Rid of Me

Hugh looked up while his fingers froze above his computer keyboard.
They froze so much he thought they would shatter like a vase once he
moved them again. Brisk rustle of movement had stopped his mind from
escaping from itself. But everything was as quiet as it could
possibly be in Melbourne. So he resumed.
His fingers steadily and successively lowered on the lettered plastic
squares like the legs of a fleeing spider. His face I will not
describe as he is, for what I know, totally faceless. But amidst the
blur, there floated an intent pair of eyes and a mouth from which
corner protruded a very painstaking tongue. He would every now and
then suspend the flow to look through the window and check if his
muse was by any chance approaching the front door. But no one did.
And so he resumed.
The screen filled with black characters, and the phrases he thought
clunky quickly stringed together. Liberally chosen words spun a web
that got vaster with every new addition, and that would trap any
flying-by semantics to liquefy and digest their rich ambiguity. He
fought, as always, against his weariness, against his punctual
disgust for the style he recognized and often loathed as his, and did
his duty as a regular updater. And as he did, the edges of his prose
scraped his pressed against the desk body, and worn out his clothes,
leaving him naked to spread and dilute some of his intimacy and
dearest convictions in between the fragile narrative layers and curls
of casual fiction.
As I stood floating behind him, I crashed my head against the
ceiling, and he started and turned to my ghastly ghost.
‘Oh, it’s you. I knew there was some one. What are you doing here?
‘Well, being a 25 year old ghost is quite a bore, so I thought I’d
try and live by proxy, and paid you a visit. I mean, you know, since
you are the one who made me die and all…
‘Oh yeah…’ he nodded. ‘And what do you think of it?’ he asked,
pointing at the busy word processor on the screen with mingled
enthusiasm and dissatisfaction.
‘I like it. You know I do. I want to write again too. Would you mind
my resurrecting?
‘Not at all.’ He answered absent mindedly, as he went back to his
keyboard.
I sneaked back through the mines and to my body, dug myself out and
came home in time to make the first comment on his new post.
And so we resumed.