Thursday, November 9, 2017

"I’ll Let My Feet Guide Me" EMMindigo

There are a lot of ghosts on this planet.

Geoffrey does not understand why his brain puts emphasis on this, spells out the p-l-a-n-e-t of planet. He does not remember being on planets besides this one.

He understands too much and too little about why he is a ghost and what these other ghosts are doing here at the same time. It as if all the personal information that had been built into his soul over the reincarnations has been repressed, swept under the rug, tucked away neatly in the back of a closet, or inside a drawer, out of sight. The only thing They had left for him was one of his names. Geoffrey.

Even his name, one of his names, isn’t a useful context clue for why Geoffrey is still roaming Earth as a translucent, slightly faded ghost. It doesn’t explain what purpose he is meant to fill.  

This lack of background knowledge makes him feel different from the other, more faded, ghosts he frequently meets as he wanders southeastward down the continent, who are all stuck in the past in one way or another, broken records. They are mostly still caught up in patterns, in problems they couldn’t answer or routines not even death could pry them from, waiting for the right person to come along to pull them into the astral plain proper. Few ghosts actually seem to wander the world of living for some purpose that doesn’t connect to their most recent life.

Geoffrey thinks he might be one of those ((un)lucky) few who is here again to fulfil some higher purpose. He has an unofficial handbook on ghosts and the afterlife memorized in his skull, factual knowledge of Earth culture, no memory of whoever or whatever he’d been before, and chronically wandering feet- searching feet. He fits the criteria.
He just doesn’t know what his higher purpose is.  

In some odd ways, ghosts have to behave like humans. Like…Geoffrey can climb in the back of a car, can sit in a corner of the bed of a pickup truck, can sit on a seat on the bus as if he still had a body. Sometimes he sees other ghosts on those buses, ghosts following their daily routines, or trying to get somewhere, one last time. Even though these occurrences are more common than expected, it always slightly off putting to see a ghost hunched over, asleep on a window, and a passenger sitting in the same seat, a solid form superimposed over a faded one.

He’ll walk on freaking running water, though. Some young ghost girl at a languidly moving river, frustratedly pacing and pacing from grassy bank to grassy bank, smooth current visible under her washed out feet, clues him into this.

The trees are tall and leafy green here, here with dilapidated small towns and white birds in the cow ponds with the cows and two lane highways and a lot of small backyard pools. The girl is washed out, but she the outfit she’d most often pictured herself in is a dress cut off at the knee, what was probably once light colored hair tied up in a simple flipped ponytail. She paces to the opposite bank he’s standing on, and when she spins on her bare heel, she abruptly and suddenly notices him and some of the faded look vanishes as she remembers why she was a ghost in the first place. The sudden blossoming colors draw the eye to a pair of slip off sandals thrown near the base of a tree leaning over the river, one floating stationary over the river water and the other lying propped up against the trunk. They look to have been thrown there in a fit of anger.

“Yes, I was trying to swim here,” she snaps at him, where he’s appeared on one bank, “no, I did not expect that swimming in a river that’s deeper than it looks with rocks on the bottom was not the best idea.” She stops furiously pacing to look at Geoffrey long enough to say, deadpan, “No I am not Jesus.”

Geoffrey knows of Jesus. He’s knows of Muhammad and Abraham and Moses and God and Buddha and Vishnu and any other number of things when it comes to that, but as he doesn’t know that much about any of them, this announcement that this girl is not Jesus seems like a non sequitur.

“I’m sorry,” he says hesitantly to the girl who’s gone back to pacing with a vengeance, “What was that about Jesus? And if you’re not Jesus, who are you? ”

“I can’t freaking drown myself and move on because I’m walking on water! Like Jesus! But I’m not Jesus, I’m Ellen!” she doesn’t stop pacing to say this, but her hands are balled into fists, and suddenly, she stomps over the sandal floating on the water, picks it up, and flings it very hard at the tree. It thwacks off and lands near the base.

“Um, ghosts can walk into still water,” he offers, because he found that out when wading through one of those cow ponds. He wanted to see if he’d walk through a cow.

