Ghosts Among Her -5minutefreewrite

For https://steemit.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/the-weekend-freewrite-11-23-2019-part-3-the-dramatic-twist
The clanking and stomping didn't stop all night. Up the stairs, down the stairs - all she wanted was sleep.
These were not mean ghosts, but they were thoughtless. They were never intentionally cruel, but they forgot about what being human meant. If she was in the midst of a conversation with one, sometimes they’d just float through a wall while they were talking, forgetting that she couldn’t easily follow them. Sometimes when they did the dishes, they’d put them away still wet. And worst of all, they’d finish the milk and put back an empty jug. It didn’t matter to them, since an empty jug of milk was just as sustaining to a ghost as a full jug, more, even, since there’s ghost milk in an empty jug.

Regardless, she liked having them around. But all she wanted tonight was sleep. It had been a long week, and promised to be another long week ahead of her. She’d working 10-hour shifts on The Ghost Hunters, and they weren’t taking a weekend, so it was going to be 10 straight days of 10 hour shifts, and she felt like she was getting a cold.

The other P.A.s got to go home every night, but they were shooting at her house because SOMEONE had told the crew that it was haunted. This was clearly ridiculous, as these ghosts were invited house guests, not tortured, trapped spirits, but people that ALL ghost activity was a haunting. She tried to explain, but the executive producers thought having a personal in with her would make the episodes featuring her house even more relatable. The ghosts didn’t care. They thought acting was fun. Which, I guess it is, if you don’t have to worry about finding your next job, and just get OFFERS.

She tried not to feel bitter. She’d moved to L.A. ten years earlier, and had been a P.A. by day, failed actor by night ever since. They didn’t even really give her any lines even though this was her house. That might have been her own fault, because whenever they turned the camera on her, she tried explaining that it wasn’t really haunted, and that’s not what she wanted.

Whatever. She didn’t want to be reality-show famous, anyway.

“Some people say why do I keep going?” Karen explained to her therapist, who just nodded. “Some people say, L.A. is hard, move to Atlanta, maybe you’ll have an easier time there. I dunno. Maybe they’re right, but I don’t want to start over all over again. I have friends. I kind of have a career, even if it isn’t what I want it to be. I just feel like, at 37, this is the life I have, and I need to make the best of it, not abandon it and move on.”

The therapist, who never really said anything worthwhile anyways, just nodded thoughtfully. Karen didn’t feel like explaining about the ghosts. She was tired. She was too tired to think changing anything would change anything. She was too tired to even think that there was any better life waiting for her anyways. She was kind of overwhelmed by a sense of there not being enough time for life. Her dad had died recently, and they had compounded her sense of the temporariness of life. It just really sucked. It sucked that her dad had died, and it sucked that she would die someday, and it really made it feel like nothing was worth doing because why bother, someday we’re all going to die.

She thought about people who said death, and the immediate sense of only having so much time, was what motivated people to do things with their lives. But not her. It made her think that there was no real point to doing things with your life. After you’re dead, it won’t matter. Not to you, anyways, and since it won’t matter. Like literally, really won’t matter, what’s the point. Not like, doesn’t matter in the sense that it does, but not a lot… Ugh.

He comes with baggage, Karen knew. Of course he does. Everyone does. These ghosts, they move in, and they’re ghosts with not only emotional and spiritual baggage, but literal baggage. A lot of them have chains that take up a lot of space, some of them hold onto important things from their lives, but Casey, well, he takes the cake. Not literally. Literally, what he takes is all the paperwork from the life he lived. He has stacks of it. And he spreads them all around. On everything. He’s always working on taxes… which is nice that Karen has an accountant in the house, but not nice because he’s ALWAYS doing it.

Now, of course every ghost is welcome in her house. She loves them all equally, but Casey… oh, Casey. She loves him like he could be her husband. He’s not, though. No one is. And he’s frustrating, too. But he… could be. He works hard. He’s very smart. If ethereal beings can be sexy, well, he is. She wishes ghosts had legs, because she’s pretty sure he’d have strong calves. Apparently he died in a bicycle accident, so she assumes he bicycled a lot.

She gets up the courage to ask him to dinner, but he demures, insisting that as a ghost he doesn’t need sustenance. He doesn’t quite get it yet, that ghosts replicate their human behavior for all eternity. He’s doing paperwork for crying out loud, but he just wants to be of service, and, in addition to his ghost paperwork, he’s also doing her real taxes. Real. She shouldn’t say real. It’s all real, but the ghost paperwork is unnecessary. Well, unnecessary in most senses, but it’s necessary to him, so she shouldn’t judge.

Anyways, she and he and the other ghosts live together for fifty more years, and when she dies… oops, she doesn’t become a ghost.