I was in a film shop. It looked heady and smelled old, and felt crowded even though there were no other customers. I turned to open the door to let in some air, but my hand didn't find one. A cacophony of laughter rose from the back of the store, bright yet flickering in and out like an old-timey recording, so I quickly followed the sound between the shelves of used film rolls and outdated cameras. As I passed, I noticed there was sand in the canisters and lenses, and that the photos were all of people and places I recognised. They were my pictures. When I slowed to take a closer look, the lights of the shop dimmed and the laughter seemed to be taken away with them. I tripped forward in the dark, keenly aware that I was Tay Tawan Vihokratana and that this was a shop packed tightly with expensive equipment in glass boxes... Even though it was limbo and it probably wouldn't matter if I rushed right through every item here, I couldn't bring myself to obliterate one of these memories, regardless of where they'd come from or how they'd got here.
Just before the darkness became absolute I felt myself clear the display floor, and I spread my arms wide to try to grasp onto something to guide me. The laughter had continued to increase in volume throughout my stumbling navigation of the shop, so I knew I was going in the right direction, but it was a bit scary to be out in the deep open with no marked pathway. It was as my left hand felt the thick velvet of a curtain, that my right was taken up by someone. The grip was a bit too firm, a little bony, but confident and eager to pull me along. I knew who it was, and had to hold myself back from asking if he'd had any of those fingers recently up his nose.
Off tugged me into a room in the back of the film shop that looked like a miniature set-up of the Dark Blue bar. At the side was the wall of drinks with their neon blue backing, just beyond was a small stage with a guitar waiting by a stool, and in the centre was a table crammed with all the expected cast, plus maybe a few more: Arm and Alice, arms hooked and squeezing lemon slices into the mouths of their beers; Joss, Mint and a handsome boyish rogue whom I'd only seen once in a small pendant picture – it gave me a probably undeserving amount of joy at seeing Zee there; Jan, Luke, Krist and bunch of other people from the office, including Godji and Wilson; Mild and Oab looking at me with too much innocence to be anything but my own projections and certainly not possessed by grim reapers; and Earth and Lee, barely paying attention to me at all, how I liked it.
Off pushed me down into a seat and I pulled a stack of napkins towards me. The very top one had a sketch of a river on it, slightly bleeding where the condensation from drink glasses had leached the ink. I set it by my elbow and Arm gave me a pen left on an abandoned waiter's tray.
In the end, it didn't take me that long to write about my regrets to my friends. I did limit myself to one each, because I didn't know how much time I'd have in limbo, really, and even if it was eternity, there was still one more person I needed to meet, and it couldn't happen soon enough. My friends continued their laughter, despite the fact that they never spoke any words, and I compiled my little list of questions.
(The questions were so petty it's not worth mentioning them. I just wrote them quickly and then got to drinking and eating and laughing. I even went back into the darkness of the shop to grab a random camera and take some photos. The whole time, I could still hear my friends there behind me. I had really great friends.)
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I was good enough to you all, right?
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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...
