Afterlife's Top Fixer

I hate it when people I know die.

It’s enough of an issue to deal with the unreasonable demands and whims of those deadweights I already have on my hands, but every new bastard that kicks the can and gets to enjoy their eternal vacation is just another chore for me. My mother was right when she used to say I was a wimp, needed to learn to say no, and stop letting people walk all over me. Well, she still says it. All the damn time, in fact, and entirely too much to tolerate. Good thing the old hag had a bad imagination and is terrible at haunting, so I don't have to talk to her too often.

It all started innocently enough, really. When my grandpa died from whatever it is old people die from, I started feeling pressure on my chest every night at 3 in the morning. See, I am a smart cookie, back then I was, at least, and I quickly put two and two together and contacted the old fella in the afterlife. Turns out, he wanted to know how Texas Rangers did that week, and he needed his nice grandson to let him know. No sports channels in the afterlife, apparently. Now, he was the first person I personally knew that passed, and he was a nice enough guy, if a bit, khm, “racey”, so I did not see a problem with spending 5 minutes every week giving him the play-by-play. In a big oversight I blame entirely on youthful innocence, however, I also informed my friends and family of this “little”, “sweet”, “adorable” favor a good grandson did for his grandpa. Big, big mistake.

Soon enough it started getting out of hand. My classmate decided it was a good idea to throw a firecracker at a rottweiler, the idiot, and the chain holding said rottweiler couldn’t survive the onslaught of justifiable wrath. Needless to say, the funeral was a rather comedic affair and did not inspire much sympathy across the board. Imagine my surprise when my bathroom mirror started to fog up suspiciously often and even spelled “COLL MI'' once. Only one dead idiot I knew could make two mistakes in two words, so I called him to see what he wanted. To my dismay, he remembered the little arrangement I had with my grandpa and was hoping for a similar one. You see, he really wanted to finish high school and get his education. “It’s what my mother would have wanted”. Usually, it is the living who get inspired by the death of a loved one to better themselves, not the other way around. Compounding the problem was the fact that he had as much of a chance of graduating when he was alive as I had of telling him no, so I found myself doing homework every night with a bafflingly slow ghost. He was grateful, of course. Or he would have been, at least, if he could actually spell “grateful”.

From there, it escalated. My uncle died in a freak jet-ski incident? There is simply no one else but me who could keep him up-to-date on his favorite soap opera. A girl I used to date in middle school missed the water jumping off a cliff? For the sake of our old love, I must transcribe her memoirs from the afterlife. My dad electrocuted himself trying to fix the wiring of our backyard shed? His work must be finished, and the backyard could use a swanking new patio as well, actually, maybe throw in an English lawn too, while you are at it, and I expect daily updates on the work, son!

These days, it is simply unbearable. I went from having five hours a week reserved for favors to the dead to five hours a day. It got to a point where I am bothered by ghosts I did not even know when they were alive! The other week, some ghost kept messing up my magnets on the fridge and spelling out his full government name, and when I finally lost patience and called him, he had the gall, the audacity to claim he was my former classmate! Guy sounded like he had been chain-smoking himself to death for five decades, and was hoping I can mend his relationship with his estranged daughter, for Christ’s sake! (I am supposed to meet her next week, but my chances are not good - her dad was a right old prick).

Instead of enjoying my youth and meeting new people, I am stuck humoring ghosts from my past (no complaints here, though, for every new person I meet is a potential new ghost to bother me in the future). The few living people I am still in contact with keep urging me to just stop helping them, or at least not take on any new ones. Easy for them to say! It’s one thing when you have five dead relatives and maybe a couple of friends to worry about, but one hundred? More, even! And the worst part? The ghosts with more elaborate and time-consuming requests are usually the ones who had better imaginations and intelligence in their lives, and consequently are much better at haunting you until you fold and help them. Oh, my buddy Jimmy wants to know Nascar standings and his damned Corvette polished or his apparition will stand, menacingly, at the end of my hallway every other night? Boohoo, he can wait a couple of days if I am busy. Try every crevice of your apartment oozing blood non-stop until you help your dead University professor finish his life’s work on dead languages of South-Eastern Anatolia. I had to learn Turkish for that, for crying out loud!

And, you know, hauling ass five hours a day for a bunch of ghosts is not exactly good for my bottom-line. I land part-time jobs from time to time, but with an army of impatient ghosts with no conception of tact or decency haunting you all the time, it gets pretty hard to keep a job. If you work at a Waffle House and every omelet you fry is somehow shaped like a coffin and smells like rotting eggs, you can see how that might make a manager unhappy. In their defense, though, sometimes they do help me out financially. Once, my cousin’s best friend who got trampled by a bull while trying to romantically propose to his girlfriend in Spain and wanted updates on whether she moved on and if it was with the damn mailman told me that he heard a guy tell a guy that a girl he knew was told by a guy that he buried a bunch of gold on a beach in Maine during the Golden Age of Piracy, and even described the exact spot. Those 500 or so solid gold coins got me all the way through college, actually, it was pretty sweet. 

So, madam, I accept your apology, and no, I am not mad at you. It is a bit of a bummer to get plastered on a road by a school bus no matter how you chop up the lettuce, so to speak, but I am not that upset about it. I know bus drivers are underpaid and you did not mean to hit me, and I really do appreciate your gesture of contacting me in the afterlife. As you probably gathered, my life was not exactly a parade of meaning, and I am glad to be free of all the constant haunting and nagging. Now, I get to enjoy my eternal vacation from responsibility. Just one thing - if you could water my plants every now and then, I would really appreciate it, you can find the key to my apartment under the doormat. Just so you know, there are a bunch of pretty valuable models and figurines in the apartment, and I am not saying anything, but if those were to be mysteriously sold off somehow, I will have you know I am exceptionally good at haunting and will not hesitate to do so. Thanks a lot in advance.