The Ghost of Romance Past
A Spooky Christmas Story
I was clanking my chains around the Christmas party punch bowl, trying to project a little ectoplasm into Dora's glass when the fat woman saw me. She screamed and threw her glass of Egg Nog into the air, then, pointing a trembling finger in my direction, she sank to the floor babbling on and on about what she had seen.
Typical. We ghosts have a saying: "It's only the people who you don't want to see you who actually see you. The people you want to see you never do." How very true that is. I mean, why would I want to get in touch with the fat woman? I have no vital and important messages from the Other Side to impart to her. And - for Heaven’s sake - it’s not as if we have anything in common: she is very substantial and I am not. It was the pale and thin, ethereal Dora with whom I wanted to communicate. Now she is much more my type, oh yes, although she is apparently about as psychic as a bag of cement.
Meanwhile, the other guests had gathered around the fat woman and Dora went to fetch a glass of water for her - striding right through me on her way to the kitchen! Obviously I tried to catch Dora’s eye as she rushed by, but without success, since our heads are on different levels, mine being tucked under my armpit while hers is in the normal place about two feet above my eye line.
Anyway, nobody believed the fat woman's story, of course. They began slowly drifting away from her in small, whispering groups: someone said she was drunk: too much rich food, somebody else explained: chocolate fondue makes her go all wobbly and she starts dribbling down her chin, they all agreed.
But Dora was wonderful with her. She is very good at dealing with the living, not so good with the dead, alas. Never mind, I bet she probably just gets nervous around people she doesn't believe in. Who wouldn’t?
Dora and I had met - if you can call it that - twice before. The first time indirectly when I was acting as Spirit Guide at a séance she was attending at her mother's instigation. They were trying to contact the spirit of Dora's Uncle George. Although why they would wish to undertake such a course of action, I cannot imagine. Uncle George is a restless spirit in more ways than one, and he really gets on my nerves with that annoyingly fidgety behavior of his, never able to sit still and decompose in one grave at a time, just farts and belches his way around the astral plane like some kind of disembodied Frat Boy. Dora was very different, however, and I knew instantly she was the girl for me. Unfortunately, the medium came out of her trance before I got a chance to put my best pick up lines across, and all I had a chance to say was the usual banal and meaningless stuff: "Your Uncle George is very happy with us on the Other Side" - which may have been true, but as I said before, the Other Side was not especially happy with Uncle George …whatever. The second time Dora and I met she was part of a group experimenting with one of those Ouija board things. I had just managed to spell out "SWM. Deceased with GSH seeks" with the planchette when this know-it-all lesbian interrupted: “a malevolent spirit has entered the circle" she whined, and I couldn't finish my sentence. Then they started playing Monopoly instead.
So both meetings were what you might call “unsuccessful”.
Fortunately, being in possession of special powers as it were, I knew that Dora would be at this Christmas party, and so I spent the previous week practicing all my most successful seduction techniques and best lines, such as: "Hi Dora, remember me, I was the cold damp spot on the floor at the séance last week.”
Or, and this never fails: “If you were dead too we could walk through walls together. What do you say ...your tomb or mine."
Unfortunately, I suffer from lack of confidence, much as I did in life. I have phantom neurosis and find it very difficult to believe in myself, and so I never think others will believe in me either. Of course, convincing arguments can be made for the survival of the spirit after death: an impression in the fabric of time, for example: a sort of Monet-ish dab in the ether. All that seems reasonable enough. But, and this is really weird, the fat woman had said I was dressed in some sort of fishing outfit from the Edwardian era, which doesn't make a lot of sense when you think about it. Of course, Tweed is famously very durable. But, nevertheless, it is hard to believe it lasts beyond the grave, however excellent the tailoring might be. And how do you explain phantom shoes? Are they are doomed to stalk the Earth forever searching for the shoe trees that abandoned them in life? It seems unlikely.
However, summoning all my courage, I picked up a sprig of mistletoe and drifted over to where Dora still leant over the fat woman, "Dora, Dora, Dora." I whispered, breathing my most expensively scented ectoplasm in her lovely ear.
"Ugggh. I think Agnes is being sick on my hair." Dora cried, and ran off to the bathroom.
It seems like she’s been in there for an eternity, but that doesn’t bother me, naturally. I can wait.
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