I made it back to my apartment just as the sun was disappearing behind the horizon. I was still pretty stuffed from eating some 30-ish hours before, but I was bored, so I figured that I would make myself a small snack and kick back to watch tv or something for a little while.

    I decided to pop in my new cassette and listen to it while I threw my snack together. I was barely halfway through track 2, the wonderful song “Daytime Drama”, when who should show up but my new acquaintance. I had moved to put a section of meat back in the freezer when I ended up walking through him.

    “Hey! Would you stop that already?”

    I ignored the intruder and continued making my meal.

    The ghost walked up next to me and watch me slowly dice up a small chunk of deer. “Dinner?”

    I didn’t answer.

    “Disgusting,” he said, turning around to lean on the counter next to me. He folded his arms. “So is this your place?”

    I glanced sideways at him. Did he ever stop asking stupid questions?

    “Got any tv or anything?”

    Dude, I clean out empty houses for a living and eat roadkill. You tell me if I have tv or not.

    The ghostly home invader got bored and sighed in an incredibly over dramatic fashion before pushing off of the counter and walking out to my living room. Guess he needed to see for himself just how boring my living quarters were. Whatever, it didn’t matter to me. I just kept making my food.

    Once I had a nice plate of meat cubes, I made my way out to my living room only to find a certain someone sitting in my favorite chair. Or was he floating? I’m still not really sure how the whole ghost thing works. The point is that he was in my chair, and that is completely unacceptable.

    So I stood in my kitchen doorway and stared at him.

    Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to notice, which didn’t surprise me one bit. I took a step forward, and he finally noticed me.

    “Need something? I mean, aside from the obvious need for portals of entertainment.”

    I glanced between him and the chair. Sort of. At him, then through him at the chair, then at him again. Come to think of it, he probably couldn’t see my eyes refocusing. Oh well.

    “You need to work on your communication skills, specifically verbal, because you make no sense.” He looked around. “Do you have any books or anything, at least?”

    I continued to stare at him. He was really starting to get on my nerves. If I didn’t have a tv, why would he think that I had books? My kind isn’t exactly literate, nor did we really need to be constantly entertained. We were pretty good at just zoning out for several hours at a time, if you get my drift. We did, however, have an innate love for music, and were known for our musical collections.

    “If you’re going to be my new roommate, I think I’d prefer the dump.” He sighed, stood, and stretched, leaving my chair vacant. Seizing my opportunity, I took my seat back. When I had to walk through him again, the ghost turned around and immediately went into a rage.

    “You seriously have to stop doing that. I know you’re all solidified and corpseified and gross, and have no idea what it’s like, so trust me when I say it is the single most violating feeling in ghostly existence. I would greatly appreciate if you’d show a little respect for the dead and stopped walking through me.”

    The whole time he ranted I just stared at him while nibbling on my snack. When he finally stopped, I raised an eyebrow. Respect for the dead, he says. Had he even looked at me yet? Or thought about, you know, taking his own orders? He wasn’t the only previously-living being in the room.

    When he finally realized that I wasn’t going to retaliate, or do anything except stare at him, he rolled his eyes and huffed. I hadn’t encountered many ghosts in my time of existence, but he was definitely the most self-centered of them.

    “So if you don’t have any television or books, what do you have? Anything? Or do you just sit around and stare at walls for fun?” His voice was tinged with more than a little sarcasm during the last question. I almost wished that I could speak just so that I could respond in kind. Unfortunately, sarcasm doesn’t doesn’t translate very well through body language, so I had to settle for a small shrug.

    He got tired of waiting for an answer and began to take a closer look around my living room. It only took him about a minute and a half to find my cassette stash, even though it was sitting in plain sight in my cabinet that had windowed doors, next to my stereo that was still blaring the best album known to man.

    “So you’re a music fan?”

    That’s it. I decided that his name, from that point on, would be Blatantly Obliviously Obvious. Or just Boo for short.

    Boo began digging through my cassettes and managed to find at least one thing to say about every single one that he picked up.

    “Janet Jackson, what a babe. Bon Jovi is always awesome. Journey, classic.” He went on for a good ten minutes or so. To think, barely half an hour before I had been all set to relax and enjoy some munchies in peace.

    Once he had gone through my whole collection, he looked over at me, intrigued. “You know, for being so… not alive anymore, you have pretty good tastes.” He tossed a cassette into my lap, narrowly missing my messy plate. “Pop that one in, would you?”

