"My Ghost" by Hugh Behm-Steinberg
- Roi Fainéant
- 1 day ago
- 8 min read
I’m waiting in line at the corner store when I see my ghost four people ahead of me, trying to buy a pack of cigarettes. But he only has ghost money, so the clerk won’t let him buy anything.
“Why don’t you try the boarded-up gas station across the street?” the clerk asks. “I hear it’s haunted. I’m sure they have all sorts of ghost cigarettes you can buy over there.”
“They don’t have Camels,” my ghost says. “They only carry brands that no longer exist.”
My ghost tries to get what he wants, that pack of Camels, the brand that smells like chocolate and/or your parents. Because chocolate smells like life. But in this world, if you don’t have real money at least, you’re going to need help to get the things you want. You’re going to have to ask for it. Ghosts are always asking for things, which is number four on the list of reasons why people don’t like them.
After looking at me balefully for dragging my ghost in here somehow, the clerk just ignores the spectre, and just like that the other customers do too.
“Any of you could have a near-death experience,” my ghost grimly whispers. “Or a séance gone wrong, or bad credit even. The end of the world is nigh, all it takes is one little curse, and you’ll only wish you had been kinder to those of us from the other side.”
The people in the store just shuffle through him, buying booze and cigarettes and other assorted crap that’ll kill them more or less slowly.
“You don’t have to be assholes,” my ghost mumbles forlornly, not even bothering to try scaring anybody anymore.
When it’s my turn, my ghost looks at me with the most reproachful expression, like if you won’t even buy cigarettes for your own ghost, then what sort of person are you? Someone who probably kicks his ghost when he thinks nobody is looking, that’s who.
“Fine,” I sigh. “One pack of Camel Lights.”
“Camel Unfiltereds,” my ghost interrupts.
“Unfiltereds,” I proclaim. “And this here extra-large bag of Sun Chips is for me. It’s on sale, right? Oh, and give me some matches, too.”
Grudgingly, the clerk rings me up, making me pay extra for the bag. Everyone knows ghosts are bad for business, at least the kind of business you want to have. But I choose to be aggressively cheerful in the situation, because I am NOT the sort of person who kicks his ghost, and I want my ghost to know it.
How did I get to meet my own ghost, me who is definitely among the living? Let’s just say when you get the phone call for the pre-planned cemetery plot package next to your parents, and the salesperson goes on and on about how much you’ll save by purchasing NOW when you are in the pre-need stage of your life, and how, for just a little tiny bit more, you can get the full ghost experience to guide you in this life and help you commune with your lost loved ones: you really should say no thank you to that last part.
Outside the store, I hand the cigarettes over. My ghost opens the pack, tapping it first repeatedly against the wall of the store, cursing the clerk and all the clerk’s relatives and pets in terrible detail with each tap. “Do you want one?” he finally says.
“No thanks,” I say reflexively. “Smoking’s bad for you.”
“Not if you’re already dead,” my ghost says. “We get to smoke all we want. Light me?”
I light the cigarette in my ghost’s mouth. I can see my face, my ghost face, and yes, it’s weird and that’s reason number three people don’t like ghosts, especially their own. We cross the street, walking past the abandoned gas station, up to the gates of the cemetery. It’s the Day of the Dead, as my ghost has been reminding me off and on all week, between haunting me and going wherever the hell ghosts go, and even though I’m not Catholic, I’d be a bad son if I didn’t at least make an attempt to say hello to my parents. The security guard sees my ghost and waves us through.
“You don’t like me,” my ghost says, not for the first time. “You think I’m a shitty ghost, but it’s really because you don’t like yourself.”
“I don’t think you’re shitty,” I say, also not for the first time, opening up my bag of chips in front of a ghost who thinks he knows all the answers. “But I have no idea how you turned out to be who you are, because I am nothing like you.”
“That’s what you’d like to think,” my ghost says. The smugness of the dead: that’s reason number two.
We’ve arrived at my parents’ grave, right next to my own with the unfilled date on the stone. “You want some?”
“Empty carbs? Fill me up!”
He opens his mouth obscenely wide. I can’t do it: put chips in his face, getting filthy septic ghost juices on my hands. I hand him the bag, but it slowly drifts through his fingers and a bunch clatter on my grave.
“Don’t be a chickenshit,” my ghost says. “They’re still sorta healthy, so I can’t hold onto them. You’re going to have to feed me. Or maybe I should tell you when you are going to die or whether there is in fact, a God who is judging everything you do and think right now.”
One by one, I feed chips to my ghost, and it’s all kinds of gross to see how much he enjoys them. After a while, he says, “Your parents are here, do you have anything you want to say?”
