That One

flash fiction

Alright, I admit that I am what many people call a ghost, but I am not a "ghost in the machine" ...not in this machine, anyway.  I'm not even a wooo-wooo type ghost, not one of those spectral voices heard at night, faint sounds from an empty room or, worse, a little voice clearing its throat under the bed.

Oh, I know about those noisy kinds of manifestations, and I won't say that I've never been one like that myself. I'm just not that kind now.

I see that saying what I am not is easier to do than saying what I am, but I'll try to make a few positive statements. Positivity in general makes me sigh, which some living people can feel but do not hear - but I'll try, never fear. Or well, people say to never say never, so....

There is vast and certain coordination among the literally endless coterie of ghosts that might surprise the living. It's kind of like shuffling a deck of cards, if a person only saw lots of cards leap neatly into the air and slide smoothly down again without seeing how it's done. If a person suspects this deck of cards is then stacked against them, like for cheating, they would be right. Ghosts don't strictly play by the rules.

We have rules, of course. We even follow Parliamentary Procedure when we discuss them. We don't often discuss them, because, as can be guessed, they're so ethereal. Someone will just give the newbies one of those glowing and curling lists of rules, written in a cursive font that's quite hard to read. The list is very long, is rarely understood, and that's it for rules, spiritually speaking. The newly dead are usually too distracted by things like sudden invisibility to concentrate, anyway.

That's one thing I've observed about human ghosts. I myself have never been one of the newly dead, because I've never been a living human. My function has always been that of Chief Ghost. I am very human-ish, but I have never been a person who got born, lived, died, and the rest of that folderol.

One might say I am the Chief Organizer of Ghosts, the unseen hands that shuffled that metaphorical deck of cards in such a sneaky way. I take pride in that. My existence began as a being that shuffled many things, including my ghostly feet, all of them, until I learned to do the floaty part.

A human might think that floating around being a ghost is lots easier than living. Some living humans really think that. But they are quickly and thoroughly turned around when they die. Then they sort of spin in their graves, or urns or whatever, at first.

Hang around with me - most dead people find it easy to just sort of hang there in one place - and see what it is I do for the human dead. Don't worry. I am merciful and I will only write, in this glowing font, a little bit at a time. Humans can then easily digest it, if they take the trouble to deal with digestion anymore. Believe me, instant absorption is the best way to go here. Everyone has time for that.

Author's Note

This is for FFM 2024 as seen on WordPress {and email} - it is 540 words