Get Your Body, by Baby
I ran on my knees past No One toward the window. Fuck ghosts.
I was done. I pressed the plywood
away and clawed my way out of the hole like a newborn spawn from the gaping maw
of hell. I fell out of the window onto
the patio bricks and heard that sharp, loud smack against the back of my head
that hurts so bad you can smell it and taste it. I felt the world tilt away from me, and I
slid of its plane into a starless eternity.
I saw a tunnel of white light that grew brighter, and heard
the sounds of voices in my head, but the words were all jumbled. And then the light hurt my eyes and I reached
up and pushed it away. Fuck that
flashlight.
I rolled over and rubbed my eyes. My head ached big time. What the hell was going on?
Someone said, “Holy shit, he’s bleeding from the back of his
head!”
No One said, “I should have left him outside! But you made me push him up over the window
hole and set him down in here!”
The response was this:
“We can’t be caught now, with him injured! At least he ain’t got no broken back… Fuck.
I should have thought about that before I- Wait!
He’s saying something! What is
it, Weeeee-ill?”
I turned my head and said, “You fuckers are assholes.”
Lion Man and No One laughed in relief.
Lion Man pressed his T-shirt against the back of my head to
slow the bleeding, and No One felt so bad for my injury that he began to
cry. He said, “Mr. Will, I didn’t mean
you no harm. But you took off after I
fell on you. I shoulda grabbed you
before you went out the window. I’m
sorry man.”
I sat up and my head spinned a bit. I said, “I’ll be OK. But who are all of these folks in here?”
Lion Man whipped around and flashed the light
everywhere. He saw nothing.
No One said, “They don’t say anything, but their mouths are
moving, like they got something important to say. Some look like they are hollering at us. You
see that?”
Lion Man looked at me and twirled his finger in a circle
near his temple, and he whistled.
I said, “Yeah. That
one over there is pointing at those shelves.”
Lion Man swung the light back around. He said, “You both are off your fucking
rockers. Ain’t no one here. Damn.
Guess I’m the only sane person here. What will a boy do?”
No One got up and jostled through the crowd in the room over
to where the pale figure was pointing.
He shrugged. He said, “Ain’t nothing
here.”
All of the faces turned to look at him when he said this,
and then they looked at each other. It
seemed like they could see things that we could not. They could see books on shelves that weren’t
there anymore. The books had been
salvaged and taken away. Some had been
stolen before that happened.
You see, the thing about ghosts are that they are faint
wisps of human essence. They are the
images played from strong emotion etched and recorded into the nearby organic
materials from when the intense experience first occurred. A ghost is not a person, but it is instead a
remnant. Strong emotions that are evoked
from a powerful emotional event in our lives, such as a wedding, a sexual act,
a violent death, or a period of mental anguish or physical torture have the
capacity to invade the molecular structure of wood, of cloth, and even into the
detritus of the living creatures which cover every surface of our planet, even
on your own skin this moment.
We are all connected, you know. Emotions are recorded into anything that has
carbon molecules in it.
Perhaps it takes the act of opening your eyes to see those
recordings.
I rubbed my eyes, but it did not erase these ghosts that
filled the room.
My fear was gone, probably because I was stunned from my
head wound, and I was most likely in a state of shock.
(To Be Re-Written)
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