Sweet Life Haunting

This was a feeling I loved: running on the summer air, my eyes on my target. I felt alive again, substantive, sensory. The afro-puff of a warm-skinned woman bobbed up and down in front of me, leaning to one side, then the other as the wind blew. I lurched forward with the breeze, reaching. My fingers fizzled into lean flesh when I felt a sharp tug at my scalp and heard the thin crack of a tree branch. I jerked back in shock. Spirits weren’t supposed to snag on things.

Below me, a twig and a fluff of hair lay on the ground — collateral damage. I wouldn’t be growing that back, but that was of no concern to me. I could be anyone I wanted. Look however I wanted. And since I’d died, I’d become used to living in the present, taking what I wanted, with no fear of the future. My only concern as I stared at the black kinky hairball resting at the edge of rubber-mixed asphalt and freshly coiffed grass, was this: that my life after life was coming to an end.

I scanned the scene for witnesses, panicked, and the layered sounds of the park submerged themselves into muted tones. The bushy-haired jogger in front of me paused, scratched at the shoulder I’d touched, stretched it, and took off again. A tired-eyed mother rested on a park bench, watching warily as a brother and sister jostled with plastic swords in front of her. As they played, the pastel-colored ribbons around the two large plaits of the little girl danced in the wind, catching my eye.

Just a week ago, I’d awoken to similar shades of pink, green, and blue surrounding me and a warm hum running through my borrowed body. This was how the Great Spirit — headmaster, friend, lover, judge, oracle to all spirits and bodies — often came to me, in colorful tones that reminded me of my own girlhood playing Skip-it in the Louisiana sun, painting neon-colored Lisa Frank nail polish on my fingers only to peel it off before I went to play with beetles and build dirt houses with ants.

But this time was different than past visitations. The Great Spirit was not here to comfort but to challenge.

“You have no idea what you’re doing,” It said.

The colors that surrounded me brightened in intensity until they became fused into a near-blinding light. The warmth in the body I was in turned into a low burn. It was as if I was an ant under a magnifying glass, slowly singed by a large Southern sun in the hands of a ruthless kid.

“Show me then!” I shot back, annoyed. “Show me why I’m wrong.”

There was a silence impregnating the moment with suspense. I waited, indignant.

“Do you trust me?” It asked.

The garish light hovered just above me as I feigned deep thought. Then, it did something I’d never seen before — it flickered, as if wincing at my ambivalence. Then it softened into a blue-gray haze.

“This body is not yours,” It said. “Neither were the last five bodies you’ve inhabited. I beg you to accept what you’ve had and rest. But if you want another life and another body, that is what you will get.”

In the days following, I woke up many times on the floor accompanied by no lights, no warmth, only nausea-inducing pain. Still, I held on. This body was a perfect match: a well-paying job I could bullshit, a physique that could party.

A week and a half of torment passed after the Great Spirit’s visitation until, finally, as I vomited up two carne arepas and a coke my host vomited up me — right out of her body.

~~~

I moved swiftly, defiantly, until I could see the afro-puff of the jogger come into view again. I thought of cotton candy. The summer break before my junior year of college, my sister and I had walked Minute Maid Park as we crystallized bubblegum flavored tufts of air and sugar in our mouths, ignoring the game. Just two days later, my legs were rendered useless — then my hands, then my arms, my kidneys, my lungs, my heart — all gone within hours. My family’s desperate actions and desperate prayers had quickly faded into a smog of helplessness. But I decided in the depth of my being: This would not be the end for me.

I was close to the jogger now. As I attempted to press my hands into her shoulder again, she jerked forward, then turned around. Shit. I saw my shadowy reflection solidifying in her widening eyes and desperately lurched forward, pressing myself into her even more as we both fell to the ground in pain. My senses were on fire. There was an intensity of heat, a bubbling, a clanking wet struggle of flesh and bone. The park faded into an array of millions of colors. The colors blended together into darkness.

In pitch black, I found myself flowing down a tunnel as if being carried downstream in the current of a river. There was the famed white light at the tunnel’s end. I shuddered as I felt a presence to my right that I couldn’t identify. I turned to look, and first noticed a round puff of hair bobbing up and down in the flow of the tunnel. Below it, the two eyes in which I’d seen my reflection peered at me, then narrowed. Further down, well-defined cheeks began to glisten with tears as she stared at me, seething, incredulous. The light was approaching fast. I felt a warm burning feeling surround me again and with it, a growing trepidation. I knew I’d now have to answer for two lives instead of one.