Spirit World Rising

A Story by ginsy

The human obsession with identity has led to something of an epidemic of personality crises in Abilene.

Every culture has a unique definition or idea of the metaphysical self which inhabits our physical bodies. Western culture tends to favor the "soul" where others state that our inner selves are stored in various parts of our bodies (hearts, stomachs, etc.). Individually, we have all managed to create an image of a duel self- a divide between the physical reality of who we are and the personification of our consciousness. The mental at war with the physical, one self at ware with another. The human obsession of personal identity is one which festers in confined spaces and grows into a life of its own, consuming all those in its wake.

Abilene, Kansas is not a particularly notable town, but a passer-through or tourist would notice that all the residents of the town seem to be moving about their lives as if their souls were slowly evacuating their body and rising into the sky, hovering on the edges of their physicality as if unsure what would be their best option: evacuate or stay. A distinct separation between the solid line of reality and the transparency of the mind is present in this town- almost as if every person has been taught before they even have a concept of their own physical body that their consciousness and their bodies are two separate entities, never to join and never to meet.

Val is one such person, soul hovering listlessly just outside the crown of her head and the lines of her wrists and curling around her prominent jaw line. The Seven Eleven in which she works served to create a routine which, much like wasps being encased in amber, the people who frequented it slowly became trapped in. She saw the same people every morning and evening. The act of closing the store, which Dale or Kathy usually took responsibility for, was a purely symbolic one. No one was going to steal anything, and everyone would be back in the morning.

Her parents still live in Kansas, a small town outside Kansas City which they were born in and will probably die in. Their amber serves not to provide a sense of normalcy, but to imprison them in a prison which they don't wish to escape. They don't call.

(In some ways, Dale, who is spindly and weather worn, is more of a parent. He took one look at her skinny teenage form and asked what hours she could work, all those years ago when she was first out on her own and the world seemed so much larger than she had imagined even if it was only Abilene.)

The exhausted woman pushing the baby in her stroller comes in at 8:30 AM just like she does every day Val is working- buying an energy drink from the rows upon rows of refrigerators which look like slot machines glowing in the fluorescent lighting

Around 9:00 the kids from the high school begin trickling in, attempting to goad her into allowing them to purchase things which they know they are not allowed, before scurrying off to their classes. The stragglers come and go by 9:30.

11:00 �" 12:00 brings the lunch crowd from the high school and an assortment of miscellaneous people who go about their business and leave without making eye contact with her.

She takes her lunch break at 1:30 and stands behind the gas station apathetically as the sun roasts her like when she left an egg out on tin foil in mid-summer, watching it sizzle and eventually cook (sort of). She runs off a few teenagers attempting to do the same before stealing her boss's sandwich from the employee refrigerator and going back to work feeling very much like no time had passed at all and that she will once again be ringing up the single mother and the high schoolers, one solemn as if in a funeral and the others loud and rambunctious as if they don't do the same thing every morning for nine months.

She deals with the rest of the people who come through: people just filling up, teenagers cutting class, middle aged men with bags under their eyes who glance at her just a little too long as they're buying their lunch.

As the clock nears 4:00 she hopes that she will get a reprieve from Mrs. Wakefield's wrath today, that she's found some other store to terrorize and haunt. No such luck, she hobbles in at exactly 3:50.

Val doesn't know what the woman's first name was, but her last name is Wakefield and as far as she knows she comes into the gas station every single day without fail and never buys anything. She nags Dale, her boss, and yells at her and Kathy, the other employee with her shift. Dale seems to mostly ignore her, as he is wont to do, but Kathy is too sensitive and tended to make herself scarce when the woman was around.

In this particular instance she scrutinizes the display of Sun Chips for a moment before plodding up to the cashier's area.

"I'm not paying more than $2.00 for Sun Chips," she stated blankly, scratching her rather short nails against the plastic coating of the counter.

