Yesterday
marked my twenty-eight consecutive day of work and I had a dream that I’d died
from overwork. In Heaven, a male secretary with thin glasses and a receding hairline
was managing a long line of the newly dead. Once I got to the front of the
line, the secretary glanced up at me and said in a dismissive tone, “Your
spirit is too restless. You are to remain earthbound. Next!” And with that the
clouds underneath my feet separated and I fell from Heaven and into a white
house with chipping paint. It was falling apart and leant to one side.
So I was
to become a poltergeist. My victim, the owner of the house, was a bald man in
his mid-fifties. Apparently, this wasn’t enough ghostly work for me and I took
up a second job as a vengeful bog spirit, donning a red cloak and heading to
the nearby marsh to scare teenagers. This ghoul’s work commenced each evening after
the man in the dilapidated home had been spooked out of bed numerous times.
A few
weeks into this routine, my thoughts began to focus on the gentleman; something
about him was oddly familiar. Why had the secretary deemed him an appropriate target
for my haunting? And was I so restless that my fate was to haunt this poor
fellow? The whole situation seemed foul, and not just because I was dead.
One night, on my way down from
my home, the attic, to the man’s bedroom, I spotted a picture on his bureau.
It was of a man in his early twenties wearing thin-rimmed silver glasses and a tired expression. I curiously picked it up and stared at it for
a few seconds, noting the coincidence that this young man and I were roughly
the same age. Then it hit me! The pictured man was the male secretary! I had
been set up!
It became my death’s goal to
prove that the secretary had abused his power to cheat me out of my spot in
Heaven and doomed me as the sleeping man’s harassing phantom for some sort of
personal gain or revenge. Upon this revelation, I woke up.