I’ve been nervously waiting for this moment. The salesperson was quite eloquent about this part: get the ghost, and you’ve got a direct line to the land of the dead, at least once a year, depending on your faith and the sincerity of your beliefs: you are sincere in your beliefs, right? I look around, observing more than a few other families having quiet conversations, and try to feel brave.
“Well?” my ghost asks.
“Hi Mom, Hi Dad,” I say to my ghost. “How are things in Heaven?”
“They say they can’t go into the specifics but that they’re fine, and what the hell are you doing with a giant bag of Sunchips at your age?”
“They were on sale, Mom,” I say, just assuming it would be my mom who would still be critiquing my eating habits.
“Was the diabetes on sale too? We see the whole delta of your life and the consequences of your decisions, the ones you make and the ones you don’t, and trust me, you do not want to go there.” My ghost gives me a gleeful I’m not the only one who thinks you’re a fuckup look as he digs out another cigarette. Somehow, he’s figured out how to make the matches work all on his own.
“Okay, Dad,” I say, because that was definitely a Dad thing to listen to. They’re right of course, I mean, who am I kidding buying the economy size? It’s kind of stupid to do self-destructive shit when you can see your own ghost sticking his tongue out at you.
So I get up off the grass covering our graves, grabbing the bag of Sunchips. I reach in for a handful, which I start placing at the various graves around me, the ones where it looks like nobody’s going to visit. I hope that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re visiting the cemetery on the Day of the Dead. It’s not like I could just interrupt some grieving family at their own plot and ask whether it would be morally ok or culturally appropriative if I left a bunch of junk food on top of their dead relatives. I wander around in the crisp fall weather, stopping by the children’s section and then the Civil War veterans’ memorial. I’m a good person: I distribute every single chip in the bag to somebody buried beneath me.
I know I ought to feel humble about my good deed, but I don’t, I turn around because I want to hear all the thank-you’s my ghost should be passing along. Instead, he’s rolling around on the ground, his mouth crammed full of Sunchips, laughing his literal ghost ass off. I mean the kind of laughter you do when you never have to worry about choking to death.
“I do a great dad,” my ghost says in the five seconds he can grab between all the laughing. “Don’t I?” Bits of chips are sprinkling out of his face in all directions.
“Delta of your life,” he says, doing something obscene with his hands that no statue can stop.
Is that reason number one, for why people hate seeing their own ghosts? The jokes? You tell me. If I could have murdered my ghost, that’s what I would have done. But in a moment, my ghost goes from laughing to rapidly slapping himself, as if little fires were breaking out on random parts of his body. “Quit it,” he shrieks. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he wails. Bits of him start disappearing, a kneecap, an eyeball, his whole left leg. Whatever’s doing this to him seems quite vicious, and very thorough. They leave his mouth so he can scream.
When there’s just the head, some spine and one shoulder with a forearm still attached, just as quickly it stops. While my ghost gets the writhing in agony out of his system, I watch the empty bag of Sunchips drift away as if in a breeze, except the air around us is so very still, it’s like the world is holding its breath.
“You had to leave some chips in the Children’s section, didn’t you?” says my ghost, like a kid who never gets to keep anything he wants. “Can you at least get me another cigarette?”
He just sounds sad. Do I ever sound that sad?
I give my ghost another cigarette. I even light it for him, seeing as he no longer has any hands. “Are you going to stay fucked up like this?”
“So long as I stay here, yeah. But I should get better once I crawl out of this godforsaken SHITHEAP of a place.”
“Do you want a ride?”
He nods, so I do my best to scoop up what’s left of him into the sack from the store. It’s goopy and disgusting, but you know what? Under my skin, I’m probably just as goopy and disgusting.
I don’t hate myself, or my ghost for that matter. But man, I need to make some adjustments if this is what I’m going to be by the time I’m dead.
I’m still ruminating when my ghost starts muttering in its sack, “All right, All RIGHT,” he declaims. “Could this day get any crappier?”
I look down into the wreckage of my face as it mouths the words, “Ezra, it’s your dad. He says he used to smoke Camels when he was in his thirties, and was wondering if you could leave what’s left of the pack on top of his headstone.”
“Is that all?” I ask. I make the bag with my ghost in it slosh around a bit.
“Your parents want you to know they love you and respect your stupid life choices,” mutters my ghost, like he thinks he’s doing me a favor.
“Fuck you too,” I jauntily tell my ghost (and maybe my parents?) as we wind our way out of that graveyard.
It’s good to be alive.