Val looked up at her. One side of the woman's face hangs slightly, and she wears no makeup. Her eyebrows are furrowed in what looked to be mild annoyance, and while she never had in the past, Val worries that one day she'll fly into a real rage.

"You're welcome to look for them somewhere else then," Val replies, glancing again at the clock.

"I know what you're doing, but you're getting paid and as long as you're on the clock you're going to help me," she said matter-of-factly, dunking her head so that she was in Val's line of sight, clock blocked by the woman's frail, willowy figure.

"There are smaller bags near the display that are cheaper," Val replies blankly.

Mrs. Wakefield huffs before tottering off and Val takes her chance to escape.

"Dale, I'm leaving! Put Kathy on the register," she calls out before trudging home.

Things continued like that. Mrs. Wakefield shuffled in on this particular shift at 3:15 looking especially put out. Her usual disdainful parade through the store now seemed more like an angry one, and Val is genuinely taken aback and how closely she resembled some horrible dictator observing her spoils of war and tyranny.

"What religion are you Valerie?" she calls from down the aisle, thoroughly examining the candies.

Val shrugs, used to Mrs. Wakefield's abrupt entrance into personal questions.

"I was raised Catholic, but I don't go to church and haven't really thought about it in a long time."

Mrs. Wakefield tuts disapprovingly and Val suspects she's about to be reprimanded for her lack of faithful attendance.

"Raising a child Catholic is the worst crime a person can commit, and remaining apathetic about it when you're an adult is just as bad, if you ask me," she told her.

"Good thing I didn't ask then," Val replied sunnily. Mrs. Wakefield just snorts in a way which resembled a horse that may or may not kick, and took her leave.

Sometimes when she is home alone at night, her only company the soft glow of the television, she picks up the phone and debates. She can conjure up endless reasons not to call- they won't want to speak to her, they won't pick up, their number has changed, they hate her, etc. Each excuse seems weaker and weaker to her though, and she always goes to sleep those nights feeling like a coward.

Still, she finds herself glancing at her phone in the night when no one else is awake to see or judge her.

It's a rough day, the full moon and the rain appears to be making even her most docile regulars unusually surly. The mother had snapped at her, the businessman's leering became strained flirty.

Currently, she's trying to convince a 19 year old from the local community college that she really, positively, absolutely will not be selling him alcohol. It's to this scene that Mrs. Wakefield enters and Val can feel her patience draining from her like swirling water down a drain.

"I'm an adult, it's not like anyone's gonna know," he continues to argue with her.

At this point, she's simply staring past him, making what feels like illicit eye contact with the wall clock. It appears to be moving slower than usual intentionally, vindictive against her for some imagined slight.

The boy keeps on, and it's when he slams his hands on the counter and the skin slaps sharply against the surface that Mrs. Wakefield intervenes.

It feels like something from a superhero comic.

She swoops in, scurrying up behind him and grabbing him by his ear.

Val wishes she could remember exactly what she had said to him, but at the time she was too focused on the way in which this woman who weighed 90 pounds generously dragged the boy from the store and demanded that he learn some manners and come back when he did so.

Mrs. Wakefield brushes her hands off on her jeans and looks over to Val.

"Rough day?"

At home, she dials and she waits and as soon as she hit call she regrets it so much, more than she regrets any of her multitude of mistakes.

No one answers, which is probably for the best.

Val very distinctly remembers the day that Mrs. Wakefield came in and asked if they had any cards. Val told her that they didn't, and Mrs. Wakefield sighed dejectedly.

"I was going to have a poker game with some of my neighbors, but I don't have any cards," she explained.

She left soon after. Val isn't sure why that day sticks in her mind so clearly.

On her walk home one day, she sees a poster advertising a showing of the 1931 film adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde. She stares into the divided face of the tormented scientist for some time before finally walking home.

Things went on like that for some time. The seasons melted into each other and summer soon became fall, which became winter. The trees, however sparse, had dropped their leaves and now appeared to stand in memoriam to a long forgotten past. The ground was hard and slushy and if one were to walk to work, as Val did, then there was an inevitable issue with wet socks.

