but she went left and he went right which, since they were facing opposite directions, was the same way. They juked back and forth trying to pass each other but they were like a mirror image. Finally Jenna stormed out of the room and into the bathroom.

“Is she mad at me?” Sven asked. “I don’t even know her name! How could I make her mad? Should I have introduced myself?”

“She’s not mad. She’s just like this. See ya later.”

Sven left and I guarded the bathroom door with my arms folded and a stern look. The lights of the hall were on but dim. It was too dark to see the puke stains on the carpet, even below the light. Even the modern world was a dark place when the sun went down.

Then Anita appeared, floating through the ceiling and hovering over a trash can full of paper towels. “Why are you standing in front of the bathroom?” she asked.

“I’m the gatekeeper. You shall not pass!” I bellowed. I leaned against the wall and my head knocked the men’s restroom sign from its nail. Rather than replacing it, I took my neighbor’s room number—also hanging from a nail—and switched the two signs. Now the bathroom was room 215 and Calvin Pickard lived in the men’s restroom. “You have another job for me? Please no more training. Am I exorcising another ghost? Because I’m pretty sure I’ve done enough work for tonight. I’ve got homework you know.”

“You haven’t purged anyone yet. That giant boy took care of Stan.” She sat with her legs crossed on the edge of the trash can. Cola syrup stained the bag below her butt but it didn’t stain her skirt.

“I would’ve done it,” I said. “Besides, I had to fight for my life. The big lug thought I was a ghost! Apparently we look similar. He needs ghost-glasses. Real stupid-looking ones too.”

The bathroom door swung open and Jenna ran into me.

Anita watched the scene unfold from between us.

“UGH! Outta the way, Tom. Were you just waiting for me outside the toilet? You know how creepy that is?”

“It’s TK. And I really had to go! What took you so long anyway? Take a shower or a shhhh--something?”

“No. Use a different bathroom. I don’t want you stinking up mine.”

“It’s a communal bathroom. Eight guys use it. I don’t care about the stink either.”

“Yeah, well, you’re out of air freshener. That’s why it stinks in there. Use another bathroom. I don’t want you bringing the stink back to our room. It’ll get on your clothes and I don’t want you bringing it back. I held my breath the whole time I was in there. It was horrible.” Jenna stomped back to room 217.

I got the hint and used the other bathroom to continue my discussion with Anita. I didn’t want to soil Jenna’s girliness—I had to sleep with her after all.

The other bathroom was identical to ours, but mirrored. It was weird. I could navigate the other in a power outage without spraying the toilet seat, but this bathroom felt off. The grime between the tiles seemed wrong too.

I bashed open the two stalls. No one was in either.

“You two are living together now?” Anita asked. “I’ve been in your room. There’s not enough for you and ghost. How will she live there with you and that dog?”

I sat by the sink. It was wet and soaked through to my butt. “Ah shoot! I forgot to get the pup from my dad’s.” I leaned on the counter, staring into myself: I needed a shave. Anita didn’t reflect in the mirror. I couldn’t see her smock or blonde hair. She was probably flicking me off. “We’ll figure something out. So what do you need?” My voice echoed off the broken tiles on the walls.

“You.” She circled around me to replace my reflection with her face. I was looking her right in the glasses. “A poltergeist is loose.” The words died in the shitty air. “It’s too early to let you handle this alone but there’s no other choice.”

“Can’t you handle it?” I asked.

“No.”

Ch. 54: A Room of Tacos, Giants, Germans

2012-10-19T18:00:00.000-05:00

Sven and I tried burying the hatchet with Mexican food. Tacos and quesadillas didn’t cover the weapon but we found by eating, our mouths were too full to feud. Perhaps he’d take a bite into the ground beef and end up with a slit in his mouth where he got hatchet instead of taco, but it never happened.

There seemed to be progress till he reached for cinnamon twists that he thought were communal but were actually mine. I smacked his hand while holding a crunchy taco and some lettuce fell out. If it had been cheese, I would’ve leaped from the bed to sock him in the jaw. He was lucky it was lettuce.

TGG knocked and entered.

I had savored my food, sampling the crunchy taco then clamping down onto the soft taco, then trying out the cheesy potato burrito before starting on the steak quesadilla and ending with tortilla-wrapped fried chicken. But Sven, though he had bought twice as much as me and probably more would’ve bought more had he not been embarrassed, was nearly done with his feast. He had finished his hard shell tacos and was on his last soft shell. He had the whole thing left and even with his gigantic mouth, he would’ve needed five bites to eat it comfortably.

But TGG politely asked, “What are you guys eating?” She looked to Sven.

He stuffed the whole taco in his mouth.

“Did you see that? It was like he was afraid you’d ask him for a bite,” I said and pushed my cinnamon twists her way.

“I already ate.”

She smiled and looked to me and I kept eating. Sven’s jaw could only rise and sink a few millimeters per chew so he kept that up till the mouthful was soggy enough to squeeze down his esophagus. He stared at the crumbs of his food. He ate them one by one, slowly, carefully, killing time between peeks at TGG who always caught his eyes and smiled. She was very polite but he was afraid just the same. They both looked to me when they accidentally made eye contact.

“Apparently he’s not going to make introductions,” she finally said when the awkwardness stifled the sounds of the room except my munching.

I ate a cinnamon twist. “This is Seventeen, this is Tiny German Girl. Just use her initials though; otherwise it’s a mouthful. Not that you’d have a problem with that.” Crumbs flew from my mouth to Sven’s wrappers.

He wadded up everything and stuffed it in the bag. Then he got up, mumbled something like “Excuse me” to TGG and set his trash in the bin.

“I should go,” she said. “Would you text me later or visit or something? It’s not dire, but I need to talk to you.”

“About what?”

She turned to Sven, who compared to her was a giant. Actually compared to me he was a giant. Compared to her he was the magic beanstalk the giant lived at the top of. “No offense, but it’s personal and I don’t even know your real name.”

“It’s Sven. Sven Stein. Kind of sounds like seventeen. I guess. I don’t hear it.”

“It was nice to meet you, Sven.”

“It’s Seventeen,” I corrected her.

“TK, text me?”

“Yeah, sure.”

She left and Sven watched her shut the door. He counted beneath her breath and listened carefully as her footsteps disappeared down the hall. “I wasn’t afraid she’d ask for a bite!” he exclaimed only after she was far enough to not hear him. “I didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t know her! I figured you’d talk.”

I pulled out my phone to text her, “Hey, so you needed to talk to me?” She replied “……” I said to Sven, “What are you getting antsy about? Got a crush on her or something?”

“I don’t even know her!”

“But she’s cute, right? That’s all you need for a crush.”

“Well, yeah, she is. But—”

“So you’ve got a crush? Too bad. She’s taken.”

“I don’t have a crush on her!”

I finished my tacos then sucked flavor from my fingers, went on to my burrito and licked the blood-juice trickling down my wrist, and downed the last piece of chicken that had fallen from its wrap. I was too full for the cinnamon twists and saw Sven eying them. So I threw in the trash.

He didn’t say anything about the wasted food. “So she’s like your girl?”

“No. Her boyfriend’s an aboriginal dude. He lives off termites and guanas. He’s a jackass. We’ve never met, but I’m sure he is.”

“Sorry,” he mumbled.

“He’s not my boyfriend. You should text her and tell her you’re sorry her boyfriend’s a jackass. Lemme see your phone—I’ll do it for you.” I scrounged for his phone in his gym bag—he had gone to KAC to get it; not to attack TGG. I tossed his boxer-briefs at him.

“Don’t text her! Get out of my bag!” He ripped it away from me. “So her boyfriend’s in Australia? And she comes to you for help since he’s not around?”

