prompt: sink, title: a ghost is born in misc. flash fiction

The worst thing about being dead other than not being alive, of course, is the way that absolutely nothing changes. Everything changes for you, sure, you’re no longer corporeal, no longer able to eat or drink or communicate with most people in any kind of meaningful way. Maybe you could make a light bulb flicker if you concentrated for an hour, give a barely-perceptible chill to some someone you walk through. Move an Ouija planchette a centimeter if there isn’t already a smug brat teenager nudging it, to mess with their friends. Whisper to people, at the edge of a slumber, at best they might note it as a half-remembered dream. Then again, change is relative.

Maybe it is best to say, you are changed so that you can no longer change anything, while you watch the whole world change while not changing around you, forever. What you thought was the linear progress of the human race turns out to just be a series of cycles within cycles, once you’ve been dead a couple hundred years. Terrible kings and queens rise and ruin and fall, oh sometimes they call themselves presidents or generals or CEOs, but they all die eventually, to join the ghosts themselves. Their children or their rivals inherit the terror that power foments, that horror of undeserved authority marching through the ages, like Einsteinian matter, never created, never lost, just new skin on ancient sins. Empires blooming and rotting upon the vine.

The longer you’re locked in, the more you understand that nothing changes but the faces and pretty words used to justify conquest and disaster. At first, this dilemma of ghostly existence consists of practical concerns: Can I still communicate with loved ones? Is there anywhere to proceed to next? If I’m walking through walls, why don’t I sink into the Earth as well? What could possibly be different about the soil’s atoms than the wall’s atoms? Is it magic? Perhaps gravity is weirder than previously thought and also wrangles the deceased? Who knows?

On the other transparently immaterial hand, however, you get to see all the goodness attempting to overturn that cruelty. The empathies and cooperations and compassions that actually built the world, when the monsters with titles would’ve only had the vision to have us keep beating each other with sticks in caves for their amusements. Over the centuries and long millennia, love and understanding keep building and rebuilding what greed and pomposity keep tearing down. And thank whatever god trapped you as a ghost as well for the little spark of goodness that keeps on rising to push back on the consumption. The disease that kills lungs, the idea that kills societies.

The worst thing about being dead is that you’re dead. The best thing about being dead is that you’re now off your temporary place on the Wheel of Life and you can see how nothing was turning at all except for you. As a consolation prize, though, having perspective isn’t too bad.