3mF

I wrote this for NPR's three minute fiction contest. Probably overdid it on the vocabulary, or threw too many ideas into one short piece, etc. Have to remind myself that these contests are subjective.

Enjoy.


Some people swore that the house was haunted. I had no choice but to trust these people; the house was the only property in the city that I could afford and my career was on the line. If they were wrong, then little stood between me and ravenous creditors, circling like sharks.

No, like vultures. Sharks don't circle. Or do they? This is why I need the ghosts – why my business card says “literary medium” rather than “writer.” I'm just no good on my own.

One source had claimed that the haunting was attributable to none other than P.B.Z. Yassouf, a notorious court poet from what is now the United Arab Emirates. I had my doubts, but the name was known among my preferred clientele – tenured academics with furtive occult tendencies – so if I could use it, I was golden. Then again, my source was an elderly ex-librarian with bad cases of lung cancer and apophenia who spent his convalescence at a bar called The Turtle, so my chances weren't great. But I was no stranger to tilting at wind farms.

I took great pains to make moving into the house as inauspicious as possible. Took possession on the 13th. Ladders everywhere. Walked backwards across every threshold in the building. Cheap mirrors, bought for breaking, dropped at midnight. I even adopted not one but three black cats (the shelter had a glut of them for some reason). Still it was days before I observed even minor manifestations; the “roving cold spot” my first night in the house turned out to be a clerical error at the electric company. I could feel the bank sniffing at my toes. Admittedly, it may have been the cats.

Finally, I had a good night's sleep ruined. Chanted couplets with no discernible source woke me from dreams of debtor's prison and kept me up for hours. Ecstatic, I tossed Tarot cards all over the floor and put Ouija boards on the furniture, then drank a pint of Headmaster's Old Particular and slept the sleep of justice. Greeted with elegant lines of Arabic text in the shower-fogged mirror when I woke, I allowed an undignified whoop to occur.

When I translated the writing, I broke into an even less dignified sweat.

“Dear Sir or Madam, please vacate the premises or legal action will follow.”

The boards confirmed it, all pointing to “no,” “goodbye” or out the door. All the Tarot cards were face-down except the Knight of Pentacles, who represents sinecures, trade barriers and litigiousness. Worst of all, the cats had shredded my bank statements for use as litter. This wasn't how it was supposed to happen.

I put my crystal ball back in the box and sat down. “Okay,” I called aloud. “Let's negotiate. Maybe I can make monthly payments.”

The manifestation looked like a junior account executive, which he turned out to be, posthumously employed at a holding company in Dubai. In-house oracles prognosticated a spike in the house's market value and they wanted it back. They'd also bought up my debts.

“How could you be so foolish as to buy this place?” he groused.

“You're supposed to be a poet!” I shouted.

Chagrined that he'd failed to frighten me off, the ghost considered me warily. “So tell me. What exactly do you want?”

I gave him a fish-eating grin. “Has your firm ever considered diversifying into publishing?”

Nothing was ever the same again after that.