“I don’t know. I guess.”

A great THUMP! startled us. The window shook and I opened the blinds. The lock on the pulley was broken so I tied the draw-string to my bed so the blinds wouldn’t slide down.

Outside, Jenna yanked at one of her flip-flops while the other sat in the pea-gravel h below my window.

I cranked the window until it opened. “Are you declaring war on my window? We will retaliate with animal crackers and soda cans—possibly full ones!” I yelled down.

“Shut up and lemme in!” she shrieked. Next to her were three rolling suitcases and a purse large enough for a litter of Shih Tzu. “I’m moving in.”

I grabbed my key and ID card from the desk.

Sven looked at me. “Is your life always like this?”

“Sometimes there are ghosts. When people don’t shoot them that is.”

He smiled, taking my slight as a joke. “I mean, are you always helping out these girls?”

“Yeah, it’s real annoying being a hero. Now let’s go. You’re hauling those suitcases. I’ll even let you carry the purse. It matches your eyes after all.” I walked out of the room. I got the cinnamon twists from the garbage. “Here. Payment for being a bell boy.”

Sven slammed the door behind him. Whether it was a sign of poor control or rage, I don’t know.

Ch. 53: A Lemon Twist for Friendship

2012-10-12T18:55:00.001-05:00

Graham, where TGG lived, was at the far end of campus across from Kuyper Athletic Complex—KAC (pronounced; not spelled). Ten street lights stretched across the front and many more surrounded it. KAC was never dark. You could always read the “Ole Dan + Lil Ann” etched into the brick near the door. You could also pick out the penis-drawing scratched on the back door. It had been painted over many times since the 70s but by the end of the year, it was always back, visible. But only students used that door, never parents. Still, every April emails were sent out, warning students of vandalism on school property, especially KAC. The emails had a nickname among the students: the penis update.

The street lights shone on a row of parking spots, full of pick-ups and VW Bugs. The greatest crop of athlete this school had ever produced couldn’t heft their gym bags the five blocks from Scholte at one end of campus to KAC at the other end, so athletic bums drove. But they were here to practice. Matches would be later this week. Tuesday was tennis; Friday was football. The alliteration helped students remember the sports schedule.

A fun-sized girl got out of her VW with a duffle hanging on her shoulder. It threw off her balance and she leaned with it. The strap was long and the bottom of the bag scuffed the concrete.

A beast of a boy, still puny compared to Sven but big nonetheless, had his gym clothes stuffed in a book bag. He hoisted it from the bed of his pick-up and slung it over one shoulder. He had to hold the strap or else it’d slip off. Around his hairy ankles were ten-pound weights. He exaggerated the height of each step so his thigh slapped his beer gut. It must’ve been a good workout, but his features were soft regardless. His jawline was hidden under flab. His bicep was mush that jiggled even while contracted.

There were others around, loitering after their workout, waiting for those slow to dress. Three guys gathered around a tanned and toned girl who had just finished a jog on the treadmill; the guys still reeked of cologne. They chatted her up to stall their own treadmill-torture.

Sven walked among these people, under the streetlight. For all I knew, he was headed for Graham to take care of a budding psychic like TGG, lest she go out of control and bend a spoon.

So I tackled Sven.

He fell because he wasn’t expecting it. I sat on his back.

People stared. I smiled at them and winked at a girl who was barely contained by a yellow sports bra and blue terrycloth shorts.

He whispered as forcefully as someone can whisper, “Get off me! People are watching.”

“I can’t have you shooting her. You already shot Stan.”

He did a push-up. “ I'm headed to the gym! And it was a friggin’ ghost!” I fell off. “And who are you talking about? You got a ghost girlfriend or something?” He kept his eyes down as he dusted himself off and flattened his hair. It hadn’t been messy.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” I informed him. “Also she’s not a ghost. But I don’t want you shooting her because you think she’s out of control. She’s a nice girl.”

“She a psychic?” he asked, forgetting to whisper.

I lied, “No.” I stared in the opposite direction of her dorm so as not to lead Sven to her. “But we both know how keen your senses are. You couldn’t spot Anita and you thought I was a ghost. Next you’ll be shooting the weatherman for getting the forecast right.”

He looked around and shook his head violently in protest. “I did nothing like that!” He seemed to be pleading to the bystanders, who stepped around us as though it were perfectly normal I had tackled him. Maybe they thought we were in a frat. That’d explain it well enough. “Besides, I can’t pick her out from this distance. She’s either too weak or over in Scholte.” He stepped in closer. “But if she becomes a problem, or if you become a problem, I won’t hesitate to end you.”

His heels were over the curb. I pinched his nipples and shoved. The giant toppled over. People stared again at the racket.

“I was told maybe I ought to be nicer to you.” I offered him a hand. “You were only doing your job when you killed Stan. And I had been about to do the same. So maybe I shouldn’t cast you as a villain.”

He took my hand but I was of no help pulling him up as he weighed too much. A BMW from the 90s pulled into the parking spot that Sven had just been lying in. I shoved him onto the hood of the car. “But keep threatening me and I’ll make your nose bleed again.”

“Stop shoving me. Do you want to fight again? In public?”

The driver honked and threw open his door.

“Sorry! I tripped,” Sven said. He ran his hand over the hood. “There’s no dent or anything. Sorry about that.”

The driver screamed at him, using ‘Fuck’ as three different parts of speech in a single sentence. “How can you fuck up my BMW and just fucking say you’re sorry, you stupid fuck? See that dent in the bumper? You fucking did that!”

“How’d you know that was there?” I asked. I stuck a pinky in my ear to get some gunk out. “You glanced at the hood but this Neanderthal’s been blocking your view of the bumper. Plus there’s blood on the bumper like you hit a pig or something. Just tell Daddy and he’ll get your lemon buffed.”

“What the fuck are you going on about? Was I fucking talking to you?” he turned his rage towards me and I stepped back to avoid the spit flying from his lips.

“You were yelling. It’s not exactly a private conversation when you yell.”

People were staring again.

Now, the driver of the BMW with the license plate “DEDSXE1” was an athlete. Scrawny and stupid, but an athlete the same—I saw his Adidas bag in the passenger seat; however, I hadn’t done a push-up since last month. His temples pulsed. The skin was tight on his forehead and neck and I saw his trachea move as he swallowed spit. His shirt was rolled up at the sleeves and his forearms were ribbed. His gnarled knuckles were scarred from punching drywall and lockers in high school. So when he cocked his fist back like he was about to clout me, I was sure I’d get a concussion.

But Sven sucker-punched him: a straight to his ear. The force of it was enough to crack a brick in two. The guy fell.

I watched for his soul to rise from his mouth, but then I thought he might not have one. Don’t worry; he got to his feet and wobbled toward the front door. He realized he had forgotten his bag, but looked back at me and Sven, then limped inside KAC to exercise in jeans and a button-up.

“I could’ve handled it,” I muttered.

“It was instinct. Didn’t mean to,” Sven said.

The exercise-enthusiasts prattling outside KAC either went inside or got in their cars and drove two blocks to their dorms. The scene Sven and I had made had made the air tense. No one wanted to breathe in tense air.

“So, when’d you notice all that about the bumper? I didn’t even know it was dented till he said something,” Sven said, looking at it for the first time.

“I made it all up.”

“Seriously?”

“No. I just notice weird stuff.”

He scoffed and scowled. “Why’d you lie?”

“It’s fun. But seriously, thanks for hitting that guy.”

He insisted, “It was instinct.”

“See? Isn’t lying fun?”

