Erin Keating
My brother was crazy. I had told him that even when I was alive. I planned to tell him now that I was dead too. Seeing ghosts is crazy – even we think so. The only mediums I had ever seen were the ones with stalls on the boardwalk. These little old women cornered tourists as they ravaged their funnel cake, up to their eyeballs in powdered sugar. The boardwalk mediums knew how to look the part: frizzy gray hair tucked underneath a purple head scarf and skirts with little fake coins that jingled when they walked, purchased cheap from the slutty belly dancing stall a few yards down. Even their noses fit the role – wide and porous, bent at unnaturally sharp angles at the bridge. My brother was not an eighty-year-old gypsy woman. But he was crazy, and unfortunately, the only person I could go to for help. I had one night to make the biggest decision of my afterlife: stay or go.
I hadn’t expected to walk the boardwalk again after I died, not that I knew what to expect anyway. But the pleasant warmth of the white light had become boring. Apparently, I was too bitter and cynical. Spirits are unnecessarily tranquil.
They sent me back to the place I was killed to try to find my inner peace. If not, they’d let me stay forever among salt water taffy and the tanning-oil-greased bodies of the Guidos who slipped right through me on the Seaside Boardwalk. Seaside always had a carnival air to it: the lights of the games and music of the rides. After dark, it seemed to turn into a freak show full of drunken college kids reveling in their summer.