“What does that have to do with anything? I drowned right here in this river,” Ellen points out, her voice sharp. She crosses her arms.

“Hey, hey, relax,” he raises his hands in a calming gesture. “I’m just saying, if trying to drown again in a river isn’t working, try something else. Like that nice cow pond back there,” he points back over his shoulder.

“I drowned in a river,” Ellen reiterates, tightening her arms, as if he hadn’t heard her the first time.Suddenly, she flings her arms out, anger flying wide, “THIS river!”

“Yell a little louder, why don’t you, I don’t think the cows heard you.” He says dryly and pointedly, a bit taken aback by how loud Ellen had suddenly gotten. If she has to drown again to pass on, why doesn’t she just go do it instead of yelling?

“I don’t want to try drowning myself in front of some cows! It’s not the same as drowning in this river! Where I already drowned!”

Geoffrey sighs, rubs a hand over his face. “Obviously, trying to drown again in this river isn’t working. The cow pond is another place to drown.”

She has gone back to crossing her arms and squints at him suspiciously, not quite believing him.

There is a silence.

“Look,” he says finally, “a drowning is a drowning, and it doesn’t really matter where it happens.”

“Changing the location of a drowning changes the experience of drowning,” Ellen argues, but her arms have uncrossed, she’s listening now.

Even if Ellen is listening, Geoffrey doesn’t really have a comeback for that response. He’s never considered that point before. He opens his mouth; then he closes it again. However, he still feels like he has to win some sort of point or they’ll spend the rest of eternity arguing, so he asks, “Why do you care about drowning again?”

Ellen blinks once at him, long and slow, as if he’s stupid. Her voice raises again, a bit, “because drowning was what killed me in the first place, and now I can’t get there-“Ellen makes a frustrated gesture at something she obviously can’t describe, Geoffrey knows because he wants to make the same one so often, “because for some stupid reason the river won’t let me drown myself again.”

Geoffrey is beginning to see what the problem is here, what lesson was so crucial to her soul that she needs to learn it before she can fully pass on.

“Why should you try to recreate the exact same experience, when another similar one will do just as well?” he asks Ellen reasonably.

She tugs at a hank of hair, looking into the middle distance, then turns her face at an angle and squints at him. He raises his arms at the elbow, spreads his hands out at about shoulder height, scrunches in his shoulders a bit. It’s a shrug.

“Drowning in the cow pond?” she asks, testing.

Geoffrey nods.

Her expression loosens and some of the squint fades from her eyes as she rights her head.
For a moment Geoffrey can see nothing behind her. She’s opaque, solid, fully colored. Freckled skin, turquoise blue eyes, butterscotch colored hair, and her dress is mauve purple with darker blue and dark crimson red accents.

“Huh. I never thought of it like that before,” Ellen says.

Ellen turns, and picks up her sandals, as if in trance. Her colors- not her colors - and solidity had reached their climax in her moment of understanding. The falling action begins, then, and her and those colors are fading as Geoffrey watches her take her sandals by the straps, fading as she walks out onto a certain part of the river and, fading until she’s see through and then she’s not even that. She’s gone.

With her seem to have gone the colors, and this wonder of watching a ghost move on loses some of its awe, for he is suddenly and indescribably sad. He can’t even find the words for why he is sad, only hazy images sliding out of his mental grasp when he tries to pin them down, only the deep and despairing feeling of watching something important slip out of his hands. Then there is a horrible shuddering fear, sinking invasive runners into even this, and he can’t find what memory fragments he was trying to search for anymore.

He’s happy for Ellen the Drowned Girl, but it’s only a small thing buried under the feelings of loss and terror.  

Geoffrey grimaces, toes the grass clinging to the edge of the bank a little with his boot, and then turns away from the river and starts walking in a random direction. Ahead of him are rolling fields of green and the occasional tree. There also appears to be a collection of buildings to the west, and Geoffrey heads in that direction, knowing there will be a road somewhere nearby.

He sighs, and lets the knowledge that his wandering feet are leading him toward some sort of answers push away the terrible feelings from watching the colors Ellen had chosen fade away. There is something right about seeking out whatever might be in his future.



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