Ch. 52: The Nord Among Dutch

2012-10-05T19:32:00.002-05:00

Sven took Franklin through the square, past Ulrich’s Meat Market and Jaarsma Bakery. The buildings were brick, as the square was required to appear Dutch. The roof of Jaarsma was not pitched or flat; it was stair-stepped. Both sides went up then inward, up then inward, up then inward, till the final inwards met. I was never quite sure how it looked from above, as I didn’t think of to look while I was a ghost. Below the final step were Dutch shutters, painted red and white. The closed shutters didn’t cover a window. They were tacked up for decoration.

Sven stopped so I did too. Then he crossed Broadway which was the dividing line between commercial businesses and residential areas. Churches could be built wherever. The town had no restrictions on where those could be built, but there seemed to be legislation that made sure a church was visible from every inch of the town.

Past Broadway, the houses were initially in the style of Dutch Colonial. Many were brick. The roofs were gambrel, which meant they had two pitches—the steep pitch that went up to the top of the second story, then a more gradual slope came to a point on a half-story. From the side, the roof had the shape of a bell. Windows jutted out from the roof, which must’ve been a pain to shingle. The eaves of the roof flared outward. The chimney was off-center but the front door was dead-center. They had no porches.

As we got farther into the neighborhood, the Dutch architecture trailed off. First, the lazy construction crew put a stop to the gambrel roof. Then the main entrance was slightly off-center, and the farther into the subdivision you went, the farther off-center the front door was. Then the eaves stopped flaring. And finally porches appeared. A spattering of single-story ranch homes ended the streets.

I followed Sven amongst the Dutch Colonials, past Stan’s house, through the park where I had buried Jack earlier that day. Anita followed me but while Sven had noticed me and stopped on occasion to glare, he hadn’t mentioned her. I thought back to my difficulty seeing Stan from a distance and thought maybe it was the same thing.

“His arms don’t swing,” she said after watching for a block. “Why don’t his arms swing?”

“They’re too heavy. Full of steroids and creatine,” I muttered. “Who is this freak? He nearly shot me! Also he killed Stan.”

She floated down between me and Sven. She held up a hand forbidding me to pass. “Why’s that got you so bothered? You were about to do the same.”

I looked away. A squirrel barreled down a red maple and charged another squirrel. They flipped across the lawn; their tails tangled, then they darted for separate trees and all was forgotten. I tried to spot one among the branches—if I had, he probably would’ve been loading up on acorns to pelt the other. It’s what I’d do with Sven.

“You were about to, weren’t you?” she asked. “It’s your job now and failure to do so will result in—”

“A deadly case of chicken pox, I know. I was going to. But this giant didn’t even know Stan. He just shot him without knowing him. If you’re going to shoot someone, you should know him. At least know that he’s got a kid. And maybe know where that kid’s headed to college.”

Sven turned on West Third Street, toward campus. He passed the professors’ huts and foreign language assistant rental properties. They were single-story houses that used to be where Roe, the new psych and socio building is, but a few years ago they loaded the houses onto flatbeds and moved them over here. They had to demolish the houses that were already there so there’d be room for the houses from elsewhere. It was a big to-do. I remember protesting it because workers had been banging away at 6 AM and I couldn’t sleep through the rhythmic racket.

I power-walked through Anita till I was on West Third. I didn’t want to lose sight of Sven, and so long as I didn’t have a house between us, the giant was pretty easy to spot. Just now I spotted his arms on either side of an oak. He was nearly as broad as the oak too so there wasn’t much difference except in his skin color. For all I knew, his trunk had turned into a tree trunk but his arms weren’t yet woody.

“TK,” Anita warned. She popped up from the sidewalk. “You can’t get to know every spirit you exorcise. You should be purging a spirit per night. Are you going to have a chat with all before you give them the axe?”

I stepped over her head. “I might ask their name and if they prefer puppies or piglets. Is that so bad?”

Anita rose from the pavement. She floated, without moving her legs, in front of me. “That’ll be worse than death.”

Sven tripped on a crack in the sidewalk. Or maybe he had his own grim reaper bugging him. Who knows? His shoes scuffed the concrete and it carried for a whole block. If nothing else, I could track him by his inability to lift his massive feet.

“Think about it like putting down a sickly dog. You don’t want to do it, but it’s one of those necessary evils. Do you think you can handle it emotionally to get attached to every pup just before it dies?”

I stopped under the streetlight. “It’s better than dying alone.” My shadow split, stretching down West Third and Franklin. “But what would you know about that? You’re always alone. Maybe that’s why you pal around with me when possible—don’t you pretend it’s to scold me.” I continued down West Third, after Sven. One of my shadows disappeared, but the one in front of me stretched all the way to the gritty driveway with recycling bins sitting at the corner, and as I got farther from the light, the shadow stretched farther till it was impossible to separate from the darkness of night.

Anita didn’t follow me past the corner. Maybe I had said too much.

But Sven came to the four-way stop at West Third and Independence. He turned right, like he was headed toward TGG’s dorm. With his earlier talk of taking out out-of-control psychics and with TGG’s budding awareness of the otherworld, was he headed for her? Was she the next target of his finger-gun?

Ch. 51: Tattling in the Alley

2012-09-28T10:49:00.001-05:00

A sedan screeched towards a traffic light, the tires skidding till the brakes locked. The car stopped on the crosswalk. A Dick Van Dyke moving truck stared down the car, waiting before continuing its wide turn in the narrow village streets. The engine popped. Slowly the wheels crawled across the cobblestone. The two drivers eyed each other with awkward smiles while headlights glared.

But that seemed distant in the alley. I coughed to break the silence between this giant and me.

He hunched over to get a better look at me. He scowled as he scrutinized me. I felt like a potential-husband on Thomas More’s Utopia, except I had on clothes—clothes that reeked of intestinal juice. “You’re human?” he asked.

I scurried backwards so the giant wouldn’t squash me. “Nope, just a squirrel. We’re masters of disguise.”

“You don’t look human.” He still had a finger pointed at me, though he was out of bullets for that laser.

“Is it my bushy tail?”

He lowered his finger-gun. “You psychics all give off different colors. Sometimes the color is close to a ghost’s. Can’t blame me for mistaking you.”

“Uh ooo a buh, huh?” I mumbled trying to comprehend what he was talking about. I think my mumblings made more sense than him. Psychics, colors, I was just a squirrel! How was I to understand any of this? “You’re nuts. Not the good kind of nuts either. Someone should confiscate that finger from you before you assassinate the Dean. I’ll get my pruning shears to clip you. Actually let’s just take all ten of your fingers and maybe a couple toes for good measure.”

“What’d you attack me for? I might have to report you now.” The giant skulked towards the alley entrance. “But I’ll let you off with a warning.”

“YOU attacked ME! And you killed Stan!” I got to my feet and rushed the guy, but as I got closer and as his shadow covered me and his face became just a silhouette, I stopped. I backed up till I could see up his nose—the hairs were encased in blood but otherwise trimmed neatly.

“Who? My gun’s harmless to humans. Even psychics will just pass out from it.” He looked at his finger then picked at dirt under the nail. The muzzle needed to be clean so it didn’t rust, I guess.

“Stan was a ghost! He went up in a fog and that’s because of you and your stubby finger.”

He smoothed the stubble on his chin but hairs pointed astray. He kept flattening them. “You’re mad because I ‘killed’ a ghost? It was dead already. How do I kill something that’s dead already?”

“With that sausage-finger of yours!” I had stooped to name calling because, even if I couldn’t hurt him physically, I might be able to hurt his feelings. Even murderous giants with finger-lasers had feelings.

I think it worked because he pointed at my nose. “Calm down or you’ll become a threat then I’ll have to report you.”

