ghosts

Behind a barbed-wire fence, a dirt road disappears into the distance in the pine trees and corners. Lost, dead roads, no ends or remaining purposes, power lines now dead and sagging and forgotten, grown high in weeds and young trees. The trees have entirely encased a speed limit sign, strange sight, nothing so pointless as a speed limit sign in the midst of dense woods, pointless and beautifully so.

When a thundering horde of drunken Vikings rush a person, it's only natural to flinch.

The spirits of the dead are not among us to entertain us... Assuming the revenants you encounter have simply signed up to play haunted house for the amusement of the living is just plain ignorant.

Michael had learned the hard way that nothing good came from interfering in the affairs of the afterlife.

There are reasons why it is often difficult to reach our dead. When we do, our lives and everything we believe to be true can be turned entirely upside down.

Every town has __HAT house_: the one that once held dark secrets. You know the house_ the one no one will purchase? The one whose walls have seen blood? The one that even birds avoid, and the darkened windows resemble empty eye sockets? There are furtive, yet insistent, whispers about __hat_ house, murmurs that perhaps the house is best left alone, lest the dark stain left upon that abode__ history seep into our own present-day.

They__ never scared him, really._ When he was younger, he hadn__ known that there was anything different about them._ By the time he was old enough to figure out that no one else could see them, he was also old enough to realize that being dead didn__ turn people into monsters._ It just meant that most of them were lonely._

There is a unique bond between the land and the people in the Crescent City. Everyone here came from somewhere else, the muddy brown current of life prying them loose from their homeland and sweeping them downstream, bumping and scraping, until they got caught by the horseshoe bend that is New Orleans. Not so much as a single pebble __ame_ from New Orleans, any more than any of the people did. Every grain of sand, every rock, every drip of brown mud, and every single person walking, living and loving in the city is a refugee from somewhere else. But they made something unique, the people and the land, when they came together in that cohesive, magnetic, magical spot; this sediment of society made something that is not French, not Spanish, and incontrovertibly not American.

..., imagine a loamy earth that starts with genocide, then adds a mix of further disease, wars, hurricanes, murder, great fires, dueling, insurrection and slavery, just to name a few of the many instances of tragedy. What dark seed would take root in such a disturbed and twisted soil?

I wish my talent was something that could be celebrated. You see, I can talk to the dead.

Live from a place of love. It conquers all that is evil.

It took a pair of ghosts to open my eyes.

This was sharing office space with wacko and bordering on ludicrous.

Calm down. Ghosts don__ ring the doorbell.

Hey, ghosts are nothing to laugh at! Whether or not you believe in them, they__e out there. I__e seen them. I__e even heard them.

At least that left hope for him. Except "Beauty and the Geek" wasn__ exactly the proper translation of the popular fairy tale.

Maybe pulling her emotions out and inserting in his logic would change this morbid course. But damn if he__ joke about it like she did.

But soon the poltergeist ran out of ideas in connection with Aunt Maud and became, as it were, more eclectic. All the banal motions that objects are limited to in such cases, were gone through in this one. Saucepans crashed in the kitchen; a snowball was found (perhaps, prematurely) in the icebox; once or twice Sybil saw a plate sail by like a discus and land safely on the sofa; lamps kept lighting up in various parts of the house; chairs waddled away to assemble in the impassable pantry; mysterious bits of string were found on the floor; invisible revelers staggered down the staircase in the middle of the night; and one winter morning Shade, upon rising and taking a look at the weather, saw that the little table from his study upon which he kept Bible-like Webster open at M was standing in a state of shock outdoors, on the snow (subliminally this may have participated in the making of lines 5-12).I imagine, that during the period the Shades, or at least John Shade, experienced a sensation of odd instability as if parts of the everyday, smoothly running world had got unscrewed, and you became aware that one of your tires was rolling beside you, or that your steering wheel had come off.