The dark, smoky atmosphere helped Goris. It was dozing off. It imagined that the sound must be loud. It was unable to hear. It was unable to sense anything. It lacked organs to sense.
Goris was the leftover existence in the afterlife of either Boris or Doris. It was impossible to tell.
As soon as Boris or Doris entered the afterlife, the first letter of the name was substituted by ‘G’. ‘G’ used to come from ‘ghost’. This substitution used to be the standard procedure of entry into the afterlife for all.
Moreover, the afterlife used to destroy gender, height, weight and all possible physical aspects of life to simplify the existence enormously. Consequently, knowing whether Goris used to be Doris or Boris became impossible.
The simplified being needed no resource to survive. Hence, there was no strife, but calmness and comity. Yet the recent sudden influx of too many lives into the afterlife, in a very short span of time, somewhat scratched the composure of the afterlife.
The Intangiville Vibes disseminated its interpretation of the event as an exodus under a viral pandemic in life. Exodus was from life. Exodus was into the afterlife. Exodus made the afterlife congested. Every new ghost, entering the afterlife, had to possess another ghost. Otherwise, it could not be accommodated. The congestion swallowed up the afterlively comfort of feathery lightness of existence and the liberty of ghostdom.
Ghosts thereof started looking forward to October. During this month, ghosts used to be summoned by the living humans from all over the world, sometimes on bhoot chaturdashi, sometimes on Halloween, sometimes on dia de los muertos. The afterlife Geistarch used to assign the ghosts the responsibility of visiting different lives on these occasions. Which ghost would go live on what occasion in which location used to be solely the Geistarch’s discretion.
This October assignment used to be a roam free boon to every soul in the afterlife. The boon used to allow the ghosts to leave the afterlife and to mingle with life unconditionally. After all, the boon used to be triggered because of the invitation by life.
In its October assignment paradigm, Goris found no life in ludicrous costumes pretending to be horrific. The site of the assignment lacked the decoration of lights. It made Goris rule out the possibility that the occasion was either Halloween or bhoot chaturdashi.
Goris found lives partying around it. Their faces were covered with skeletal mimics. Their clothes were painted with skeletons. It concluded confidently that the occasion was dia de los muertos. However, the gestures of those lives seemed remotely ghoulish, rather strongly ticklish to Goris and its host life.
Host life was the one that Goris entered by means of possessing. The invitation from life made the possessed life ‘host’ of the possessing ghost. The invitation made the host lend its senses to Goris. Senses enabled Goris to relish the offerings by its hosts.
The host ate, drank and sniffed things. Goris enjoyed along.
On the dance floor, someone stomped on the feet of the host. The host cried in pain. But it was inaudible under the spell of the disc jockey. Borrowed senses inevitably made Goris, the possessing ghost, suffer from the pain of the possessed host.
For avenging the feeling of pain, Goris twisted and broke the necks of the mindless stompers. It crowded the afterlife further. But Goris was in life. It remained oblivious of further crowding of the afterlife. Rather it felt light. The influence could be the festive mood; could be its absence from the afterlife crowd, could be the substances in the system of its host.
Suddenly, the lives on the dance floor started stumbling over the bodies on the floor. They started screaming, running hither and thither. Stampede took the lives of many more. Goris guessed that the malodorous sourness in the air induced craziness in lives. The haze, the confusion, kept Goris immune from the reality of life around.
After a while, Goris was exhausted by the jumping, bumping and thumping of the host life. As its host sought relief at the urinal, the darkness in between the janitor's closet and the bathroom door enticed Goris. It left life and started dozing off.
Life was still thumping its feet and went back to the dance floor. The loudness of the dance floor flared even by the bathroom. But Goris left life and became free from the senses. It could only faintly imagine because of its remnant but quickly dying memory.
Then Goris started feeling dense. The Frequently Undulating Waves transmitted that the heaviness of the afterlife existence by the bathroom was growing hourly. Each existence was possessing the other just to squeeze in. The Waves also induced into the ghosts the understanding that this sudden influx of ghosts into the afterlife by bathroom were from the deaths on the dance floor and was totally different from the exodus that crowded the afterlife.
Goris was distraught. It took current heaviness as another of the countless, mindless ploys of life.
The dance floor was illuminated unexpectedly. “Deaths thinned the crowd on the dance floor, giving lights some chances...”, transmitted in the FU Waves.
The Intangiville Vibes, however, reflected on an existential crisis, “Ghosts are unable to bear light. Hence, they are huddling in the nook by the bathroom. The lives in uniform would not let the ghosts have peace....”
Suddenly, the bright beam penetrated the afterlife by the corner beside the janitor’s closet. Goris and the whole bunch of ghosts just whizzed away.
They perched on the innermost trunk of a tree which was neither a birch nor a maple but had thick canopy even in the month of October. In that dark quiet coziness, the ghosts untangled themselves.
Disgust was in the Vibes, on the Wave, “Life always makes the afterlife uncomfortable; makes the existence of the afterlife difficult.
Camino de Confluencia shivered in fear as the ghosts screamed in protest from atop the ceylon ironwood tree, “Afterlife matters.”
