The Ghosts

The ghosts told him to jump. They promised flight and elation and freedom and so many other wonderfully unobtainable things that he didn't think twice about the truth of their words. As a swift breeze inflated his clothes and ruffled his hair, he looked down at the dots of human mass congealed below him. They begged him with megaphones and flashing sirens and trampolines and fire ladders and helicopters and news crews not to jump, not to give up, not to take his life.

But the ghosts knew better. They told him it was all a matter of perspective.

He would not jump, but he would fly. He would not give up, but he would succeed. He would not take his like, but he would gain it.

Those little dots just didn't know much about anything. He too was ignorant like them, but then he met the ghosts.

They first appeared to him as odd movements in his peripheral vision, but he was too afraid to turn his head and see them clearly. Then, they starting speaking his name in low voices and screaming all kinds of anguish at him. Once they moved into his house, he couldn't ignore them anymore and he faced them directly. He jumped back in revulsion at the sight of their green-tinted, transparent forms that looked as though the air had gone rotten. They threw things at him, slammed his doors, and shattered his lamps as they told him of all they knew and how blinded he was not to realize any of it.

Soon enough, he got used to them and he listened to every word they said. Wherever he went, they were there, passing between and through other humans seamlessly while explaining how he too could become seamless and exist without limitations outside of a body bound by physical laws. They told him about the weightlessness of their kind and how much more they have known because they are outside of themselves.

The ghosts became his only friends, his only teachers, and his only knowledge. They explained to him step by step how to reach such a glorious state, and as more and more humans fell away from him, more and more ghosts flocked toward him. They made him their project and their masterpiece, their one stamp on the history of the world. When he tried to tell others what the ghosts knew, they didn't believe him. Then the ghosts told him about perspective and how it can never stretch far enough.

He needed to stretch. He needed to reach that ultimate perspective. Still clinging to the concrete building, he looked up and saw the ghosts flying in a circle above him.

"Look how we fly in the sky so high, formless and free as we were meant to be! Join us, friend, because you know you'll never have anywhere else to go!" they chanted.

He smiled. Their chant grew louder. He laughed. Their chant grew louder. He was hysteric. They were chanting so loudly that he felt the vibrations of the hollow tones in his whole body.

"I am a ghost among men!" he shouted. "I am a ghost among men!"

Still laughing, he took to the sky and went first upward, then downward.