“Don’t stick your grubby hand in my face. It smells like you’ve been sucking on it.” I smacked it but his aim was too firm to shake. So I pinched him and he flinched. “I know you’re out of bullets. I guess you got a little trigger happy and forgot to aim.”

That trigger-finger twitched but nothing came out. “Must be because of you,” he muttered. “Who trained you like this?”

“I’m a self-taught genius,” I proclaimed, thumping my chest then rubbing the sore spot where his hand was imprinted. “ANIIIIIIITA!” I screeched, right in his face so spittle shot into his eyes. I had better aim than he did. “Who’s this joker? How’s he got powers like me? Was he dead too? Is he another one of your sex slaves?”

“I’m not a stinkin’ ghost!” he yelled. He poked my nose till I lost my balance.

I grabbed his arm for support, and he let me, but when my panic over falling subsided, I let go and let myself fall on a pebble. It hurt but I’d rather be in pain than accept his help.

“Who are you yelling for? Is this Anita-lady your mentor?”

“Mentor and lover. Some say that crosses a line since she’s an authority figure but we’re consenting adults. And she’s wild in bed. ANITA! I’m sure you’re listening so if you don’t want me slandering you anymore, you better appear!” The echo leapt from George’s brick to Ver Dught’s siding till it skimmed the shingles of the insurance agency’s pitched roof.

“I don’t sense anyone around.” He didn’t bother looking. How come everyone else had this sixth sense and I was stuck using my eyes? “But don’t bother tattling. It was your fault you almost got shot.”

“I’ll tattle if I want,” I muttered. “ANITA!” I shrieked once more. “I don’t care whose fault it was—but it was definitely yours so I’m tattling. Give me your name so I know who I’m tattling on.”

“Sven Stein, but I’m telling you: it was your fault. If they show, I’m telling them it was you!”

I eyed him. I guess he looked like a Sven since Nords were known for their Beowulf-like stature. “Kind of sounds like seventeen. That’s what I’ll call you. ANITA! Seventeen here has been selling drugs to kids and he plans on kidnapping goslings from the pond! He also stole licorice from the Kum-n-Go! ANITA! He called you fat!” I shouted to catch her attention.

“Would you stop yelling? Someone’s going to hear you.”

“So long as it’s Anita, I don’t care.” I turned around in the alley hoping to spy a hint of her ghostly figure but she was being obstinate. I rang the Dumpster to flush her out but only old soda leaked out. I tossed out a few bags of trash, trying to reveal her hiding place. It just soiled my palms with smelly yuck. I smooshed my palms together then had difficulty pulling them apart—threads of sticky filth stretched from hand to hand.

Sven watched me, glancing toward the alley entrance as if he were ready to leave but couldn’t pull himself from my spectacle. There was a question burning inside him. “Is she really your lover, too?”

I wiped my hands on the giant’s back. “Yeah.”

“Don’t tell him that,” Anita snapped, floating above us.

He cringed in disbelief and shoved me. “Don’t touch me with your Dumpster-hands! She’s obviously not coming,” Sven said and lumbered from the alley.

I followed, looking from him to Anita. Clearly his senses weren’t as keen as he thought.

Ch. 50: This Time, It Started on My Back

2012-09-21T11:41:00.004-05:00

In the alley between George’s Pizzeria and the Ver Dught Insurance Agency, the shadows retreated back into the alley as headlights approached. But as the mini-van passed, shadows snapped to their original positions. Cars ran over rocks which popped over to the gutter. A water bottle crinkled beneath a pick-up truck. A sedan rolled towards a stop sign and its tires, peppered with grit, grated the pavement.

But in the alley the roads were muted. We were in a separate world. The rusted Dumpster was too full and neon orange bags sat on the lid. A pizza box lay against the siding of the Ver Dught insurance agency. Their tan, house-like structure clashed with the brick of George’s. But no one complained. They faced different streets. George’s was on Washington and Ver Dught was on Franklin. Only their backs were ever seen together and only by employees taking out the trash. So no one complained.

But apparently school girls ventured here too. There were chalk drawings on the concrete: yellow and blue butterflies, green flowers with an orange stem, pink man-eating dinosaurs, all the usual things sever-year-old girls draw. They had forgotten their tub of Crayola chalk. The sticks were thick and sharpened from use. A few were left out, sprawled across the alley, pointing every which way and having rolled towards the walls or cracks in the concrete where they stopped and were left, forgotten, as though the girls had been chased away suddenly, but only after signing their names—the scribbles were hard to read.

My hands were still at my sides, glowing.

Then a flash shot through the shadows of the alley. It pierced Stan through both shoulders. The bright line was visible for a millionth of a second then the alley cut to black. And Stan was gone.

I whipped around to find the source but saw only a dead-end with the Dumpster and a puddle of puke. So I looked to the other end and it appeared to be sealed off too till the wall strode forward. A blue dot flickered as it rose to eye-level. I couldn’t see the source behind it—they were just a silhouette.

Instinct made me tremble like the bulb. I backed up till I bumped the Dumpster. I slid in the puddle of puke which soaked my shirt in a rank smell and chunks of pork were smooshed under my back.

But that might’ve saved me because at that moment another line shot out and disappeared. Some ghost-hating psycho had developed a ghost-killing laser and now they pointed it at me! But I was no ghost.

He stepped into the light above George’s backdoor. His hair was blonde but appeared orange under the incandescent light. He patted the buzz-cut to flatten it but the bristle stuck back up. Maybe it was a popped pimple scabbed over, but something that looked like chocolate was in his eyebrow. His block-shaped head was enormous. His shoulders were broad but slumped. As he walked his arms didn’t swing. Veins snaked through his forearms which were visible because he wore a candy-cane, horizontally-striped tank top. And he wore runner’s shorts—those real short ones that go about halfway down the thigh; the kind pedophile coaches make you wear if you’re on the middle school track team. “Two tonight?” the hulk asked himself. “I ought to get praise for this.”

But his ridiculous outfit didn’t kill my anger! He had killed Stan, and now he was after me. I rose from the puke. I charged him.

He pointed a finger at me and it glowed.

Silt under foot made me skid and my legs split in opposite directions so that my crotch was near the concrete, aching. The laser cut the air just above my head—it might’ve trimmed a few hairs. I continued the charge and gave him my best uppercut to the chin.

Well, that’s where it was aimed but I couldn’t reach. Fully extended, my fist only made it to his Adam’s apple. Luckily even a weak strike to that is enough to stagger a guy.

He pointed a finger at me. His thumb was perpendicular. It was like a finger-gun. The index lit up. He was about to fire. His middle finger twitched as though it were the trigger being pulled. But I was too close and he was off balance. The laser shot over my shoulder.

I wanted that giant in pain. So I threw my other hand at his body, which was chin-level for me. I might as well hit the leather of a punching bag. His body was firm. My fist bounced back.

But my assault surprised him; he stepped backwards into the tub of chalk; this surprised him even more; he couldn’t balance; he fell. His hand stretched to the side to find a ledge for support but his palm got scraped by the brick of George’s.

I pounced. My knee slammed his belly—though it didn’t sink under my weight. But my fists, still glowing since before Stan’s second-death, lit my way in the dark alley as they flew from his cheeks to mine as I clobbered his nose bloody.

He flailed his foot and the chalk tub flew off, losing its contents along the way which clattered to the ground and each stick broke in half and many dotted the concrete with colors. He slapped my chest and I flew to the tub. This giant had the strength to toss me as far as a piece of plastic.

I was on my back now.

