Tastes Like Ash

It's 2040. Our president is a plant!

Before summer comes to an end and we must return to school, I figured it was time to cross something off the to-do list. While investigating the void outside the library I decided to roam the stacks and found something that should help.

A 400-page textbook that was caked in dust and likely assumed missing from circulation for years now. Ghosts From Our Past was prominently written as the title against a nebula background. (Better than most with stock images of co-eds or animals.) The tagline of "Both literally and figuratively" gained a smile.

My fingers flipped through the book kicking up dust. Most books on the paranormal are mythology collections. Each with their own grains of truth mixed into the prose like Carrie's "How To Summon A Fairy" book. This tome, however, was filled with equations, quantum theory, and equipment specification.

I must have spent an hour in that corner of the library reading things like, "paranormal phenomena breaks natural laws. Take ghosts, for instance, they are said to appear out of thin air apparently violating the law of conservation of mass [...] You know what else breaks the laws of the natural world? Quantum mechanics. Many of the laws governing the smallest particles run contrary to the laws governing the micro-world. Scientists have even gone as far to describe the behavior of these particles "spooky." Yet, quantum theory is accepted mainstream physics. While similarly spooky natural law-breaking paranormal phenomena is left off as a joke by conventionalists."

As a member of academia and what this textbook would also likely describe as "paranormal phenomena", I thought they were onto something so I checked out the book to solve the early mysteries of this series. Such as, what is hunting our kitchen?

I haven't written about it since our first post, mostly because activity hadn't increased until Ezra started dating the two of us. Although I doubt the ghost is annoyed at our non-traditional values. It's likely caused by non-parahuman activity being a catalyst.

For example, our kitchen has been getting colder despite sun trying to sneak in all day long. I quite enjoy it, but the sun-loving types in the house are finding it a bit strange. Creaks have been all but ignored due to the age of the house, but now our fridge is chiming in with a dripping sound, but when we open it, nothing.

I would have excused it all like I had when my suspicions were first raised, but one afternoon when Ezra was making coffee he spilled the grounds on the counter. He turned to grab something to clean it up and when he turned back a pattern was drawn.

Ezra was too weirded out to guess what the odd shape was but Carrie's tea reading habits gave it a go. It was segmented with a hexagon and a pentagon shape stuck together. The right only had one line parted in the spilled grounds while the left side had several. Almost from every point, some seemed to even have two lines from a single corner.

"I think it's an ant?" Carrie offered.

"Whatever it is," Ezra mumbled, "I don't like it."

I pressed my lips together with a growing doubt. Why would a spirit of any sort need to draw an ant? Surely, hi or boo would get a message across. If it had been me, I would have assumed someone had been playing a joke, but since both Carrie and I were in the living room at the time Ezra wasn't granted that luxury.

Armed with my new book, I flipped to the Preparing for the Metaphysical Examination section. It claims that houses are the most haunted place, but not dorms. They are "haunted only by hairspray and bad decisions." I'll agree if we are counting abuse culture under bad decisions. (Which I do.)

Interacting with "our world" definitely makes this ghost more than accidentally glimpsing dark energy. But what it wanted, or really anything besides the fact that it didn't say hello was still unknown.