Ghosts

1. We were both kids. He was my next-door neighbor. He was fourteen, lean and athletic, handsome in that dark Cajun way. His mother left him notes that ended with "I love you." I was jealous as hell, no way that my own parents would ever say or write anything like that, not to mention that I could never have dreamed of being as athletic as he was. The gigantic photo of his big brother, in LSU football regalia, hanging on the wall in the downstairs hall didn't register. Eventually we moved out of that rental home to successively worse and worse places as my father slowly fell into early-onset Alzheimer's and was no longer able to work, but it was a small town and I always knew what was going on, about the successive bad boyfriends that his mother brought home, about him going to live with his father and working in his father's wrecking yard after school and during summers, about the day he committed suicide by crashed his car into a bridge pylon at 100mph. Apparently he always felt he could not live up to his big brother the football hero and one day decided to end it. That was twenty years ago, more or less. I don't know why I was thinking about that when I woke up yesterday morning. I don't feel guilty about his death in any way or anything like that, the memory just popped out of nowhere for no reason I can think of.

2. The Mighty Fang stuck a claw out and ripped a gash in my little finger because I was ignoring him and talking to my brother on the phone when TMF wanted me to get out of bed and feed him. I went to the bathroom and grabbed a bandage out of the first aid basket. This basket is a Christmas basket, stuffed with first aid supplies and stashed in the laundry closet. A little over ten years ago as I was walking out the door of my home next-door to my grandmother's one of my aunts, now deceased, dropped a Christmas gift basket off with me as I was walking out the door to go somewhere and asked me to give it to my grandmother for her. I promptly stashed it somewhere and headed back out to do whatever errand I was going to do and forgot about it, and months later came across it again and was stumped as to which aunt gave it to me for my grandmother so never did anything with it other than eat the food items (summer sausage and cheese). Now they're all dead, for close to ten years, and I still feel guilty about that damned basket every time I go to grab a bandage. I guess that's what differentiates me from Darth Cheney, who feels no guilt at all about sending men to their deaths for the profit of Halliburton, but you'd think that after all this time I'd stop beating myself over the head about that damned Christmas basket...

-- Badtux the Ghost-plagued Penguin