Free Ghost Brother (Spooky Short Stories by Kathryn Meyer Griffith) by Kathryn Meyer Griffith

 
    Oh, I’d already figured out I was dead. There was no other
sensible conclusion to arrive at. When I awoke–if awaking was the right term
because suddenly after a time of blackness there I was–I was sitting on top of a
fresh grave in this quaint but uncared for cemetery I recognized as the one
down the road from our house. There was no headstone on it yet so I couldn’t
read the name of the current inhabitant. Perhaps it wasn’t my grave, wasn’t my
headstone to come. Or that’s what I hoped.
    At first.
    Sooty clouds raced above, dried leaves danced in a chill
wind around the tombstones. It was raining, a steady forlorn drizzle that had
soaked everything. Drab splotches of brown spotted the earth and bundles of
witchy dead branches bounced round me like tumbleweeds. There were no birds. No
creepy crawly insects. Not a living thing. The colors were off, too. Everything
had a veneer of gray covering it and the air around me hummed with eerie
echoes, as if a crowd of people were whispering just beyond the threshold of my
hearing. It hurt my head, made me irritable. Angry.
    I looked down at myself and was surprised to see I was
dressed in my old brown suit. The one I only wore to weddings or funerals. It
was too tight and the legs too short. I’d always meant to buy a new one but
somehow had never gotten around to it. After all, I hadn’t attended a funeral
or a wedding in years.
     I could see through myself. Damn, I was a pane of glass. I
wiggled my fingers in front of my face. They were transparent, too.
    My head was really killing me now, making me realize I
could feel pain. Again, I thought that odd. Where was I and what the heck was I
doing here? Sheesh. Must have really laid one on last night. Maybe I should stay
off the booze for a couple of days. What a trip. I racked my brain but couldn’t
recall what had gotten me here. Hmmm.
    No, I was alive, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I? This was just some
sort of drink induced hallucination. Right?
    Rising to my feet, the mud on the grave remained clinging to
the ground and wet blades of grass, yet my suit was clean. Gazing around at the
gravesites, I thought I was alone but then, out of the corner of an eye, caught
another see-through person scampering away. It’d been hiding behind a tree,
spying on me. As it vanished into the rain curtain amidst the fringe of trees
surrounding the cemetery I heard it laugh. A you-poor-sucker-you-don’t-have-a-clue-yet-do-you
laugh. Let me tell you, that didn’t reassure me much. It didn’t sound human.
     I blinked and everything turned black and shadowy for a moment
and slowly came back into focus. My left hand disappeared and reappeared. My
outline blurred.
    Oh, oh.
    Something huge skittered around in the branches of the
trees above me and made a heart-stopping screech. Again, nothing human.
    Oh, I was dead all right. Dead as a doornail. Dead as
someone without a pulse, or a heartbeat, and whose blood has stopped moving in
their veins, could be. It was the why, how and when that eluded me. I fought to remember what had happened before I’d
found myself sprawled on the grave, but once more there was nothing. A frustrating
blank.
    Was this my paradisiacal reward, some in-between limbo or was
it, heaven help me, hell? If it was heaven, it was one weird one. There were no
angels and harp music. No fluffy clouds of cotton-candy white. No departed dear
ones to welcome and comfort me.
    “Well, what am I supposed to do now, for Pete’s sake?” I grilled
the silent graves around me. I had the overwhelming feeling I was supposed to
be somewhere else. That I had somewhere very important to go, something very
important to do … but couldn’t remember where or what
it was.
    “Hey, anyone around .
A nyone here?” I yelled
into the waning afternoon. Of course, no answer. Nothing. The silence was
beginning to freak me out. My laugh startled me. Who did I expect to be in a
cemetery anyway? The dead don’t make small talk or noise. The dead