    I stared at him. Was he serious? Who did he think he was?

    “Well?”

    Whatever. I was hungry, and I wasn’t about to take orders from an imperious ghost.

    He stared at me for a moment, obviously expecting me to follow his orders. He waited. And waited. And a minute passed. Two minutes. Three. Ok, so it was really only about forty five seconds. He was a rather impatient non-person. Point is, he figured that I wasn’t going to do what he had said, and decided to move on.

    “So what else do you have around here? Anything cool?” Apparently he had no idea what personal boundaries were, and he started wandering around my apartment, digging through my cabinets and drawers and pulling everything out of my closet. I decided to just leave him be. The worst I could do would be to stare at him, and for some reason I didn’t think that would stop him.

    A little while later, I had finished eating, tidied up my kitchen a bit, and was considering going out for a shamble until dawn, when I figured that I may as well invite the transparent one. It would be easier to keep an eye on him, if nothing else. I grabbed my coat and put it on, then stashed my new cassette into my pocket.

    I found the ghost in my bedroom, my few belongings strewn about the floor and the bed. It looked a bit like a minefield, and I was not about to walk in and step on everything, but he could at least walk through all of it. It took him a moment to realize that I was standing in the doorway.

    “You have pretty awesome taste in stuff, man. Why didn’t you tell me you had a love for the best decade in music history?” He held up a gig poster from the ‘80s that I had forgotten was buried in the back of my closet.

    I shrugged.

    “Anyways, you need something?”

    I turned and motioned out toward my living room.

    “What?”

    I motioned again, more insistently.

    “What is it, boy? You need to be let out?” He laughed, but I was far less amused. If he wanted to act like that, then he could just stay here, and I would enjoy my walk in peace.

    I shook my head and walked out, leaving him laughing in my bedroom.

    As I wandered downstairs, I passed a few of my neighbors coming back from a hunt with a very unhappy-looking young woman who was shouting to be let go of. I could guess what the next few minutes would hold, and that she probably wasn’t going to see the sunrise. i could also guess that my neighbors would be getting a visit within the next few days from the SOP, the Supernatural Order Police. They tended not to take too kindly to our kind devouring their kind. Normally we wouldn’t have to, but if we are unable to find enough food to keep ourselves satisfied, then… Well, hunger makes everyone, even supes, do drastic things.

    The air outside was rather cold, I was guessing somewhere around 40 degrees (Fahrenheit, of course. Celsius is just gibberish.), and I was glad that I brought my jacket. With my hands in my pockets, I followed the familiar sidewalk through the woods and toward town.

    As I was approaching the town limits, the world around me was ever-so-slowly growing brighter. There were birds starting to wake up and sing, and the occasional early morning jogger passing by. This was my favorite time of day. It was quiet, peaceful, and full of potential. But I’m digressing here. Point is, I was wandering around town, all by my lonesome, in the wee hours of the morning.

    I found myself wandering down main street and watching the shop keepers getting ready to open for the day, when I felt that I wasn’t exactly alone anymore.

    “We should stop somewhere for donuts and coffee.”

    Great. What was he doing here?

    The ghost pointed toward a small coffee shop up ahead, where the worker was propping the front door open. “There looks good. Let’s go.”

    He started crossing the street, and I stood and watched. My kind doesn’t do coffee and donuts. If it wasn’t a living, breathing organism at some point, we don’t want it, glazed or otherwise. He made it to the doorway, when he suddenly couldn’t go any further. He looked as if he had hit a brick wall face-first. Turning back toward me, he sighed. “Would you get over here?”

    I shook my head and decided to continue on my walk, ignoring him as much as I could. I managed to make it about a block when he showed up a few feet in front of me.

    “Come on, man. What’s wrong with a little coffee in the morning to wake you up? Not that we need woken up, but still! Hey, would you listen to-”

    I walked right through him without hesitation, cutting him off. He was incredibly difficult to ignore, but at least he couldn’t exactly get in my way.

    “You really have to stop that! You have no idea what it’s like. It’s painful!”

    I stopped and raised an eyebrow. It is common knowledge that ghosts can’t feel pain. They’re not physical beings, and thus they are incapable of feeling anything physical. You could still hurt their feelings, though, which I seemed to have done.

    “Ok, so maybe not, but it’s still rude!”

    I continued on my excursion. He, of course, followed.

