Random stories

I could always communicate with the dead, but I learned very quickly to pretend that I couldn't.

People finding out you see and hear ghosts was never a good thing. That's how you get sent to infuriatingly calm-voiced doctors and counselors for "evaluation".

Even worse, though, is when the ghosts find out you can see them.

All of a sudden, their "unfinished business" is somehow your problem, and unless you want the dearly departed jump-scaring you all day out of spite, you have to help them resolve it.

Thus, I avoided eye contact with the dead, kept my unearthly sixth sense to myself, and just tried to live my life. I never stopped seeing them, but eventually, the spirit world just became part of the background noise of my life. Birds squawking, car horns honking, and the groans of the damned -- you just learn to tune it out.

That was until my fateful trip to Hong Kong. I'd been sent there by the company I worked for to train some employees in our Asian subsidiary but had some spare time for sightseeing.

As always, I avoided giving the scattered spirits any sign I could see them, never letting my eyes linger on the dead -- especially in a foreign country. Being able to hear ghosts doesn't mean I automatically know what they're saying, and the last thing I need is a ghost who only speaks Cantonese trying to get me to help them find rest, despite the language barrier.

But then, at the mouth of an alley, I saw something I couldn't tear my eyes away from: the pale ghost of an old woman stood by a firing barrel, across from a living, middle-aged man, who she seemed to be watching expectantly.

He was awkwardly holding a cup of instant noodles with chopsticks stuck in the top in the crook of one arm, as he reached into a paper bag, and pulled out what looked a tiny replica of his cup of noodles made of paper. He dropped it into the barrel, and then set it alight with a match.

Instantly, a steaming cup of ghostly noodles appeared in the old woman's hands. She gave a broad, gap-toothed smile, and began eating them. As I watched in amazement, the man and the old dead woman just quietly had lunch together, and then parted ways, with the man pausing to press his palms together in respect.

To my further astonishment, the woman then called out something in Cantonese, and a ghostly man pulling a rickshaw darted out of the wall of the alley. She handed the other ghost a few bills, then climbed into the rickshaw, and the other apparition \*spirited her away,\* if you'll excuse the expression.

At first, I thought the noodle man must have the same gift I did, but when I asked him what he'd been doing with the paper noodle bowl, he laughed, looking a little embarrassed. It turned out that like many residents of Hong Kong, he spoke pretty good English.

He said the paper noodles were part of a modern adaptation of an old Chinese custom of honoring the spirits of their ancestors with offerings.

Papercraft items, called "joss paper" in English, were burned with the idea that doing so gave the ancestor being honored the spirit of the item represented by the paper. Kind of like how Egyptian pharaohs were buried with little model chariots and furniture, which would presumably be full-sized and functional in their afterlife.

In modern-day Hong Kong, people burned paper smartphones, paper condos, paper cars, paper food, paper jewelry, paper gold, and even paper money which was printed -- due to a cultural and linguistic misunderstanding -- in the name of the "First Bank of Hell".

The noodle man add that he didn't really believe in it, but his grandmother had, and so every so often he'd perform a simple offering or two in her honor --- apparently a fond memory of his was sharing a lunch of instant noodles with his grandma l, as a child.

It hadn't occurred to me that a ghost would have any desires beyond ending its purgatorial sojourn and moving on -- this encounter had given me a whole new perspective on the dead.

Shortly after my trip overseas, I was laid off from my job. It turned out I'd been training people who would, in turn, train other people in the company's Delhi office, and those people would take over my job remotely.

Surprisingly, I didn't mind so much. I had my own business venture in mind.

That’s how, six months later. I found myself cashing in over fifteen thousand dollars in chips at The Mirage in Las Vegas. The suspicious glare of the pit bosses had been almost palpable when I’d cleaned up at the roulette table to a degree that would make any statistician have a seizure, but they had nothing on me.

Their cameras and sharp-eyed security guards might be able to spot cheats and card counters a mile away, but there wasn’t much they could do about Mary Lou, the shade of an ambitious young woman who’d come to Vegas from her small town in Kentucky to experience the high life back in the 1970s, but had said life cut tragically short by an overdose. By exerting the tiny bit of force she still could apply to the physical world, Mary Lou could put a roulette ball exactly where I wanted it to go, among other ghostly tricks that made gambling not much of a gamble for me.

As I exited the casino, cash in a locked briefcase, Mary Lou floated up beside me, and flashed me a smile that was dazzling despite her…well, her condition. When I’d found her moping around the dark alley off the strip where she died, she’d looked pretty rough, clad only in the torn, dated polyester dress she’d passed away wearing. Now -- courtesy of my joss paper supplier in Hong Kong -- she was decked out in a gleaming satin evening dress and high heels, with a fox fur wrap draped over her shoulders (it’s otherworldly ectoplasm and paper, don’t @ me, PETA) and her neck and fingers sparkled with ghostly gems.

“Where to now, sugar?” she drawled, playfully linking her arm with mine and matching my pace so she didn’t pass through me.

“Now? You’re off the clock, go wherever you like.” I said, stifling a yawn. “Me, I’m calling it a night.”

“Aw!” she pouted, trying in vain to tug at my sleeve. “Don’t be boring, boss -- come on, let’s go check out the Aladdin!”

I shook my head, with a wry smile. “I need my res. Besides, that’s not exactly my kind of place -- remember?” The Aladdin Hotel & Casino she referred to had been a fixture of the Las Vegas strip, back in her day, but it had been demolished in 1998. I didn’t know what would happen if I tried to follow my deceased employee into the bygone casino’s ghostly echo, which seemed to roughly intersect with the Planet Hollywood Casino that occupied the site where it once stood, and I didn’t particularly want to find out.

She shrugged, pulling out her phone and scrolling through it. She’d taken to modern technology remarkably fast, once I’d burned her some. I still didn’t know what that phone connected to, but it must do something, considering how often she’s on it. Maybe old iterations of the internet and cellular networks have spectral echoes, too, just like the Aladdin. “Suit yourself, boss man! As for me, I’ll sleep when I’m…well, you know what I mean. Bye, babe!”

I waved at her fondly as she floated away and vanished into the crowd.

For the first time in my life, I’d made peace with my gift, and even found a way to make it work for me. That was a plus.

On the downside, I was seriously worried that I might be falling for a woman who had died decades before I was born.

---

Submitted by SilasCrane on Thu, Jul 14, 2022 to /r/WritingPrompts/

The prompt

You can talk to ghosts, but you've never liked using your power much. That is, until you realized ghosts have problems too, and they're willing to pay, in their own way, for solutions to those problems. You launch a new business venture.