Sage Among Ghosts (ManxMan)

If You Give a Ghost a Cookie

I noticed her tiny hand first. It was pale and chubby, and had faint red and purple splotches on the heel of the palm and the fingertips that one would get from finger painting. It shook ever so slightly as the fingers flexed and released in a beckoning motion.

"Here Skittles. Come on boy, come back up here," she called down to me. She was maybe six, with strawberry blonde fluff surrounding her cherubic face. Her candy red mouth was curled down in an anxious frown and her blue eyes glowed with an ethereal light. She was the cutest dead girl I'd ever seen.

If not for the unseasonably hot day, I would never have noticed my pre-pubescent apparition. I sat in my office, eyes tired and red from going through case files and taking notes. My giant oak desk was varnished with medical texts, legal pads and pens with missing tops. I wiped my brow with a napkin from yesterday's Chinese lunch special. It was ninety degrees in the shade, and I was baking in my cramped, eraser sized office. The damn AC was broken again, and I'd long ago shed my sport coat and tie. But that hadn't stopped me from browning like a damn turkey. Giant sweat puddles stained my charcoal button down at my pits and spine.

"Could it get any hotter in here?" Sebastian complained as he plopped his designer slacks encased butt on the edge of my desk, knocking a stack of papers askew. He was like a spectral version of herpes. I acquired him one fuzzy, drunken night and haven't been able to shake him since.

Sebastian Montgomery Roth died in '84, trying to escape the third floor bedroom of his married lover's window. A member of the yuppie elite in New York, he fucked anyone as long as they were beautiful-man or woman. A dick of the tallest order, it wasn't a big loss in his community that when fleeing Buffy Carlisle's room to avoid being caught by her husband, he slipped on the wet balcony roof paneling and fell in the shallow end of her pool, snapping his neck.

"Bite me," Seb smirked, giving me his trademark "aren't I just the hottest little shit you've ever seen" look. And he was. With his dark tousled hair, tall lean frame and dimples, I would consider him totally doable if not for that whole dead thing. The only thing that marred his otherwise perfect canvas was the angry red band of flesh around his neck denoting his death. That and his eerie glowing blue eyes.

"Not even if you paid me," I muttered. Turning in my chair to face the enormous window behind me, I rose and surveyed the frame.

I'd never tried to open the window in the three years I'd worked there. The frame and sill were painted a dull gray, two shades darker than the drab walls of my office. It added to the "loveliness" that were the old wooden book shelves overflowing with medical journals and research materials, the beige carpet, and the equally beige eyesore I called a couch. The one and only time my mother had come to visit me at work she'd almost had a coronary.

"Bright colors are a foundation of a bright soul, Sage. How can you expect to heal someone's troubled mind in this wasteland of nothing?" she'd questioned me. It was a chink in the bucket of what she hated about my choice in career.

When I told her I was going to get my Masters and PhD in psychology, she wept in horror. "You're a sensitive soul, not cut out for the constant bombardment of viewing the innermost spitirof a person day after day." Of course I'd ignored her. She prayed to the goddess for my soul daily.

I'd grown up in a very unorthodox fashion. I lived on a commune with my mother until I was thirteen, when my father finally put his foot down and dragged me home to the 'burbs with him and my two older half-brothers. Having Free Breeze as a mother, I was completely unfazed to realize that the middle aged pot head I was speaking to when I was six wasn't really my imaginary friend. My mom watched me walk around for hours finding secret weed stashes all over the property. It finally clicked in her mind that these had been Muff the Huff's hiding spots, and no I was not this magic weed whispering wonder boy. She sat me down and we talked for hours about the people only I seemed able to see.