He twisted his shirt around to wipe the gravel from the back of it. He patted dust from his hair then held it flat only to move his hand and have it spring back up. Ignoring the bloody nose, he lumbered towards me. Each step dragged across the pavement. The echo died and the silence between steps was frightening; I waited for the next before I exhaled. Blood dribbled across his lips and dripped from chin to hairy knee. Red streaked his stubble. His toe hit a rock; it bounced past me and pinged off a Pepsi can. He stepped on a drip of blood. When he lifted his shoe, the droplet was stamped with his sole print. A stick of chalk under foot scratched the concrete, leaving a lime tally. His size 17 running shoes flattened the weeds growing from a crack.

He pointed a finger at me. His middle finger pulled the trigger.

But nothing came out.

Still, he was a foot taller than me and had enough thickness to appear stocky. I was shorter but lanky. Even without his finger-lasers, I had no chance of winning this fight. It’d end in my demise. I’d be the only man who died twice in a week. The creases of his palm were imprinted on my chest from when he slapped me.

“I’ve never had a ghost bruise me,” he muttered, wiping blood from his chin, which really just smeared it on his neck. “What the hell are you?”

“An English major,” I squeaked.

Ch. 49: For Thee

2012-09-07T11:42:00.003-05:00

Beneath the oaks and maples of the park, snaked a sidewalk. It didn’t run perfectly square. There were curves as it bent around pawpaws and tulip-beds. I paced the path, waiting for Stan. I could see his house and the window to his wife’s bedroom from the path. I kept an eye out for him as I sweated out my anxieties. I must’ve made twenty laps around the park waiting for him to show up, and as each lap was the same as a lap around the track, I must’ve gone five miles before Anita appeared.

“What are you waiting for?” she barked. “Don’t be nervous. Go get him.”

“How am I supposed to get him if he’s not there?” I leaned against a streetlamp. “I’m new to this so I can’t find ghosts any easier than I can find the Queen of England.”

“He’s right there!” She shoved me across the street and I tripped on the gutter. “See?”

As I stepped onto the driveway of his neighbor two houses away, I spotted Stan at his window. I walked back to the previous driveway, and looked but Stan was gone. Halfway between the two driveways, I couldn’t see Stan, but another few squares of concrete forward and I could! I found the exact range at which I could see Stan. One step back and he disappeared. I looked for Anita to explain this but she was gone—torturing kittens or something.

“Well howdy, TK,” Stan said as I continued toward him. “What’ve you been doing in the park all afternoon? I waved but you must’ve missed it.” He peeked into his house’s window with his face so close to the glass that his nose poked through.

“I had a funeral.”

“In the park?” He turned and leaned against the mellow yellow siding.

“It was for a rabbit.”

“Sorry about your pet.” I followed him around the side of the house. There was a fence but enough boards were missing that I could pass through almost as easily as he could. “We had a dog that died about a year ago—Wiggles. He was one of those curly, white dogs. A bichon. Carol loved him and cried more for him than for me. Can’t blame her though. That dog could’ve cheered up Sylvia Plath. He was always smiling with his tongue hanging out.”

I lifted a plank that had fallen from the fence and laid it in the grass so the nails were sticking the grass instead of into the air. I didn’t want anyone stepping on them. “It was my friend’s.”

“What was its name?”

“Jack. Jack the rabbit.”

“I like it.” He chuckled. “But something tells me that sour face isn’t over a dead pet.”

The day’s breeze had died already. It was only in the 70s but muggy so it felt like the midst of summer. The sky was clear. The children in the park enjoyed the day. They were young.

“Is it finally time?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Gosh, I don’t know why I thought I could make it to graduation. I always promised I would be there for big events since Linda complained that I was gone so often. But I guess I won’t make that one.”

“Sorry.”

“Me too. But ghosts can’t be floating around for eternity, right? That’s not good for anyone.” He sat in a lawn chair with woven nylon making up the seat. But there was a hole. That didn’t bother Stan.

I got my hand glowing and got myself ready to smack him. I had to do it quick or I’d chicken out.

But as I cocked my hand back, he threw up his hands and yelled, “Wait! Lemme say a quick goodbye to Carol. She’s right inside doing her homework. I was watching her do it as you came up.”

He floated in. His daughter had a belly like her mama’s but her face was pretty. In all the school pictures, you wouldn’t have known she was pudgy. She was only thirteen so maybe once she hit a growth spurt that weight would even out. She was pale with freckles. Her hair was like cherry wood. She had a kid nose.

I stayed outside and spied on them through the sliding glass doors. She could’ve seen me if only she’d look but people never look outside.

I heard Stan through the glass as if it weren’t there. “I love you, honey,” he said. “Maybe I wasn’t great at showing it, but who is? I got you that A in Biology, didn’t I? You know I’m no scientist. But maybe you want to be so I helped how I could. And on that miniature golf project! You did great. I helped more than I needed. I just wanted to be involved. You could’ve done it better. Heck, without me you’d’ve gotten an A plus. But thank you for asking me to help. Sorry I couldn’t stick around any longer. But mind your mother and study hard and you’ll get into Notre Dame. It’s been our dream for you to go there since you were littler than an inchworm. Just hang on a few more years.”

He floated to the backyard and sat in the lawn chair with the ripped seat. “Ready,” he said.

Once again, I prepared myself to smack him. It was a little easier this time. I had worked through my personal hang ups on the matter and was cold and calculating.

“WAIT!” he screeched. “Can’t I see my wife first? She’s at work.”

He floated above the pitched rooftops to the hospital. He had a direct route through the air and I had to navigate the sidewalks and wait for traffic signals. Still, he only beat me to the parking lot by a minute. He went in and found his enormous wife and stayed with her while she devoured a whole chicken for lunch. “You were always beautiful,” he said, though she had fried chicken skin in her crimped hair. “Take good care of Carol. Don’t force a curfew on her but make sure she comes home. Tell her I love. Tell her I’ll always be watching. I don’t care if it’s a lie—tell her anyway. Make sure she gets into Notre Dame too. We worked so hard for it already.”

As he spewed his guts to the cow of his dreams, she licked the grease from her plate. Then bought potato chips from the vending machine.

We met again behind the hospital where the ambulances unloaded their passengers. But our town needed paramedics about once a week on a bad week, and usually it was for old folks. So it was empty. We were alone.

“I’m really ready this time,” he said.

So my hand glowed and I went ahead with no hesitation.

But I stopped when he yelled, “Not yet! I want to visit my favorite restaurant. Is that okay? They probably put me here with their low prices and food covered in delicious salt. I just miss tasting it. I want to remember the taste. Maybe going there will help.”

We went to George’s pizzeria, a block over from Jaarsma on the square where I had been hit by the car. George’s was a family-owned restaurant with an aisle and booths on either side of it. When the college had family days, parents packed the booths with their freshmen. As the hostess led new customers to their tables, the aisle jammed as another family got up to leave while a server brought a third family their food. Whenever dishes spilled, people clapped unless dishes were spilled on customers. All the employees were high school girls; I had never seen a guy serving or hosting. Maybe they were in back. George’s undercooked their steak but if you sent it back, they burnt it. They served potato chips instead of fries. I had never tried their pizza or seen anyone order it in the restaurant. They delivered but the delivery girls walked it to the customer so the meal sometimes got cold when it reached the front door. After a meal, everyone got an ice cream cone as they walked out the door. It was free. I used to eat there with my family.

“I just wanted to see it one last time. I spent a lot of lunch breaks in here. Rainy days too. We couldn’t work in the rain but we stayed on the clock in case the sun came out.”

Stan and I went to the alley behind George’s. By now the sun had dimmed. It was sinking into the corn but we couldn’t see it because the buildings blocked our view. Shadows dimmed the alley. Street lights were already on. Rush hour was over. People were home or in George’s: wherever got them off the street.

“I’ll do this all night. Whenever you’re ready.”

