Buyer Beware

My car is haunted by the spirit of a dragged man. He’s tied to the bumper by a rope of ectoplasm. He screams at stop lights and you can only hear him from inside the car. If you try to drown him out with the radio he screams through that. It works with certain types of music, but most times it is simply dissonant and stressful.

I pass through multiple worlds on my way to work. It helps to wear sunglasses. Sometimes there is a road, other times I just steer by the fires on either side and on the horizon. There are always intersections for the damned. I drive right through them while the thronging souls drive right through me. It doesn’t feel like anything in particular, except for sadness. This passes as they pass and this way I don’t have to listen to the dragged man.

The only thing that is never changing is the sky. When I look up I can see the mortals. Their world is called The Grey. It’s called this because supposedly there is no black and white. Everything contains some part of its opposite up there. A degenerate heap of solids and copulations, in my opinion.

Where I work we manufacture notions. Today I’m working with folly, a rape of stones, and pursuit. It’s not much to work with but I have experience. The mingling is always difficult because it is not in our nature. In essence we are imitating Grey things. They are transmitted to The Grey at the end of every shift. Everybody transmits their own at the end of the day, and these get mingled too, before piercing the effluvium and finding mortal minds.

When my shift is over I am half my regular size. When I reach my car I have even lost my hair, receded into my form for recuperation.

There is a mischief on the hood of my car. The third one visited specially to me in my entire life. I am reminded of the damned.

I am saying to the thing, “What do you want you wretched pest?”

He titters, “I want nothing. To want is to purpose, I am but the rearranging fool. Surely you know this?”

This one at least speaks in words. Its predecessor burned thoughts into me and it took many years to learn to speak again. “I know very well, but I do not accept. What have you done now?”

“I have given your dragged man a proper voice,” he sings, and I am moved by the astounding nature of the melody. He is spinning his folds like the petals of a wind born flower.

“You are the worst type of spirit,” I say, as his folds arch above his head, melding and encompassing him.

He is flashing fourteen different colors, and laughing fourteen different laughs. “We have our fun,” he says, taking to wind and floating away.

I get in my car, turn the ignition and step on the gas. The sound is louder than Gabriel’s horn and it is drawing every glance it passes. It is so loud it reaches The Grey, and is transmigrated into a slew of nightmares.

“OH! AYIEEEE! AGH!”

We have our fun.