Unlike the ghosts that whispered in my ear—including the one in my living room right now who was taunting me—anyone could hear Clarence. A problem, because he wasn’t the most discreet of creatures, and he happened to be my responsibility.
“What style is our visiting ghost cramping?” I asked.
He stretched, his huge paws pushed straight out in front of him and his bobtailed bottom high in the air. Then he flopped over on his side, diving cheek first. Once he was comfortably situated, he lifted his back leg in the air and—
“Stop. You know the rules: no cleaning your business in mixed company.”
Clarence grumbled.
“What were you saying about style?” I redirected him to his previous rant in hopes of avoiding the you’d-do-it-if-you-could-reach-it speech.
Sprawling, but more circumspectly now, he said, “That ghost has to go.” Except he didn’t sound that concerned, and he certainly didn’t answer my question.
Boo!
I ignored the voice. That strategy hadn’t proven successful thus far, but until I had other alternatives I was sticking to it.
“You do recognize that you’re a shade away from being a ghost yourself, Clarence. I’m surprised you don’t have more sympathy.”
He sneezed.
When he was done spreading cat snot all over my stained concrete floor, he said, “A shade, that’s cute. But let me ask you this: am I corporeal?” He didn’t wait for a response. His whiskers twitched, then he said, “If I have a body, I’m not a ghost. Simple math, bozo.”
I crossed my arms. “Your ghostly self stole that body and, if I had to guess, got stuck.”
Not that I knew. No one knew how Clarence had ended as he had, a human ghost in the physical body of a wildcat. Or no one was sharing that information with me.
He rolled around on my bobcat-snot-covered floors, trying to scratch his back.
He seemed happy enough, so I was hardly certain he’d been stuck. Maybe he stayed by choice.
“Quit it.” I snatched a tuft of hair floating through the air. “You’re getting hair everywhere and stinking up the place.”
He purred. “You know you love it.”
He smelled not unpleasantly of the outdoors, a pine-forested version, and not like a nasty, musky wildcat, so he wasn’t entirely wrong. But it was disturbing to see him wallow on my floor in feline ecstasy. Maybe if I didn’t know he was human . . . No, it was unsettling either way.
“You’ve got to stop that.”
He flopped over on his side again and let loose another sneeze. “Man, these allergies are killing me. Can you find out if I can take Zyrtec in this body? I don’t know if it’s the mold or the pollen or the—”
“You don’t need allergy medication. You need to stop rolling in every stray weed patch you come across.”
“Just a quick pharmacy run. I can check online if cats can take—” His eyes widened, eyeing the newspaper I’d retrieved from the coffee table.
I started to roll it. “You were saying?”
A nasty feline growl emerged from deep in his chest. “Nothing.” With a sniff, he added, “Forget the drugs.”
The idea of corporal punishment made me squirm, but if Clarence thought the threat was real, I’d use it—the threat, not the newspaper. I tossed the paper back onto the coffee table.
After a few seconds of much too short, blissful silence, he said, “It’s past time to get rid of the ghost. You know, he might go away if you did what he wanted.”
I choked out a negative response. Clarence would think that.
Kitty, kitty, kitty. Here, kitty.
My left eye started to twitch.
Maybe Clarence could hear our ghostly visitor because he was still technically a ghost himself—a ghost permanently possessing a twenty-five-pound bobcat, perhaps, but still a ghost. He could hear and see ghosts better than I could, and he didn’t get twitchy or headachy from their presence. Unlike Clarence, I could only see them when they wanted to be seen.
Kitty, kitty.
Or hear them when they wanted to be heard.
The constant interruptions from this particular disembodied voice had begun to make my left eye twitch.
Ghosts were a pestilence upon the planet. It was a good thing most of them didn’t have much shelf life.
Unfortunately, the one that kept hassling Clarence and me seemed to be fresh. He was also grounded close by—kitty-corner to my home, to be exact—so he could recharge and return to hassle us multiple times a day.
He was becoming a nuisance. No. He’d been a nuisance when I discovered him lurking the second day after I moved in. What he’d become in the intervening week was an eye-twitching headache. And if he stayed much longer, I suspected he’d be a deep, throbbing, icepick-to-my-eye migraine.
“You know, Clarence, you’re right.”
“Huh?” He lifted his chin from the floor and gave me a suspicious look.
“We’re going to do something about our uninvited houseguest.”
Suspicion turned to discontent, and he gave me his best bobcat kitty glare. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. We are? You’re the one who should be doing something. You’re the big D, so he’s your problem. But, uh, maybe hold off on the scary death stare till you know what he really wants.”
Now that was intriguing. Clarence had thus far been lukewarm against the ghost. The shift had me questioning his motives.
“I’m not the ‘big D.’ I’m retired.” I settled into my favorite armchair. “And there’s no such thing as a death stare. Although if there were, I’d love to use it on whoever botched this ghost’s collection.”
When souls were separated cleanly, collected, and moved on to wherever they were going, ghosts didn’t happen. That was my theory, anyway. And since I’d been death—more accurately, one of the deaths—for several decades, I probably had a better handle on what made ghosts than most people.
“Uh-huh. Sure, big D. There’s no death stare, just like retired soul collectors can’t hear ghosts.”
The second part was true, until me. Or none of the other retirees were fessing up to the ability because they wanted to lounge in peaceful obscurity, hidden away from needy specters.
As death, seeing ghosts