“Thank you but no. I put it off long enough. I’m sorry for that but you gotta understand—I don’t want to die. I mean, I’m dead already but it feels like I’ll be dying again. But don’t let that bother you. I’m ready now. No more delays.”

I got ready to smack him but my hand passed through and he was still there. “I was seeing if you’d stop me this time.” Electricity tingled through me. I smiled to fight off any mood altering effects of touching a ghost. “This time, it’ll be for real.”

He nodded.

My hand lit up. In the dark alley, it was brighter than the shine from the lamp.

“Wait!” he yelled again. “So this is it? I always thought there’d be something more poetic. We read about them in high school. Bells or clouds or even fire. I’d be okay with fire. I like summer. But shouldn’t there be something? Shouldn’t this be some grand finale?”

“I could put on a cape if you’d like. Maybe a crown made of foil.” My hand flickered.

“I’m just stalling.”

Then a flash erased Stan from the living world.

But it wasn’t me who did it.

Ch. 48: It Tolls

2012-09-07T11:42:00.001-05:00

Instead of answering TGG, I suggested we have a funeral for Jack.

“I want to leave him something to remember me by,” she said.

While she padded the shoebox coffin with a bohemian scarf from her collection, I went outside and pilfered a shovel from the groundskeeper’s lawn mower. He was still fiddling with the air conditioner so he didn’t notice. But the only shovel on his mower was a trowel.

We walked to the park. The shadows of leaves were cast on our faces. The humid air made us sweat and it got soaked up in our shirts. She walked with all the solemnity of a pallbearer, holding the box in both hands, palms facing upward. She had tied yarn around the box as the funeral would be closed casket.

The park was full of kids on swings that squeaked—the kids and the swings. They should’ve been learning long division at school, but their moms had sneaked them from their rigorous curriculum for a vacation at the park. These slides were much nicer than the school’s; they were plastic which didn’t burn the kids’ bottoms like metal slides on hot days.

“I think we found him somewhere around here,” I said.

“Are you sure it wasn’t the other side? I think it was.”

“We should’ve brought the pup. He found him.”

“Let’s just bury him in the center.”

“There are kids there.”

“Then here?”

“Sure.”

I pierced the dirt with the trowel. The first six inches came up in a minute. But the soil got hard. I wiped sweat from my face and mud smeared my cheeks. It was war paint. The trowel was no good and I used my hands to pull out dirt clods. I hit a root and couldn’t go any deeper so I started again, three feet over.

Before I was a foot deep in the new hole, TGG said, “I need to get to class soon.”

“Tell the prof you had a funeral.” I set the box on the hole. The hole would’ve been wide enough for the corpse but not the shoebox casket.

“For a rabbit?”

“You don’t have to say whose.”

“I have an essay due. Remember? I was writing it when we met.”

Kids slowly joined us during our discussion but we didn’t acknowledge them. They stared at the box and whispered to each other and elbowed their neighbors in the ribs for wiping boogers on them. It was how all funerals were when family was present.

We bowed our heads over the coffin. The yarn tied in a bow covered the Nine West logo. “Let’s start the eulogies. Jack hopped right up to heaven,” I said. “That’s about as high as any rabbit could ever hop.”

TGG’s was full of typical platitudes that were comforting, but who knew if they were true. “I only knew you for a short time but we had that instant connection so it felt like a lifetime. But you’re in a better place. We’ll meet again someday so don’t you forget me. It’s for the best that you’ve moved on.”

Maybe it was best he had moved on. With such big ears, rabbits must hate college parties. The music’s too loud and the drunk people are yelling to each other. It probably scares all the rabbits in the park. So maybe Jack didn’t mind moving on. The afterlife was probably quiet. Or maybe it was a celebration of even greater magnitudes with Socrates up on a coffee table doing the twist, spilling his wine on Shakespeare’s Scrabble board while Bach jammed his favorite sonata on an electric violin. That would be awful for rabbits with such big ears.

I promised to finish the burial. She hugged me. But I didn’t let my grimy hands touch her loosely woven hoodie that was unzipped in front.

She left me to my digging and the kids followed her for some time asking what we had been doing. She explained a friend of ours had died and so the kids all hugged her then ran back and hugged me from behind as I dug the grave with mud under my fingernails.

“What are you doing?” Anita asked from behind. I knew her judgmental voice, scoffing at my sentiments.

“Digging.”

“Why?”

“You did it. You should know.”

“Did what?” she demanded. She grabbed my shirt collar. It choked me but I kept digging.

I tossed dirt over my shoulder, at her. “Murdered Jack.”

“Who?”

“The rabbit! The baby rabbit! He had a name—Jack! And you killed him anyway. To teach me some cosmic lesson about the circle of life and all that crap.” I yelled. “That’s the cruelest visual aid imaginable.”

She floated around me so I’d look her in the face. I kept my eyes on the dirt. “I don’t control who dies,” she said, obviously lying.

I speared the earth again but a rock blocked the trowel. I jabbed it till the edge blunted. “Bullshit.”

A child nearby heard and gasped. “Um-mum-mum-mum!” He darted off to tell his mom, who gave me a dirty look but didn’t say anything. I later heard the child saying it with his friends.

“Life in this world is limited,” Anita said. “No one in the afterlife decides it’s time for someone else to die. People just die. My job is to shepherd their souls to the next side.” As she spoke, my trowel rang against the rock. She swiped it from me. But I kept digging.

The rock was a boulder bigger than my head—it must’ve been. I clawed at it, widened the sides of the hole with my fingertips, searching for an edge, for anything to grab but the rock was too big. It scraped the nail of my index finger till it chipped, bled.

“Stop, TK!” She grabbed my forearm but her hands passed through.

I stopped anyway.

“Life is the same everywhere, whether it’s a rabbit or a human or a spirit. But a human can’t exist beyond this world and a spirit can’t be in it.”

“Well they do. I’ve seen them.”

“They’re anomalies. If we let them be, it’d be like graduating college but never getting a job. You can’t spend eternity on the internet.”

“Why not? Time would pass quick enough.”

She pushed back my forehead so I looked her in the eye; I smacked her wrist but it didn’t budge—I couldn’t stare at the dirt like I wanted. She smiled to be sympathetic. “There’s no perfect metaphor to explain it. If there was, I’d give it to you. But life is what it is. It’s messy and imperfect and there are sad moments that make it seem long and happy ones that make it seem short. Things happen for a reason but not because of some plan. Everything is an unexpected consequence of the trillions of souls who spent their lives trying to make it a better world. Too many wasted it trying to explain everything.”

The hole was big enough for the shoebox coffin. I dropped it in.

“I’d like to tell you the world after this one is a better place, full of eternal life or that it’s full of relatives or that all life is reincarnated to begin again or that from loss springs birth. But I can’t. That’s the big secret. No one can know it.”

“That’s just an excuse.” I covered Jack with dirt.

“But what you do know is that spirits don’t belong here. They can’t be happy here. Not for long anyways.”

“Fine.”

Ch. 47: For Whom the Bell Tolls

2012-08-31T13:09:00.003-05:00

I was three cars behind a Bronco stopped at the four-way intersection of W 3rd and Independence. The other streets were clogged too. It was just after noon so everyone was eager to get to George’s or Breadeaux or Happy Joe’s, which were all pizza places and inferior to Pizza Hut because The Hut had stuffed crust, but that had closed down last June. Lunch time around campus was the only time there was traffic in Iowa.

