Lines of a Star

FFM 2024, Day 8, flash fiction month - word count: 515

Long ago, I focused attention on a single ghost, strange as it may seem. I am Chief Ghost, and whatever space a human ghost fills is seen by me, even if they don't quite seem to be there.

Human ghosts are the reason I exist, though I have never been human myself, nor had a life, nor died, for that matter. I'm just here. There's no need for further explanation.

This particular ghost, wispy thing, seemed very alone. He drifted to a different drummer, you might say. I could see his complete former life in an instant, and he was often alone then, too. His was a pretty short life, usually spent in a shallow cave away from other humans. 

The little man was a creative type. I've come to know them at one inhuman glance.

This man, when alive, spent most of his time chipping careful lines onto flat rocks. The results could roughly be called art. It almost showed the humans and animals he saw around him. In his living mind, what he saw was quite detailed, though his tools did not allow that.

A few rocks he worked on would, much later, become part of a display in a museum. Of course, the man had no concept of such things. He barely realized there would be a future. That was common back then. He also, commonly, died young, at about twenty-five years.

As a ghost, the man looked too transparent and stayed away from the pooling of others. I saw that, where his living eyes had been, he had large, very bright lights which shifted constantly.

The mind-pictures around him remained as simple as they were when he died millennia ago, maybe during what humans call the Clovis Era. But most of his ghostly presence was perfectly still. He looked at everything but did absolutely nothing, not even disassemble.

If I had a human head, I might have tilted it then. What was wrong with him? Of course, a millimeter away, in the layers of time, I saw the answer. The little ghost needed tools to make his crude yet promising pictures again.

I watched as the human ghost really came around for the first time since his arrival. A bare glint of stone appeared, and soon he was carving once more, looking up and looking down, going still and starting again, over and over. 

He became as steady, alert and fluid as a human ocean. He made his art shine in non-time as bright as a sun on a human sea. No other ghosts seemed to notice. Oh, there were, and are, many creative human ghosts here, but none as completely bound to their art as he was. 

Perhaps some would call that mystical, but I have nothing to do with the mystical. All presences are as spatial and moving as any other, if you ask me.

However, this one was only really full when he was carving ghosts, making lines of light on ghostly rocks. He was, to my limitless knowledge, the first ghost I ever called a rock star.

Author's Note

FFM 2024, Day 8, flash fiction...
Written to the prompt "Stars are just holes in the sky" by verilyaweirdo
Word count - 515