A Ghost of a Chance Read Online Free

waking hour and even some of his sleeping ones. Over the years, he had grown used to their constant chattering, the multitude of jokes and pranks, the crazy ethereal noises twenty-four hours a day. Silence was as foreign to him as pantyhose.
    Even the loss of his privacy was something he missed less each year. But it all came with a price; the effort to bottle up what happened to him all the time made him quiet and withdrawn. Keenan wished there was someone he could talk to about it, someone living.
    Doctors were no good; they all thought he was crazy. Three hospital stays, thousands of dollars in therapy, and nightly handfuls of meds hadn’t even made a dent. He gave up on conventional treatment long ago and surrendered to the reality… or sur-reality, as he liked to call it. He knew something had to give soon. The thought was a sobering one.
    A crowd of six men stood by his closet heatedly debating eighteenth century politics and smoking phantom cigars. As usual, an old residual couple hunched near the window. Residuals were not aware they had passed over, choosing instead to act out some scene in their life repeatedly. These were rare, but Keenan had two living in his house, the other a civil war soldier who pissed on the dining room curtains around nine o’clock every night. The room reeked of it for about an hour then it just disappeared. Keenan avoided that part of the house as a rule. How they ended up there was anybody’s guess.
    The rest were what paranormal researchers called sentient , which meant, as far as he could tell, that they were intelligent and aware of their surroundings. Intelligent . For some of them that was a stretch.
    Three children played ring-around-the-rosy on top of his bed. The room sounded like the Rose Quarter during a Blazer’s game.
    “Come on. Give a guy a break.”
    The ghosts continued without giving him so much as a glimpse.
    Keenan flipped his middle finger uselessly and stepped into the bathroom, disregarding the three guys in the bathtub arguing and the naked ebony-skinned woman sitting on the vanity swinging her legs and singing. Their combined voices echoed against the porcelain.
    “… not going to take it anymore, I tell you …”
    “… hush little baby, don’t say a word …”
    “… shut up, Luke. It’s nothing to sneeze at …”
    “… mama’s gonna buy you a mocking bird …”
    “… I hate this place, man! You tell them they can suck my dick …”
    “… if that mocking bird don’t sing …”
    Rubbing his face with both hands to relieve the constriction in his cheeks, Keenan leaned against the sink, lifted his chin to the mirror, and frowned at the brown eyes staring back at him. The glaring red saturating the white accentuated their color, and dark circles made them look sad. Keenan slapped the faucet handle and splashed cold water against them. An icy headache formed. He reached for the small towel hanging to his right and held it against his face until the chill passed.
    The noise stopped.
    When he yanked the towel down, the spirits in the bathroom were gone and everything went dead quiet. He gave his reflection a fleeting look, ran a hand through the thick black hair, and turned to go into his bedroom.
    It was empty and silent too.
    The last time this happened was in Florence when he searched for a corner where he could sell paintings. When he walked onto one of the back cobbled streets, the ghosts had just disappeared. It was the only other time in nearly twenty years he had been completely alone. It was kind of spooky…and this coming from a man who lived the way he did.
    Constance , he thought. She must have talked them into cutting him some slack for a change.
    Not one to pass up a blessing, Keenan stripped off his boxers and socks, slid into the unmade bed, and popped a pill into his mouth. One of his ghost friends must have “touched” the water bottle; ice cold chased the pill down his throat. He hit the switch on his lamp and burrowed into