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“Are your socks on the floor, Edward?” the woman’s voice demanded through Tracy’s mouth.
Her client opened his mouth indignantly.
“Because I think your socks are on the floor. From the day I married you to the day I died, Edward Davis, you took off your bloody socks every night and threw them on the bloody floor. And believe me, Edward, I can see a lot of the mysteries of the universe from where I am, but I can’t see why. Did you think they were some sort of modern art installation? Come one, come all, marvel at the fact that Edward bloody Davis has feet? Or—oh, he’s gone.” The specter unpossessed Tracy at about the same moment that the downstairs door slammed shut, signaling another lost client.
Tracy sighed. “And what,” she asked the shifting, flickering ranks of spirits, “am I supposed to do now? You don’t have to eat, but I do!” She was twenty-three and facing eviction and this was not how her story was supposed to go.
“I didn’t even get to tell him about the toothpaste,” the late Mrs. Davis mourned. “All the time, smearing the toothpaste over the top of the bottle so you couldn’t close it without it getting all squidgy . . .” Her voice was fading out as she wandered off through the spirit realm. Tracy wondered, not for the first time, if there was something about being a ghost that made people feel more free to express the small but potent grievances they had suppressed in life. Or was it that ghosts were people with unfinished business, and the majority of unfinished business was excruciatingly petty?
“I have to eat,” Tracy repeated firmly. “I have to pay rent. So you lot better shape up and start telling people that you’re very very happy and you love them and you’ll see them when they cross over in due time, or—”
The voices pointed out, with varying levels of scorn, that there was nothing coming after the “or.”
“Just lie to them,” a voice said reasonably.
Tracy focused on that one. “You. Who are you?”
“Colleen O’Leary, not that it’s any of your business.”
Tracy remembered this one, she thought. An older spirit, mostly content to offer snide color commentary on whatever was going on. Tracy thought she might be a teenager, if that meant anything to ghosts, which it very likely didn’t.
She thought about it. People, by and large, didn’t actually seem to want truth. Or at least, not truth in large quantities. It was like salt, truth was: if you just dumped it on without consideration, you ruined the whole thing.
“Colleen O’Leary,” Tracy said, “I think you’re going to be my new spirit guide.”
“Shan’t,” Colleen said, crossing notional arms.
“And all you have to do is—absolutely nothing. I’ll make it up.”
Colleen looked, for some value of “looked,” cautiously intrigued.