Rotten and Spoiled

“… because I’ve been dead for ten years, in fact, I am a ghost who should not be here, because I am not alive, but am, in fact, dead.”

She had jumped across the room, got on tables, stumbled upon glasses, and cats, and banana peels, just to get to him in time, but it was no use, by the time, her hand was on his mouth, he had already spoiled the story they were in, and there was no turning back.

“What’s wrong with you? You are going to kill me,” he said and winked very beautifully foreshadowing something everyone already knew while everyone around them watched them curiously not knowing what to do.

“Come with me, you ruiner (i.e., someone who ruins things)!” she said and grabbed him along and threw him inside a room. “What did you do? You just ended the story and it was barely beginning!”

“What? No, no, I was getting ready for the role of… a lifetime!” he said and winked again. She tried to slap him across the face and send his eyeballs flying, but of course, he was a ghost, so that did not work.

“You idiot!” she cried and started peeling off her own face, which she could for the story was over. “This was my story at last. Don’t you get it? This is the only time I’ll ever be featured in any text, in the entire history of fiction, and you destroyed it by spoiling the ending!”

She curled up in a little chair and cried her heart out, literally, and then ate her heart, figuratively, then she cried some more until the blood came out of her own body, literally, and then she hit her head against the wall, figuratively. It was over, her time for literary stardom, to be featured at last in Gozumo Literary Short Story & Cake Recipe Magazine, Vol. 156, №12, was no more.

“Hey, is not the end of the world,” the ghost said and put his translucent hand on her shoulder.

“Of course it is. Don’t you see? The story has no ending anymore! There is nowhere for the story to go!”

“Come on, we’ll think of another ending!”

“Oh, yeah? Go ahead!”

But it was pointless and she went back to crying and he floated around the room. He thought and thought of something they could do for so long, that she had abandoned crying, and was simply drinking her problems away with alcohol of the methanol variety.

“Go get those optic nerves!” she screamed.

“I got it!” he said suddenly. “Let’s just say that I am another personality of you, then the twist is that, you look in the mirror and you’re all like oh it’s me there I am but I thought it was somebody else.”

“Won’t work, it hasn’t been set up at all!” she said and tears formed in her eyes again.

“Ok, what if I am your long lost brother, and I am here to exact my revenge?”

“Revenge for what? You were killed by sticking leaded poison up your anus.”

“Ok, what if I am just a figment of everybody’s imagination and then it turns out the whole town is like poisoned or maybe the aliens came and or maybe it is like collective trauma caused by parasocial crushing systems of capitalism devouring our societal, communal spirits and…”

“Just let it go, man,” she said and put her hand on his shoulder. “It is over. This story will be no more and we won’t be a part of any literary course ever. That’s all I ever wanted. I wanted a professor of just one Literature Course to say my name, and look wistfully at the sun, and sigh like they were having the best orgasm of their life!”

“We still can do it. There’s still time!”

“There it is! The blank page, do you see it? Here it comes!”

“No, I’m sorry. I failed you! We can still be heroes, we still can. Just trust me!”

“You don’t even have a name,” she said and she shook her head as she was elevated downwards towards literary hell where all rejected ideas go. “And neither do I. Just hold my hand as we vanish into the nothingness!”

“Let’s have a sequel please, even if in movie format, do not give up on us. We are still worthwhile characters! Hello, can anyone hear me?”