    “You could have at least waited for me to get some coffee to go,” he grumbled from behind me. I couldn’t really figure out why he wanted coffee in the first place. It’s not like he could drink it. It would, quite literally, go right through him. Why did he need me to wait, anyway?

    He kept pouting, and finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I spotted a coffee shop up ahead, stopped, and pointed to it.

    The ghost stared at me. “You mean it? You’ll wait for me?”

    I nodded, already wondering if I was going to regret this decision.

    His face lit up and he ran across the street, not seeming to notice the car passing through him along the way, and ran straight into that invisible brick wall again. He turned back around toward me.

    “You have to come, too,” he called back to me.

    Great. So I was literally stuck with him now. It would seem that I hadn’t quite found myself a ghost, so much as a parasite.

    I checked for traffic like an intelligent being, not like some lesser beings that I knew, and crossed over to the other side (pun intended). I waited on a bench outside of the shop while my pest grabbed himself a beverage. Once he arrived, I stood and we were off once again.

    “I love coffee. It’s so warm, you know? It’s perfect,” he rambled. “Ok, so maybe you don’t know. But it’s really cold to be like me. You’re cold all the time, so things that are warm or hot are amazing. And what is the one hot handheld thing that you can get in pretty much every third building on main street? Hot coffee.” He grinned and walked alongside me, finally in some semblance of quiet. He thankfully stayed that way most of the way back to the apartment, only speaking up to make stupid little comments on stupid little things, like those we passed on the street, or some of my neighbors.

    As we walked back into my apartment, he walked into the kitchen and leaned on the counter next to my sink, still hugging his cup in both hands, even though I was sure it wasn’t warm anymore. “You know, we seem to have quite a lot in common.”

    He wanted more small talk. Just wonderful. I was starting to miss my peaceful singular life already.

    “Who were you in your pre-death?”

    I stared at him for a moment in disbelief. That was probably one of the most personal and rude things that you could ask someone who was in their post-death. That was like asking someone living what their deepest, darkest secret was. It just wasn’t something that you asked someone whom you didn’t already know incredibly well.

    And on top of that, I didn’t even know. So I sighed and shrugged, then hung up my coat, leaving the tape in the pocket, and went to sit down to play some card games.

    The ghost, I guess, took the hint and kept to himself. A few minutes later he was back digging through my bedroom.

    I had played a few games of solitaire, and won none of course, when the ghost wandered back into the living room.

    “What’s this for?”

    When I looked up, I noticed that he was holding my old skateboard. I had picked it up a while back, but was never very good at riding it, so after a while I just tucked it in my closet and pulled it out once in a while to dust it off, then put it back again.

    I shrugged.

    “You skate?” He looked it over, turning it between his hands. “It’s a pretty sweet board, nicely made. Not exactly top of the line, but definitely above average. Where’d you get it?”

    I shrugged again. I had acquired it the same way that I had acquired nearly all of my other possessions. I had found it.

    He looked up at me. “Are you any good?”

I shook my head.

    “Then why keep it?”

    I sighed and stared at it. I really did like that board, even if I was terrible. Unfortunately, my kind trying to act like normal people was frowned upon, so even if I was good at riding it I wouldn’t be able to keep it if the SOP caught me with it.

    “I’m kind of jealous, to be honest. Skateboarding is awesome. I miss it.” He paused, then turned to me, his expression thoughtful. “Maybe I can teach you sometime. I mean, no use having it if you can’t ride it, so if you can ride it then you will have a use for it!”

    So not only was he annoying, but he was also out of his gourd.

