Day Thirty one: Ghosts

We all have ghosts, remorse, dreams, things we love and hate. One day something in life- a word, a phrase, something in a book, a beautiful woman- clicks and part of that world takes on a special meaning. And you realize you have a story to tell. --Arturo Perez Reverte

The past but lives in written words: a thousand ages were blank if books had not evoked their ghosts and kept the pale unbodied shades to warn us from fleshless lips--Francois Fenelon

 

 Today's exercise is taken from THE 3 A.M. EPIPHANY: Uncommon writing exercises that transform your fiction by Brian Kiteley

Write a story about a ghost who is bored by the immensities of time and timelessness. Or write a story about a ghost who is embarrassed by the intimacies she is able to achieve with perfect strangers over and over again (without actually being intimate with them). Start your fragment of fiction with a phrase something like, "After I was dead..." Try to be matter-of-fact about your ghost or ghosts. Certainly a living person encountering this ghost will have a scare but make this ghost the central sympathetic figure of the narrative you unfold, not the mechanism for exciting our interest in the living characters. This should be a straightforward piece of narration. Something that takes for granted the idea of ghosts.

Later:

Ghost Exercise #31

By Laurie Guerin

After I was dead, life got interesting for a time.  All of that worry and existential fear; POOF!  I mean the ‘worst’ has happened, right? And it turns out the ‘worst’ is actually not the worst, but the next. Just the next.

Which pissed me off at first.

I mean, planet-bound life is such a set up. I remember thinking even when I had the body that humans were so brave. That to get up in the morning was an act of immense courage. Seriously. When you know that at any time anything can happen to you or the people you love? Not just the obvious, like a car crash, or cancer, or a drug overdose, but the sneaky little freak accidents—like in Vacaville, California when a cow gets struck by a car, launched into the air and lands on some poor guy; Or the little girl in Ohio who’s killed by a random hockey puck, or the guy in South Carolina who’s jogging on the beach when a small plane crash lands into the back of his head. Sometimes I saw life as a mad dash across a billion-lane highway, dodging cars, planes and airborne livestock.  And while we were making that mad dash we were supposed to hold down jobs and remember birthdays and fall in love and sign tax forms.

How were we supposed to pay attention to the little things?

Like the shadows that fell oh-so-briefly across our children’s faces when we told them that for sure tomorrow we were gonna play that game, or see that movie, or read that story together.

Shadows fall everywhere, after all.

When you die, you blink. It’s a long, slow blink, like a cat’s. You close your eyes and when your vision comes on again, the entire landscape has changed. Not just physical, which of course had changed completely- but emotional.

You’re terrified. You blink. You’re not.