"This feels weird."
"Believe me, it looks weirder."
I sat up and prodded around the bony, whitened point of my knee. I failed to catch the eye of the doctor standing in the corner, who was watching every second drizzle down on the digital stopwatch in his hand.
Muk tied her hair into a low ponytail, but it was so short that thick strands immediately sprung loose around her taut face once again. She waited for me to hop off the metal bench holding Cryogenically Frozen Me, and despite her half-open mouth, even gave me a few more moments to try shaking my own hand for the ninety-sixth-seventh-eighth times.
"What do you mean, you can't wear clothes?" she finally blurted as I gave a disgruntled cough, and everyone's shoulders shivered back down into place. The Vihokratanas' pointed looks all bypassed my ghost suit and landed on my (alive?) Converse sneakers.
"I didn't say that, exactly," I replied, shuffling my feet. Perhaps I'd tried too hard to prepare them for disappointment when I met my body for the first time, by overhyping the little issues I'd been having recently. "I can wear clothes. I just...have to think about wearing them. A bit more than I used to. Or they kinda don't...hold on."
Muk squeezed her nose almost high enough to touch her forehead. "I literally cannot picture this at all."
"Um, well, they just, after a bit, fall through?"
"Are you asking me or telling me?"
Mum patted Muk on the shoulder. "What about the gloves that we used to hold your hand just before?" she asked. "You didn't 'fall through' then."
"That wasn't so hard, I think because it's you guys. But I did have to concentrate a bit."
"I thought ghosts could touch things just fine," Sasin said. The doctor next to him had started bouncing lightly on his heels, still resisting glancing up. As far as he'd told us, he'd had no experience with ghosts besides second-hand accounts from a few of the people who had bodies stowed here at his clinic, and didn't want to know any more than that. But I did wonder if he had an opinion.
"Tethered ghosts can," I said. I thought back to my not-Ghosts Anonymous meetings. "Untethered ones apparently have to get really emotional to affect things in the living world."
"But you're tethered," Muk protested, folding her goose-skin arms across her jittering torso. "You're so tethered I had to ask Mum to consider going over the birds and bees talk with you again."
I choked up more air from my lungs than could have been present in that whole windowless, basement chiller room. "Muk!"
"Do I, Tay?"
"Mum!"
Sasin laughed loudly at the confused expression on the doctor's face – of course now he'd looked up, and about a thousand questions were scrolling in front of his pupils like Matrix script. "Guys, I don't want to be the voice of reason here, but Tay's sex life is probably not the issue we should be talking about right now."
"Is a sentence I never want to hear exit your mouth again." Muk jumped when a shrill beeping blared from the doctor's stopwatch. He swallowed without saying a word and moved forward to unfold the sheet that had been pulled back and left on my body's chest. Grandma Nart helped lay it neatly over my face. I watched the material settle into shallow divots over the dips of my eyes, sensing a thickness rising in my throat, almost of missing something.
"Dears, there's nothing to stress about," Gran said as she and the doctor gently pushed me– my body into its metal capsule in the wall. "We should be rejoicing. Tawan is ready."
YOU ARE READING
The Ordinary Haunting II
Fanfiction~Sequel to The Ordinary Haunting~ Tay Tawan was not expecting to get tied to New Thitipoom when he died. He used to be a happy-go-lucky kind of guy; the kind with no real troubles or regrets that he considered important enough to stop him from his e...