After trimming the football field, an old maintenance worker in a plaid hunting cap rode his mower down W 3rd Street. He stopped at the intersection, signaling his right turn with his hand (though the college kids thought he was just a friendly old kook waving), and continued on Independence, the same way I was headed. I jerked the car to side to zoom past him but cars were parked on the street, about two feet from the curb; with his wide mower, capable of finishing the football field in twenty-one passes, I had no room to get around. I coasted behind him at five miles per hour, braking every ten seconds so I didn’t ram him.

We parked in the lot outside Graham and his mower took up more space than my Lincoln town car. He held the door for me as I entered. He smiled; his incisors were missing but the other teeth were still crowded. I held open the next set of doors for him, expecting him to bolt through them with all the hurriedness that I felt.

But he limped. Rather he dragged his left leg and occasionally he tossed3 it forward so his left boot stomped the carpet. The hairs of his beard tangled a leaf of grass. His overalls were held up by a leather belt and a tool belt, also leather. A hammer dangled from a loop in his jeans; the shaft whacked his knee with every shuffling step. He nodded at the sorority girl leaning against the wall, reading a physics book. The cover promised her the fun of Ferris wheels and rollercoasters. But inside was all numbers—gibberish.

I couldn’t get around them. The only way to pass this old man was to barrel through him. I didn’t do that though.

He crouched at a hallway air conditioning unit and scraped the rust with a flathead screwdriver. He jiggled the cover till it popped off. He mumbled to himself and tapped each component. He pulled from his pocket a greasy rag, blew his nose into it, then wiped lint from the filter with it.

His dead leg, the limping one, lay across the hall. It blocked my path. It’d be rude to step over, no matter the hurry I was in. So that’s what I did.

But he swung back the hammer and the claw nearly tore into my thigh. I waited for a few more swings to get the timing just right—but I didn’t. As I passed the claw got me, hit my hip, right on the bone, and the old man apologized.

I continued to the end of the hall, seeing no girls because it was near the half hour and most were in class or in their rooms. When I got to the door I knew so well, the one I had passed through as a ghost, I threw it open. “I’m in love with you,” I announced to an empty room.

TGG tapped my shoulder. She had a towel wrapped around her head. “Jack died.” She squeezed past me and hung her towel on the corner of her bureau. Bent over, she scratched her wet hair, which was heavy enough to be straight, but she scratched till it curled. The tile was speckled with droplets.

“What?” I wasn’t ready for this. I wasn’t expecting that. Every report of hers had been cheerful or so full of cute sweetness that I nearly got diabetes. “How?”

She went to her desk to straighten up the stray essay drafts, marked with red ink and smiley faces. “I don’t know.” The shoe box was on her bed. The lid covered his corpse. That was the casket he got? I got some thousand-dollar, padded coffin made from cherry wood with carvings and wifi—that I didn’t even use—and he gets the box a pair of high heels came in?

“Is he in there?” I asked.

“Yeah.” She dumped her dirty laundry on the bed—I had a clear view of her undies and everything but I didn’t look. “It happened this morning. I was Skyping with Kevin. He was getting ready for bed; I had just gotten up. I took Jack and my laptop to the lounge so I wouldn’t wake my roomies. Kevin was going on and on about his day—he had met some aboriginal woman who could play the didgeridoo. He didn’t really like Jack. He said Jack looked gross.” As she spoke, she folded the wrinkled, stained, smelly clothes and neatly arranged them in the laundry basket. “So I was secretly feeding the little guy in my lap, where the webcam didn’t show. I thought he was just tired or something. But he needed to eat so I poked him a little with the nipple—of the bottle, I mean, and he didn’t respond.”

Normally I would’ve suggested she was lying, that it wasn’t the bottle’s nipple. But I was distracted.

She continued with her story of Jack’s final moments. “So I cradled him in my hand and poked him some more hoping he’d latch on. By then Kevin knew I was feeding Jack and kind of got angry. He’s not really the angry-type. Jack is more ferocious. Or was, I guess. But while Kevin was whining, I saw Jack die.” She straightened the pictures on her corkboard, pictures: a Bichon Frisé, a fat munchkin hound dog, a tiger-striped cat, greying parents, friends, her and friends, her and her homecoming date, her as a kid, her as a teen, her from two weeks ago and every other aspect of her life. She didn’t pause to reminisce about any of the memories. She just straightened the pictures.

“How do you know? Maybe he’s sleeping still. It’s Monday. People sleep in on Mondays. Rabbits too.”

“I saw him. His soul, I guess. I wouldn’t have known what it was if you hadn’t told me they looked like fog.” Her roommates’ shoes were strewn about the room. She picked up an overturned heel but couldn’t find its mate. She got on her hands and knees on the dusty floor and peered under the bed. She had to lie flat to reach under but she found the matching shoe. Her front was covered in dust. “I was going to tell you sooner, but you didn’t respond to the text. And I didn’t want to open with ‘Jack’s dead.’ But don’t worry. Kevin already told me it’s stupid to get worked up over a rabbit I found a few days ago.”

“Kevin can go to hell.”

“Hey!” she jabbed my shoulder. “It’s just a rabbit. I know that.”

“He had a name and you don’t name something unless you’re attached and you don’t just brush off the death of someone you’re attached to.” God, I was just standing there. She’s flying about the room and I’m standing in the doorway, giving any passerby a view of my butt. I sat on her roommate’s bed, which was directly across from hers, from Jack’s shoebox coffin. I stared at it. I put my dirty shoes on the bed covers so I could hug my knees and stare at Jack’s shoebox coffin.

TGG had a neon green feather duster. She dusted the TV, desk, bed posts, dressers; when she reached up for the top of a dresser, her shirt rose and I could see the dimples of her back. When she bent over to dust the far bed posts, her butt was like right there. But I didn’t look—not more than peeks. “Thanks,” she said then tickled me with the duster, hoping to get me to smile. I sneezed. Then she used it on Jack’s shoebox coffin. She sat next to me. “I don’t know what I did wrong.”

“Nothing!” I got up so violently that she was bounced from the bed to her feet. I sat back down and hugged my knees again. “You did everything you could. You gave that rabbit three extra days of pampered bliss. It wasn’t your fault.”

She sat back down. “Thanks.”

“Nature’s just cruel sometimes.”

“Yeah.” She hugged her legs too. Our elbows touched. I could smell the berry shampoo in her hair and the coffee on her breath. “Maybe it would’ve been easier if I hadn’t found him.”

“No!” I got up again and again she was bounced from the bed. These mattresses were very springy. “Maybe you wouldn’t feel bad, but what about him? You were the only chance he had to survive. If you just turned away when he needed you, maybe you wouldn’t feel bad, but I wouldn’t like you nearly as much.”

“You like me?” she asked.

“Death is just a part of life. People die quickly. Usually without warning. It leaves an emptiness. But without it, there’d be a hundred billion people on the planet when we can barely support seven.” Jack’s coffin was from payless. “Seriously, we’re way overpopulated. Even this hallway has more than seven people.”

We sat on her roommate’s bed reflecting in our own thoughts. Our elbows still touched. I rested my chin on my knee, thinking about Jack. I hadn’t spent any time with him. I knew him less than I knew that Saturday-morning grackle.

TGG leaned her head on my shoulder. “So when you barged in my room, were you being serious?”

Ch. 46: Ask Not to Know

2012-08-24T11:06:00.000-05:00

Before I left home, I helped my dad move some stuff to the basement. Anything that should’ve taken two people—a table, a desk, or an ottoman bigger than the armchairs—we each carried alone, struggling down the stairs, bumping the door molding, cracking the overhead light casing, and leaving scuffs on the walls.

At the bottom of the basement stairs, I threw down the desk I carried.

Dad snapped, “Careful!”

“It’s fine,” I muttered. I trudged upstairs to get an antique wall clock. The wooden case was heavy under my arm. The brass pendulum swung. On every stair, the chime tolled. By the time I reached the concrete basement floor, it was 13 o’clock.