She grumbled to herself as she opened the doors at 8:00 AM.

Right on time, the single mom, the high schoolers, the morning commuters and, later, the lunch crowd. Everybody came and went and Val had yet to see the standard terror of the old woman cursing at the prices and demanding to know why things had been reorganized. The customers of her shift trickled out and she doesn't see her, so she takes off her vest and takes her leave, feeling somewhat betrayed by this woman who had single handedly ruined her routine.

The trudge home was not a particularly long one, but the quiet gave her time to ruminate on her disappearance and conclude that she was being silly for being hurt or worried. She probably went to find someone else to bother at work.

Still, she couldn't help but hear the click of the line on the telephone when things such as this happened. People leaving without a word, never to be seen again, seemingly disappearing from thin air as if they combusted, leaving only a scattered remains (ashes to ashes, dust to dust; she supposed). People seemed to do that too easily around the flat lands, saying goodbye for the day and then being picked up by aliens skulking about the plains or falling into gopher holes.

While the thought of existing un-autonomously, a number in a system from high school algebra, made something in her stomach clench painfully, what else was only really supposed to do?

By the time a few days passed without hide nor had hair of Mrs. Wakefield, Val began to become legitimately worried for her safety. She was an old woman, there was a plethora of things that could've happened to her. What if she fell, or had a heart attack? She'd probably scold her for taking so long in retrieving her.

She had inquired as to her place of residence from Dale, who had looked just as dubious as she feels as she trudges up a well maintained gravel driveway which prefaces the compact house that stood just two blocks from the gas station. The glass in the gravel sparkles in the winter sun ominously, the reflections looking like sprites (or something of that nature) flitting between leaves and sticks and rocks, always just in her peripheral and never fully in her sight.

Her front door possesses a similar image: flat blonde wood, brass handle, and blown glass as opposed to the transparent variety which was favored by most people.

Val knocks loudly, but got not answer. She looks in the window and doesn't see her and upon no response to her second bout of knocking she elects to go around the back and see if she could catch someone's attention.

She peaks in (thankfully, these windows are transparent), and saw the frizzy white hair peeping over the top of a chair which faced a TV that looked as if it belonged in a museum. She knocked on the back door but got no response from the figure, almost ghostly in its stillness.

Finally, she tries the door and finds it to be locked, so she regretfully picks up one of the ceramic figurines which line Mrs. Wakefield's back porch and breaks through the glass, unlocking the door from the inside. The woman makes no move to respond or reprimand her.

When she approaches the couch, the smell of both preservation and rot overtook her senses, and as she took in the pose of the woman in full putrefaction. Her abdomen was swelled with gas and her skin had taken on a royal tint which stood in juxtaposition to the pasty white of the way her skin usually looked.

Stumbling back, Val attempts to assess her surroundings but manages only to stare directly into Mrs. Wakefield's remains as if she can resuscitate her my sheer force of will alone.

"Jesus Christ," she murmurs as she dials the number for the coroner, who was unfortunately busy enjoying his lunch and tells her that she'd have to wait for them to get down there.

While the coroner had not even suggested that she had to stay on the premises, she feels an obligation to sit vigil over this woman. Her leathery purple tongue is sticking slightly from her weathered, dried up worms (victims of the rain) where her lips used to live. Val feels comradery for the dead in general, the listlessness which they embody was exactly what she feels every day and knowing Mrs. Wakefield in life only solidified those feelings.

She wondered if this was how her routine was dismantled- not with an alien abduction or spontaneous combustion, but with the simple passing of an abrasive old woman.

Amongst the procession of her body, she thinks she sees her soul slither out her ear and out the window, up to wherever dead souls go, never to be seen again. In this moment, she feels as if her own soul, having bore witness to the day's events, had finally made up its mind and shrinks back into her skin like a sweater left too long in the wash.

But she has work the next day, and she feels the first stirrings of her soul desperately staging revolt once again.