    That day was a day like any other: dark, dreary, and duller than a plastic butterknife. Which was perfectly fine for me. I mean, it’s not like I care for sunny days. I don’t exactly tan very well. I got first degree burns just walking down the block one afternoon last summer.
    It was mid-morning, probably around ten or so, and I was getting kind of hungry. I hadn’t eaten in at least a week, and I had run out of food reserves, so it was about time I go hunting for something to restock my pantry. I grabbed my light jacket, since the days were starting to get cooler, and left my apartment, not bothering to close the door. I lived in a fairly small apartment building with very few neighbors, and we all pretty much kept to ourselves, so I wasn’t too concerned. It’s hard to worry when your neighbors are braindead.
    I meandered out of the building and headed east, toward my favorite place to look for food. Just off the main highway a little ways out was a pretty dense forest that was always filled with deer and other animals. Easy prey.
    It didn’t take long to reach the highway, and within minutes I had found myself the perfect feast. A large buck was just off the side of the road, unmoving and practically begging to be mine.
    I walked up and looked it over. Its head was twisted backwards and tongue hanging out, and it looked to have a couple broken ribs, but overall it looked rather intact. Thank goodness for inattentive motorists, and at least they had the common decency to pull it to the side of the road like they are supposed to. Most people just kind of leave it there to get run over a few more times. That ruins a lot of the meat, making it almost not worth the trouble of dragging it all the way home. This one, however, was a beauty.
    I grabbed a horn and started dragging, being careful to try not to let my prize get too scraped up on the long walk back. I managed to make it back to my building by late afternoon, and after an annoying fight with the elevator doors and losing a hoof I had finally made it back to my home sweet home.
    The giant monster of a meat slab hardly fit into my little kitchen, which I knew was going to make prepping it somewhat difficult. Given the size, though, I could compromise since it was likely to feed me for a good month or two.
    As I pulled out my favorite chopping knives, which, let’s be real here, are a hatchet and a bone saw, I realized that I had forgotten the single most important step of the entire process: I had forgotten to put down the chopping tarp. See, blood is a strange thing. It cleans up just fine off of tile floor if you get to it soon enough, but when you’re chopping up anything too big to fit in the kitchen sink, it gets everywhere, and you’re not likely to clean it up right away because you’re too busy trying to salvage as much as you can before it starts to rot. That means that your floor will start to stain and leave weird shaped blobs of this rusty reddish-brown color all over the place and you will never be able to have company over ever again. Trust me, it’s embarrassing.
     Anyways, I knew I couldn’t get started without my chopping tarp, so I wandered off to my back room and dug through the closet until I found it. As I made my way back to the kitchen, however, I heard some noises and immediately regretted not taking the extra minute and a half to close my front door behind me when I came in. My suspicions were confirmed when I rounded the corner into my kitchen and found my neighbor trying to pry one of the legs off of my find. Seriously, man, not cool.
    My neighbor looked up when I walked in and stared at me, looking as if I were a two-headed alien that had just appeared out of a mysterious swirl of rainbows to tell him that he was really a girl his entire life and had been living a lie. I stared back at him, doing my best to glare so that he would get the picture that that was my food he was yanking on, and after a moment he slowly let go of the leg and stood back up. He continued to stare at me, as if considering challenging me for the beast, but I took one step toward him and he backed away and out of the kitchen to leave. That’s what I thought! No one messes with my food.
    Now I could get down to business. I pulled the beast out of the kitchen and into the living room while I laid down the tarp, trying to cover as much of the floor and up the doors of the lower cabinets as I could. Once it was in place I pulled my dinner back in and set to work.
    It took me the better part of the night to chop the animal up and fit it all in the refrigerator and the freezer, but by dawn I had finished, cleaned up, and eaten until I was full. Now that I had eaten I could get back to work.
    My job was less than pleasant. I was working as one of those people who cleans out foreclosed homes. It was only my second month there and already I was hating it with every fiber of my being. I mean, you get to find some pretty cool stuff sometimes, but for the most part it’s just a matter of throwing things in a trash bag, throwing the trash in the dumpster, and repeating until the house is completely empty save for the spiders. Sounds thrilling, right?
    That day I would be clearing out a house of someone who apparently hadn’t paid their bills in close to six months. When someone had finally broken in to demand the money, they’d found that the person had been dead for months. For the record, this is a pretty regular occurrence. From what I had been told, it wasn’t too big of a house and it should only take me a day or two to clear everything out on my own. I was pretty thankful because I had just finished a huge gig a couple of days before cleaning out a gigantic house that was on the verge of being classified as a mansion. Not only had it been long and boring, but also rather painful. I had lost a foot on the second day and couldn’t get it replaced until the fifth day. Do you have any idea how hard it is to move furniture when you only have one foot? Probably not. Suffice it to say that it’s really hard and not worth the paycheck I get.