When I got back to campus, the first row of corn had been plowed to test for moisture. Too much moisture in the grain cylinders meant rot and mold and farmers had to pay a heavy fine if their corn would cause that, so they tested it a row at a time. Husks floated in the pond. They were like little gondolas for the Japanese beetles. Or maybe an invisible Charon piloted their corpses to Hades, assuming they had a coin to pay.

I had forgotten my Mabinogion in Dr. Radulescu’s room which was empty. When I came back out, waiting for me outside the building was Anita. As Douwstra, the humanities building, didn’t have air conditioning, the front door was propped open; Anita sat on it. A basketball player in his jersey passed under her dangling feet without noticing her.

I too pretended to ignore Anita but she was wearing a skirt and I thought I spied a crack in her legs. She caught me looking. “That’s bad for the hinges, you know,” I said and continued walking past a bag full of Japanese beetles on a garbage can. Inside there were two more bags. That must’ve been nearly 50,000 beetles.

“Why didn’t you take care of that ghost last night?” She floated after me. She passed through a tree branch that was dead from the beetles.

“I had other things on my mind,” I muttered. “Plus you ran me ragged the night before. I figured I deserved a day off.”

“This is your job, TK. You don’t work a day then take off a day.”

Beetle shells crunched beneath my feet. The sidewalk was covered with them. They clogged the cracks with their butts up. Weeds grew around them. Across the pond two student-workers with the groundskeeping department filled 40-gallon trash bags with the bugs. One held the bag open; the other pushed the snow shovel. It grated the cemented.

Anita perched on a branch of a silver maple. “Ghosts are like an infestation. You have to purge them from this world.”

“An infestation of what? Lions? Golden marmosets? Dragons?”

She plucked a Japanese beetle that was nibbling a leaf. “More like these guys. One won’t do much damage. A few are annoying. And they’re not directly dangerous. But if you let them be, plants die out. Entire species—extinct. And why? Because you didn’t think it was a big deal.”

“I think dragons would be more of a danger. Golden marmosets too.”

“There are billions of these guys. Your college sprays them; they set out traps, and the students are constantly swatting them. But they still buzz about the campus, pelting kids on muggy days.” She fell backwards off the branch but her legs were hooked around it. She hung upside down so I stared at her frown that looked like a smile. Her hair hung from the gravity but her skirt stayed near her knees, unaffected by physics. “That’s like our job. Everything we do is to keep the ghost infestation from getting worse. There are millions of ghosts out there and more popping up every day. We have to exorcise the few we can or they’ll wreak havoc on the living.”

“All Stan wants is to see his kid graduate.” I sat on a bench and opened The Mabinogion to “Geraint ac Enid.” I had read it last night in preparation for the quiz earlier but instead we talked about Avalon and the uncertainty of death and Bedwere valuing Excalibur for its jewels. “Just give him a few years. Put him at the bottom of the to-do list.”

“They all want something. That’s why they don’t move on to the next world.”

“The beetles will die soon.” I kicked a beetle shell and it skipped across the pavement, into the pond. It floated till it filled with water and submerged. “Yesterday they were rampant. Today, I’ve only been hit in the eye once. Why can’t it be the same with ghosts?”

“It’s not a perfect comparison. Do you remember what’ll happen if ghosts start touching everyone? If there were as many as there are beetles, there’ll be no avoiding them. People will get anxious, depressed…”

“…cranky, hungry, constipated,” I said, supplementing her list with my own. “I know all that. Fine, every other ghost can get exorcised. I’ll smack them till the cows come home. But what about Stan? Can’t he stay till his daughter graduates?”

“They all have stories and wants and something to live for. But it’s past their time.”

“I won’t do it to Stan.”

“And when the next ghost comes along and you get attached to him, will you want me to take care of him too?” Anita asked. She flipped and landed on her feet. She wobbled and got a 10 point deduction because she couldn’t stick the landing. And because she was being a bitch. “Why’d I revive you if you’re not going keep your end of the bargain?”

“I get a second chance and they’re shit out of luck? I’m not a hypocrite.”

The wind blew a husk across campus. It scraped the pavement, got stuck in a crack and turned end over end. It stopped against Anita’s shoe. She kicked it. “You died saving a kid. Don’t you think that’s a little different than someone who had a heart attack?”

I cracked my knuckles with my thumbs. Then I went back and twisted each finger to get a few more pops. It was gas in the synovial fluid making the clicking sound—I knew that now as an adult, but I used to do it because people told me it caused arthritis, because they told me not to do it. “You know what I thought when I first died? When I floated above my mangled corpse with my bone sticking out of my arm, my lung popped, and blood just everywhere, do you wanna know my reaction? Cool. Not ironically or sardonically. A completely serious ‘cool.’” I got up and the Mabinogion slid from my lap. I paced around the bench. “Living is hard.”

Anita sat on the bench with her shoes on the seat and her butt on the backrest.

I went on: “I’m not saying I jumped in front of the car on purpose or anything. But my life sure wasn’t worth giving another shot. Do you know what it’s like to be alone all the time? To have no connection to anyone because you just don’t give a damn? And everyone else seems to feel the same. Friends, family, classmates, none of them care—well me neither. There’s no one worth talking to but you lie awake having discussions with old friends you haven’t seen since middle school just so you don’t forget how to talk. Or you pretend you’re on Conan and you’re just the wittiest, deepest, smartest, best role model ever and everyone wants to know your secrets. But you can’t always sleep, even if you want to. So when you’re bored, there’s no one but the personalities on the telly so you wrap yourself up in Friends or Scrubs or Seinfeld or whatever show has a marathon and you wish you had friends like that to charm with your wit. You spend your last buck at Red Box because you can go a month without food but a day of boredom could be all it takes to throw you over the edge. Don’t tell me I deserve a second chance because of the way I died. Stan deserves it because of the way he lived.” I took a big breath and walked behind Anita so she couldn’t see me shaking. It was from the lack of oxygen. I had talked too much. Though I sure thought everything I had said sounded great, worthy of Conan even. “He actually cared about his family. How many dads are like that? I can’t think of any.” I sat on her toes but I didn’t feel them under my butt.

She stayed quiet.

Dr. Radulescu walked our way from Douwstra. He crossed the bridge.

Anita saw the professor and disappeared into the tree. But I could still hear her. “I won’t repeat myself again. Take care of the ghost tonight. Or you’ll blow your second chance.” She continued upward till I could no longer pick her out in the bright sky.

Dr. Radulescu groaned, “Alone on a bench, gazing thoughtfully across the pond? Imitating Heathcliff?”

“I was never a fan of The Brontës. I prefer Narcissus.” I leaned over the pond to gaze upon my perfect reflection. My eyes were a bit red. I brushed my bedhead; it had some lint in it.

“Maybe you ought to read up on Prometheus instead. Always the trickster he offered Zeus two dishes; Zeus chose the slab of fat that hid a bull’s femur as that looked more appetizing than ox stomach which was secretly filled with beef. That’s why sacrifices were of bone and fat. Prometheus is also credited with creating man from clay. Though I suppose he’s most famous for giving fire to humans, a crime for which he was chained to a rock in Caucasus where an eagle would feast on his liver daily. It didn’t stop until Heracles slayed the eagle and cut him free. It’s odd that a titan, an immortal, could sympathize with a lesser, transient species like man. And then a demigod would free him from the burden.”

“Sorry, class time ended an hour ago,” I said. “I stopped listening then.”

“Don’t lie. You stopped listening the minute you walked in the door.” He left with a grin on his wrinkly face. Crazy geezer.