Phantom Limbs: A Spicy Ghost Story

Chapter 1

You don't need to be a ghost to imagine how lonely it is, but, as a ghost, I can definitively tell you: it's lonely as hell. I've inhabited this two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment ever since my death back in 2012 and, although many people have come and gone since then, they were all too busy to notice me. Whenever I left a cabinet open, one roommate would either blame the other one or question their own sanity. Whenever I flickered the lights on and off, they would blame the power company. Nobody ever wanted to believe in me, even though they would notice the eerie quality of the place. Sometimes, people would get so spooked out that they'd move out, but they'd never do the work of wondering why they were creeped out. Humans would rather do anything than to acknowledge my existence.

So I spent the days bored, watching the humans' lives play out in front of me. From one year to the next, from one set of roommates to one single mom to one small family to another set of roommates, and on and on, I'd been dwelling in the place, unnoticed, spectating. Every day seemed to be exactly the same. All I wanted was for someone, ANYONE, to say aloud: "Hey, do you think this place is haunted?" But it never happened. I never got the recognition I craved.

But then, one day in 2020, everything changed.

The sun had started to last longer, so I figured it had to be spring. I only knew what year it was because, whenever the landlord would give a tour of the apartment, they'd mention what a year 2020 was. Apparently there was a pandemic going on, some far-reaching and awful illness. But from the confines of my ghostly presence in the apartment, I hadn't been able to witness it firsthand. I did, however, feel grateful to not be alive in that moment. Ghosts didn't get sick, after all.

The new tenant was a beanpole of a thing: a tall, slender man with long black hair and hollow eyes. He was so pale, his expression so lifeless, that he might as well have been a ghost. Two weeks after agreeing to rent the apartment, he started to move in. Although a handful of people had arrived to help him, I noticed that, once they all left, he was alone.

My new roommate got to work unloading boxes. As he did so, I couldn't help but find him oddly attractive. He seemed to really like metal. He unpacked boxes and boxes of band tees and stashed them haphazardly in a small dresser. He carefully unraveled multiple bands' posters and taped them up on the freshly-painted white walls in his bedroom. The other bedroom sat empty, occupied only by boxes that my new roommate had decided not to open yet.

And as he labored around the apartment, setting everything up, I couldn't help but notice that the scraggly thing did, indeed, have some muscles. Whenever he moved a box, they would flex and he would let out a soft sigh, clearly struggling with the effort.

It was apparent to me that this wasn't a move he wanted to make, but I couldn't figure out why. All I knew was that he kept walking past the empty room and sighing before moving onto his next task. Everything in the apartment was his, and his alone, and he seemed completely miserable about it. As someone so accustomed to loneliness, I found myself immediately relating to him.

At the end of the day, my new roommate took a hot, steamy shower. I decided that would be my moment to let him know I was there. I drifted into the bathroom behind him, looking away when he undressed. I was creepy, such is the nature of ghosts, but let it never be said that I was impolite. Once he'd become completely immersed in his showering experience, I reached out and flickered the lights on and off.

"AAH!" he yelled, bumping into the wall.

My new roommate peeked his head out from around the shabby brown shower curtain he'd put up earlier and looked around the room frantically. For once, he didn't look dead, but he did look terrified. His thick black eyebrows raised and his brown eyes widened as he scanned the bathroom, but then he seemed relieved to find that nobody was there – nobody he could see, anyway.