The Ordinary Haunting

11. The Angry Ghost

I lined up my fingernail with the ladybird's approach and waited. Its red wing covers sparkled in the sunshine streaming onto the rooftop. I counted its seven black dots over and over. I struggled to remember who it was who'd said that each of those dots represented someone's seven joys and seven sorrows.

The ladybird's front feet tickled their way up my nail and then, ever so slowly, she began to sink back down to the cement. I'd have to count that one as a sorrow then, I decided.

I raised my camera and pressed until the shutter flickered inside. The beetle jerked sideways and quickly fluttered away on its translucent white wings. I released a shallow breath and watched it for as long as I could while I wound the film, enjoying the scratching of the wheel beneath my thumb. I checked the window and saw I had just five shots left already. I pushed a hand back through my hair when the wind picked up around me, and scoured my surroundings for something else to shoot. It hadn't been more than two weeks since I'd had my camera out, but it felt like two decades.

I didn't know if picking up my old hobby was me continuing to look at the world as a living person, or if in fact it was me starting to look at the world as a ghost who was probably going to be stuck here for all of time.

Small questions, you know.

"It's more than that."

I shook out my hands, leaned back and pointed the lens directly into the midday sun overhead. The focus moved in and out erratically, alarmed at the huge subject before it. I crammed my eyeball hard into the viewfinder and willed it to find something to connect itself to.

Before I could commit to an image, my stomach started to squirm. I looked down at the roof beneath my feet.

"Where are you going now?" I grumbled.

I placed the back of my tongue between my teeth and when I lowered my camera once more I was standing in a meeting room behind a row of tables. Tables with people at them.

"Fu--! Vihokratana, what are you doing here?"

My eyes were still adjusting to the change in light. I coughed away the dizziness in my head and smiled sheepishly at a vaguely maroon shape to my right that I figured was Ms. Godji.

"Sorry about that. Ah, this is the meeting for Hideko's cover, right? I heard you wanted my input."

"Well it's perfect timing I guess. We're still taking our seats. Do you have the requests from the author?"

I walked briskly across to the other side of the room and plopped myself down next to Arm. "I didn't have a chance to grab my notes, but there weren't many. She emailed me this morning and just asked that the colour blue be the main motif."

"Got it. Let's take a moment to get ourselves organised and start at :45."

I nodded and waited for the last of the overexposure to fade from my eyes. I could see the shapes of my coworkers starting to move again, laptops and notebooks being deposited around the U-shaped table set-up. A few of them glanced at me with slightly shaken but otherwise amused looks.

Arm tapped the desk in front of where I had laid down my camera. "You okay?" he asked.

I smiled at him with closed lips. "Not my finest entrance, I know."

"I haven't seen you all day. You've been out taking pictures?"

"Yep. I'm a ghost. I don't have to work."

Arm frowned. "That's not like you. Will you tell me what happened up that mountain already? I'm this close--" he held up two fingers very decidedly squeezed together, "--to getting it out of Off."