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  Mr. Shady

  Rob E. Boley

  1

  After dying in a car wreck, I spent the first three days of my afterlife standing in the same damn endless line. Okay, technically I wasn’t standing. I was hovering in mid-air. Also, to call it a line was being generous. Imagine instead a squirming mob of thousands of ghosts all floating in front of the same massive orb of light. Yes, the fabled Light with a capital L—the one that was waiting for all of us after our final breath. The crowd waiting for the Light had no real shape. We jostled against each other, restless yet passive. See, the line wasn’t moving. No one was passing through. Something about the Light was broken.

  I imagined those at the front of the pack had lost all form—smashed from the hundreds of thousands of fellow spirits pressing against them from behind. Even surrounded by countless lost souls, the Light still glowed brilliantly. I couldn’t not look. Indeed, all the ghosts waiting with me stared blankly at its immeasurable beauty. I didn’t know if it was heaven or not, but it was clearly worth the wait. Imagine my surprise when after days of waiting, a tingle washed over me and I fell out of the sky.

  It happened like this. Something tugged me downward. Like gravity, except more purposeful. Instinctively, I grabbed the hem of my skirt. I drifted lower, now at eye level with the crotch of the ghost beside me, a balding spirit in a faded blue suit. His aura glowed white—just like all the others in the crowd.

  “Shit,” I said to him. “Will you save my place in line?”

  He nodded wearily, but as soon as I drifted out of the way, some old biddy hovered into my spot. Damn it. You’d think heaven would’ve had some kind of Fast Pass system like Disney World.

  As soon as I was free of the crowd, I fell.

  Faster and faster, I spilled through clouds. The tingling sensation wormed around my ghost flesh. My intangible arms pinwheeled at the shreds of unblossomed rain. I tumbled past new spirits rising to join the epic crowd. My velocity increased, the wind shearing bits of my ghostly essence away. Those phantom particles trailed behind me like the tail of a meteor, except this meteor was screaming her fool head off.

  “Fuuuuuuuuck,” I yelled. “Meeeeeeee!”

  The ground was coming fast. I was falling toward my hometown of Davis, Ohio—a one-stoplight town surrounded by well-groomed cornfields, a patchwork of forest, and an increasing number of upscale subdivisions. The elementary school was in the middle of town. It must’ve been recess because a bunch of kids were standing on the playground. Most likely they couldn’t see me, but I crossed my legs all the same. I didn’t want any prepubescent boys seeing the goods.

  For a moment, the view of Davis eclipsed my sheer panic. I’d never seen the town from this angle. The divide between the poor and well-to-do couldn’t have been more clear. Those with less lived in the run-down homes clustered in the middle of town. Those with more resided in the much larger, newer, and more spaced-apart homes that rippled outward from the town like the rings of Saturn.

  Winter’s fresh potholes hadn’t yet been filled. Green buds sat like fat insects on the trees’ bare limbs. Leaves filled the gutters. It was a normal early spring day in Davis, aside from the unusual number of cars parked at the graveyard.

  My home—rather, my mother’s home—sat, or more accurately squatted or leaned, almost in the dead center of town. I expected that was where I was headed. Perhaps I was destined to haunt those crooked walls and crammed closets for the rest of eternity. If so, I vowed then and there that I’d find a way to strip the Home Shopping Network from Mom’s cable system. I was already thinking of ways to torment Sasha, her annoying Persian cat, but soon realized that I wasn’t going home after all.

  No, the tingling force was taking me to the intersection.

  Skid marks from the crash that took my life still marred the asphalt at the four-way stop where Dorothy Pike met Orchard Way. Trees lined both roads. An old blue Dodge van was parked on the shoulder in a patch of shade near a shrine of wreaths, pictures, and random knick-knacks. Aww. A shrine? For me? How sweet.

  The ground rushed at me. The wind roared like an angry lion. I curled into a ball to minimize the impact. If I’d still had a functioning bladder, I surely would’ve pissed myself. I closed my eyes but could still see through my translucent eyelids—though everything was milkier. My spectral muscles tensed. Would I shatter like glass or splash like water?

  Neither.

  The tingling force field that enveloped me eased to a stop and plopped me as light as a feather on all fours to the ground. An ectoplasmic tear rolled down my cheek. The field tugged me toward the parked van, but I wanted to see the memorial. I clutched at the grass on the side of the road.

  A handful of tiny knives stabbed into me.

  The grass’s thin green blades did not yield to my touch. My hand didn’t bend and bow the grass. Rather, the long green cutlasses pierced my phantom palm like a pincushion. I discovered then and there that I was no longer an active participant in the physical world.

  No, I was at its mercy.

  2

  I screamed. Each penetration stung horribly and yet I crawled onward. The grass blades stabbed into my knees and shins, the pads of my feet. I gasped and grunted, edging closer to the shrine. More tears. The force tugged me, but I needed to see the memorial. Despite the pain, I couldn’t stop a trembling grin. This outpouring of love gave me the strength to endure.

  Except the monument wasn’t for me at all. No, the pictures were of some young blond girl, and all the signs said shit like, “We miss you, Shannon.”

  “Rest in peace, Shannon.”

  “I love you, Shannon.”

  Fuck you, Shannon.

  My unbeating heart sank. I yielded to the field around me. The tugging force pulled me to my feet and dragged me down the shoulder of the road. It was strange not hearing the gravel crunch under my feet. Stranger still was the fact that I was wearing only one kitten heel. My right foot was bare. I must’ve lost that shoe during the crash. I kicked off the ghostly heel but it whizzed around in a wide arc and snapped back onto my foot like some kind of podiatric boomerang.

  The force sucked me backward into the van’s open driver side window. I tumbled into the passenger side bucket seat, surprised to find another ghost sitting behind the wheel. It was Shannon, the girl from the shrine, and she was wearing a track outfit. Blue and red—the Davis High School colors. I’d worn a similar uniform back in school but that’d been over a decade ago. Shannon wore her hair in a tight ponytail. She stared at two teenage girls in the back of the van. Her aura glowed a faded yellow—the color of old newspapers.

  “What’s going on?” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything better. “My name’s Molly.”

  She ignored me. I figured that maybe she couldn’t see me. Maybe I was so unwanted and forgotten that I was a ghost even to other ghosts. I looked down at my palms. The tiny stab wounds from the grass had stopped bleeding. As I watched, my ghostly flesh knit itself back together.

  The van’s rear seats had been stripped out, replaced by two beanbag chairs and a pile of blankets. The girls sat on the bags facing each other over a Ouija board. They both wore black lipstick, too much eye shadow, and blue streaks in their hair. One sported a black halter top that revealed way too much cleavage. The other had big horn rimmed glasses that I was pretty sure were supposed to be ironic. Their fingertips rested on a planchette. A thin line of smoke wormed upward from an incense stick beside the board. I sniffed but my ghost nose could barely smell its spicy scent. And maybe that was just a memory.

  “This feels wrong,” Cleavage said. “I mean, shouldn’t we be at Shannon’s funeral? We could get in trouble for skipping.”

  Her funeral. That explained all the cars at the graveyard.

  “C’mon,” Glasses said. “This could be my last chance to talk to her before she passes over. I n