Dead Girl Tales

Chapter 1

They say that life can knock you off your feet, well so can death.

It did more than knock me off my feet, it sent me flying up over the top of the car and back onto the pavement. I bet I looked straight out of an action film, if only I had been conscious to fully enjoy it. And I guess this is where you want me to say that I had a near death experience that allowed me to see the spirits around me and caused me a great adventure. Well I did get an adventure of sorts and I can see spirits but I didn't have a near death experience. I just died.
Let me back track because I'm getting ahead of myself. My name is Ashley Hill but I prefer Ash and to a select few I'm known as Ginge, ya know, because the bright ginger hair. My favourite food is - was - chicken noodles and I liked to read books about real life serial killers. Well maybe that's a bit of an overshare but you get the picture.
When I was younger I wanted to be a painter because my Uncle painted me a mural of The Little Mermaid across my bedroom wall. I like to think that I was a good artist, not the best but I would have happily painted out the stress of my live onto canvas. I guess it's silly me worrying about all that now. I died right in the middle of exam season, one minute I was power walking to the library with my text books and the next I was watching two doctors trying and failing to resuscitate me. One of the women, blonde with a straight long nose looked at her watch and pronounced me dead. And that was how I expired, just me and my two would-be saviours; I expect less people attended my funeral. I didn't show up myself. Seventeen was no age to die, not really, but I still ended up surviving longer in my Mum's care than anyone thought I would.

Death, like life, is a very personal experience from what I've gathered. I didn't see a great long tunnel or wake up with a sense of what I had to do to stop being stuck on the Earth. I hope that I'm never expected to give anyone any answers because all I know is that not everyone else comes back as a ghost and that other ghosts are assholes. They won't talk to you if you're a 'newly expired', which is the one time that they could be of some use or comfort to the recently deceased. No, they expect you to go find your way in the ethereal world solo, so I did what I did when I was alive, I went to the library. The only adventures I had when I was alive were to the library so not much really changed for me, it was the same walk I did every day when I was alive except now my legs didn't burn when I walked up hill. Now it didn't bother me when people walked into me because now they passed straight through me, which by the way is not a cool as the films would have you believe, it's like living people are Velcro and when they walk into your form they attach and its all fine until they step through you and it's like they rip away. It's disgusting and my only solace is hoping that I can somehow give them ghost germs.
I don't know if me returning to the library was a compulsion of spirit but I liked to think that it was my choice, the library had always been my safe place until I'd been ploughed into on the pavement outside of it. Walking past where the car had come up the pavement and ran into me always made me feel sick. Luckily it hadn't happened yet, I didn't want to have to find out what a ghost would throw up. Maybe it was just my ghost senses going crazy that caused it, or maybe it was because it all looked so normal, like nothing had happened there. I got a mention in the local paper, but no flowers decorated the area in remembrance. The day I died it seemed like that car had wiped any trace off me from the world. When I first realised that I was going to be stuck like this for a long time I decided to spend my travelling, unfortunately as it turned out I couldn't get out Wise Water Bay. It didn't matter which out the three roads out of the town that I tried to take, I couldn't leave its boarders.

But I couldn't bring myself to think about the world that had so willingly forgotten about me when just inside the library doors were shelves and shelves of worlds for me to indulge in for the rest of my undead existence. Devouring book after book was the only way that I had to ignore the lingering guilt of my last conversation with my drunkard mother. I hadn't meant it when I said that I hated her, not really, maybe this seemingly endless entrapment in my hometown was my karma?
Wise Water Bay was a carbon copy of every other English seaside town, in the Summer months we boomed with classic sea side rides, ice-creams and families but when the sunshine left the tourists followed and so did the seasonal jobs. Most of Wise Water Bay was left living off the state like my mum did but she didn't complain about having too little money for food like most, when you're on that much drink and drugs you don't really need food. I've not been to visit her since I died, I know that she'd blame me for dying and for living her to rot alone in that damp little flat.