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She haunted him.
Years, it had been now, since the last time they’d breathed the same air — or, for that matter, since one of them had breathed at all. Not that Mrs. Ormerod had been in the habit of leaving her husband much air space anyway, even back when they’d both been alive.
It hadn’t been that bad, in life. Or, well, maybe it had been, but in any case Ron figured he’d tolerated it well enough. Most of the time. For a very long time.
But they’d said, long ago, ‘Til death do us part. He’d meant it. He’d stood by it, for better and mostly for worse. And now he was dead… and he was more than ready to part.
But instead, every week without fail, he found himself drawn inexorably back to that Marjorie Potts’s living room, forced yet again to listen tonguelessly to another seemingly endless discourse on the latest trivialities and family gossip while Marjorie did a terrible job of impersonating him. If Ron had still had a heart, it would have given out from sheer annoyance. The fake accents alone were worse than any of the eternal torment his old pastor had warned of.
So many years, and still his wife haunted him: a ghost of the past he couldn’t seem to leave behind, no matter how hard he tried.
(If anyone had suggested to Ron that maybe he was the ghost in the situation, he would have taken offense. Just because he happened to be a dead, disembodied spirit didn’t mean people had to go calling him names.)
He was no longer capable of being sick and no longer capable of being tired, but he was sick and tired of the whole business anyway. It was very unfair, in Ron’s opinion, that Marjorie should have just enough psychic ability to summon spirits to a seance but not enough to actually know how to channel the spirits themselves.
So there he found himself, week after week, stuck listening to his wife go on and on and on, unable to say a word in response…
And that was even more unfair. Death wasn’t supposed to be the same as life.
Someday, Ron Ormerod vowed in the heart he didn’t have, he would find a way to answer back.
Perhaps, when he did, he could finally be at rest. It wasn’t easy, being a haunted ghost.