Kessie's Short Stories

The Slippery Thought

Originally written March-June 2018

When I first realized I could leave my body at will, I was terrified. I panicked without knowing whether the revelation was natural or if I had been cursed by some unknown force that had all reason to hate me. I was only seven at the time, by the way.

It wasn't until my thirteenth birthday that I found out about The Slippery Thought. The scary part was that it was only an hour away from my hometown. When I turned 18, I decided to scope the place out.

The Slippery Thought did not look out of place from the other dive bars in the area. The atmosphere inside was not much different than a normal dive bar either- comfortably dark with an amber lighting, booth seats with red leather covers, and the bar and décor itself carved out of smooth redwood. There wasn't a lot of people here though; some folks were sitting in the booths without much organization, and some lonely guy sat at the bar with his head down, completely ignoring the drink next to him. But all of them had something in common- something so subtle that I would have looked over it: none of the patrons were in their bodies. Their souls were elsewhere, floating somewhere in the world, doing and seeing things that would never happen in a small local dive bar.

Knowing this, knowing that there were others like me this entire time, I let out a rather loud, rather bitter exclamation of "Are you fucking kidding me?"

The guy at the bar apparently snapped back into his body and gave me a rather deadly glare. I flinched away from him and took a spot at the other end of the bar- all the while, the bartender (an old man that looked friendly enough) was lightly chuckling at me.

"So you thought you were the only one?" he later asked me as I hid my embarrassed face behind the specials menu.

""No..." I slowly admitted. "I just didn't think..."

"There would be so many in one area?"

"Yeah..."

To further drive my embarrassment home, the bartender gave me a playful chuckle.

"Freaks attract freaks," he then said to me, as if it would make everything better, "Take of it as you will."