Each month, I buy a book of twenty stamps. I create twenty post cards. I write twenty short stories about them. I send them to twenty strangers. This is the twenty stamps project.

Request a postcard by sending your snail mail address to sean.arthur.cox@gmail.com or find me on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/SeanArthurCox

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

The Practical Necromancer



People have in their minds these very biased ideas about ghosts, always longing for revenge, to see their loved ones one last time. After fifteen years in the psychic business, professional medium Indira Patel harbored no such delusions. Sure some ghosts have these overwhelming maddening passions, but most don’t. Most are about as full of drive and vigor in death as they are in life, which is to say, not much. They are, after all, the same people they were before they died, only without the maddening drives of the limbic system. Even the passionate ones settled down eventually once their true loves died, reuniting the star-crossed lovers, or those they hated got some form of comeuppance.

No, Indira learned that after decades long dead, what people missed the most were mundane things. The small trivial pleasures that get taken for granted so often in life. The smell of a pipe. The feeling of a good comfy couch. With humanity being so vast and diverse a species, one could, with enough time, find someone who missed just about anything. That realization prompted Indira to make the switch from séances to full necromancy.

As far as she was concerned, it was a win-win. Here were the deceased, longing to do things like wash dishes, take out the trash, mow the lawn, and she got free housekeeping. Sure the neighbors complained when the ghost fires rose from her lawn along with the souls of the chore-loving dead, but they were just jealous. They didn’t have ghosts to fetch their morning paper.


- Originally mailed to J.W. in Mississippi

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