Playing With Matches

Chuck's Journey

For as long as humans have been sentient — if you can call a handful of self-destructing apes who think paying for ringtones is a neat idea to be "sentient" — they have been obsessed with the idea of death. Mainly, how to keep it as far away from them as possible. 

Throughout the ages, they have developed concoctions, diets, potions, and all matters of malarkey that claimed to stave off the effects of death. They mostly helped accelerate it. 

Ancient Egyptians, which you might know as those weird cat lovers the Pan-Galactik Bamboozlers pranked a few millennia ago into making those useless pyramids and racking millions of SpaceTube likes with their classic "Mad Monkey Pyramid Prank(Gone Wrong?!)," used to believe that ingesting small amounts of mercury would make them immortal. Their corpses prove otherwise. 

Alchemists and charlatans used to concoct elixirs they would swear would vanish all those ghosts in your blood that gave them a case of the deaths, mostly made out of cocaine and celery root. We cannot attest to their efficacy, but we can vouch for them being a hell of a party drink.

We at "Playing With Matches" do not encourage drug use. If you are in possession of drugs right now, please send it to our headquarters in Alfa Centauri. We shall dispose of them for you. Don't thank us; we like to be of service. 

Chuck Colt was rather ambivalent about the whole death thing, although we are willing to bet that, in any other set of circumstances, he would be quite happy about his current ghostly circumstances.

Not really dead, and not really living; something in the middle that was arguably crappier than both options, but comfortable enough for him to thrive in as a disembodied fart whose only worry would be where to drift off next, and occasionally being stalked by chain-smoking, home-invading ghosts. 

That possibility went out of the window, yelling all the way to a sure death as soon as his supposed corpse started moving.

"Wack!" yelled the jolly, home-invading ghost. "How you doin' that?"

"That ain't me!" answered a distressed Chuck. "Well, it is me, but I ain't the one moving me!"

The ghost shushed Chuck and bobbed up and down, inspecting Chuck's body as it tried to claw his way to freedom. It wasn't breathing, and his eyes were glassy and empty. It was, for all intents and purposes, dead. And yet, it was moving around like a worm on a string. The other thing the ghost noticed about it was his ugly choice in clothes, with a garish striped-blue shirt with pink flamingos and lime-green pants with red Crocs. 

Chuck felt the noose tighten around his non-existent neck. In an act of desperation, he tried to prop up his body, but it was like trying to support a stick of butter with a hot knife. He went right through it. 

"Please, stop doing this!" pleaded Chuck to both his zombified body and the smoking ghost. 

"I ain't doin' nothin'," said the ghost with a grey glow that suggested he was shrugging. "You sure you dead?"

"Positively maybe," said Chuck.

"Then that there's a zombie," says the ghost. "I ain't messing with Voodoo shit."

"Wait, a zombie? Voodoo? How the hell did that happen?"

"Maybe you got hanged for crimes against fashion," said the ghost. "I mean, really? Crocs and pants?"

"I pick my wardrobe at random," said Chuck. "Takes the pressure off actually having to decide what I pick. That's what geniuses do, like Einstein, and Jobs."

"All dead," says the ghost. "And nun of 'em ever turned into a zombie. Maybe you got sum crocs curse."

"Please, don't change the subject. You were gonna sell my body for cigarettes! As far as I know, you're suspect number one."