1. A ghost whom we’ll call “The Thirsty Ghost” has a particular obsession with drinking water. Like a cat weaned too young who’s forever trying to suckle on your coat sleeve — it’s a hopeless case. Because your coat sleeve will never become a cat’s nipple. Likewise, the ghost’s thirst and the water it seeks do not coexist in the same world, so they can never meet.
2. Speaking of meetings, there’s a ghost we call “Missing You,” who comes back to keep an appointment he missed a few hundreds of years ago. He stands at the crossroads, waiting for his lover. She also waits for him, in the same place, hundreds of years before. Where she waits are horses in muddy streets and ox carts full of vegetables. Wild children run past her, calling each other names. Then the road is empty and the mud hardens to ice.
Where he stands are lonely asphalt and neat sidewalks, occasional cars passing, then a bus with load motors and rattling windows, then silence.
The lovers do not meet.
We would like to believe in a concerned deity who conspires to let the one lover feel the other across the divide of hundreds of years, who lets them feel one other’s presence, and lets the first ghost drink his water.
But this concerned deity likewise does not arrive.
3. Were this deity to exist, he lives in a third place, a garden high on a plateau by a meadow on a mountain, somewhere the lovers visited once and then promptly forgot. There, he grows cucumbers and salad greens, and plays an endless back and forth war with the rabbits.
4. Let’s return to the first ghost, the thirsty one. We see him drinking the water. He has trouble manipulating the glass. When he seems to get a grip on it, the water runs through his empty gullet, the glass full of water is tipping into a void and splashing on the floor. He tries different water, tea, wine, spirits.
The spirits actually work for a while, because spirits and ghosts exist in neighboring realms. And then they stop working, and it is even worse than before.
Really it is quite hopeless! But how can you explain this to the ghost? Because he can plainly see others, the living, who can pick up the same glass and drink. And to his eyes they seem undeniably gratified! They pick up the glass with what seems like thirst. They grunt while drinking and then put down the empty glass with a glazed look of satisfaction in their eyes, and then they promptly go about their business and seem to pay no mind to the water until the next time they drink from it.
How can you tell the poor ghost that they do not feel the thirst he feels? How can you tell him that they do not enjoy the gratification he craves?
You can’t. He carries with him the bright shining light of his thirst and it illuminates heaven with its light. But if he ever figures this out, if our thirsty ghost ever stumbles on the truth, and opens his eyes, he will cherish his thirst, and follow its light to the garden by the high meadow, where he will commiserate with god on the difficulties of keeping a garden by a meadowful of rabbits.
Photo Credit: Antonis under Creative Commons license
I love, because spirits are in a realm close by and of course the rabbit. This is your best work to date (that I’ve read anyway)