Death Penalty for a Ghost in China
Copyright© 2020 by Kim Cancer
Chapter 7
七
The drilling had stopped, thankfully, but I hadn’t slept in three days. After what I saw in my dreams, sleep wasn’t what I wanted. Sleep or no sleep, though, I was thinking there’d be more, more ghosts, worse ghosts, and that the ghosts were probably hungry...
Lacking sleep left me both alive and dead. I felt like my head was slurry, wet and sloshy with cytoplasm. I lay in bed, supine, awake to the night, reading my phone in the dark, my room black as marble.
A story popped up on my phone, a local news story of three people drowning to death in a manure pit. A maintenance worker, trying to fix a septic tank, had plunged in, and two others rushed to help him, and they too were swallowed into the pit of shit.
Reading it provided me a guilty bit of schadenfreude. Despite my current woes of ghosts, insomnia, and filthy air, there was really nothing I could imagine worse than drowning, suffocating in a pool of shit. That being how one leaves the Earth. What a horrific fate.
Perhaps a “ghost of shit,” a violent, vengeful janitor’s ghost sucked them in. What a bilious, malicious spirit that must be...
Then another story popped up. An anonymous news article from tomorrow, written in the future tense, saying there’s going to be a dreadful traffic accident. The article didn’t mention ghosts, but I knew the spirits would have something to do with it.
The story said that a deliveryman on a motorbike, next to our school, will die in gruesome fashion, be run over by a semitruck.
Aghast, I couldn’t read past the opening paragraph and clicked off my phone, popped a handful of pills and drifted off...
Sure enough, the next day, walking back from class, I witnessed the aftermath, the carnage, the young deliveryman’s body split in two halves. I’d seen plenty of gore on TV, movies, in video games, but seeing it firsthand would be forever etched into the eyes of my mind.
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