    So off I went to work, ready for a nice and relaxing day of taking out the trash. Unfortunately, it’s against the law for me to own a car, so I had to walk all nine miles to the house, and it only took me about five hours. That was a new record for me, seeing as how most turtles could probably beat me in a race.
    The house was nothing special. It was in the middle of a lower-middle class neighborhood where all of the houses looked the same. Except for the house I was heading to, of course. The lawn looked like a jungle next to the somewhat neatly mowed lawns surrounding it. Some of the shutters were falling off of the house and there were a couple shingles on the ground that had fallen off of the roof. The porch was missing floorboards, and the walkway up to the house was almost as overgrown as the lawn. Oh, and the entire place looked like it was in its own shadow, darker than everything else around it. That had to be the place.
    I shambled up to the front door, being careful not to fall into the holes in the floorboards, and let myself in. I knocked and listened for a moment, but no one seemed home, so I figured I would get to work.
    The inside of the house was even more dilapidated than the outside. The railing on the stairs was missing parts, and one of the steps had been completely eaten away by what I’m guessing was termites. The furniture was riddled with holes, and the tv was missing its screen for whatever reason. I figured that the upstairs would be the best place to start, and I would work my way from top to bottom.
    The upstairs hall was nearly pitch black, despite it being the afternoon, so I tried the light switch. The lights, of course, did not turn on. That meant that I would be working in the dark all night, as well. Great. May as well get some daylight in while I could.
    I tried the first door on my right to find a room filled to bursting with boxes. Great, the guy was a hoarder. I began to wonder if he’d died from his boxes falling on top of him. That could happen, right? Regardless, I wasn’t going to find the window in that room any time soon.
    I went to the first door on my left instead and found that my prediction was incorrect. Not only was the room a bathroom that smelled terrible, it was also covered in blood splatter everywhere. I guess if you’re going to blow your brains out then the bathroom is as good a place as any to do it. At least there’s no carpet or fancy wallpaper to have to worry about replacing. And on the even better side for me, there was a window facing the west, meaning plenty of natural light for the rest of the day.
    The other door on the left led to a dark and rather empty spare bedroom that looked as if it hadn’t been entered in well over a year. As I made my way to the window I could see little puffs of dust clouding around my feet with every step, which only served to confirm my suspicions. The windows in the room were covered with dark curtains to block the light from outside, and I wasted no time in pulling the curtain rod down and removing them. When I turned around, I almost wished I hadn’t let the light in. Everything in the room was covered in dust enough to make even the red carpet look a dull and muted grey, my footprints standing out like a hipsters at a death metal concert. Apparently this half-headed person had no idea what a vacuum was when they were still living.
    Now that the room was lit, I left to check the last room on the opposite side of the hall. Just standing outside of the room made me not want to see what was on the other side. You see, I can’t really smell things. I can smell really strong things, sure, but I’m talking only if it’s suffocatingly strong to where people with a normal sense of smell can’t breathe anymore. And outside of that door even I could barely breathe because of the smell. I sucked up my hesitation, though, because I had a job to do, and pushed open the door.
    It seemed as though someone had been in here within the last few of days. And he was still here, lying flat out on his back in the middle of the floor, a tourniquet around his upper left arm and dried vomit all over his face. Another dead junkie, and more trash to drag out.
    As I stood there, I heard a loud crash from the front yard and recognized it as the sound of my dumpster being dropped off. Perfect timing. I looked around from something to grab the dead kid with and had to settle for a pillowcase, of all things. Better than nothing, I supposed. Anyways, I used it as a giant glove and grabbed the dead kid by the wrists and started dragging.
    Most people think dead bodies are heavy. But then, I’m not most people. I did just drag a giant buck a few miles to home the day before, after all. This guy may have been incredibly disgusting, but at least he was rather light. Once we reached the top of the stairs, it was, quite literally, all downhill from there. I was feeling pretty lazy, so I figured I would just roll him down and make it easy on myself. Big mistake. Not only did he not want to roll, but the the dead guy didn’t even have the decency to pull his legs up. He kept getting his feet caught in the railings, making it even more difficult to get him to roll.
    The entire fight took about five minutes, but by the end we had reached the bottom of the stairs and I had only had to break one of his legs to get him there. I would call that a success. I grabbed him by the wrists again and maneuvered him around the holes in the floorboards and out of the front door. Unfortunately, he was not finished with being a pain, and ended up getting his foot stuck in one of the holes in the porch floorboards. I guess I deserved it, thought. I was pulling him on his stomach, after all. Did I learn my lesson? You bet your sweet behind I didn’t. I yanked on his arms hard, felt both of his shoulders dislocate, and his foot finally give, leaving behind a shoe and some scraps of skin. Another success. I finally managed to get him across the lawn without issue and threw him unceremoniously into the dumpster, pillowcase and all. I dusted my hands off then and turned around to get back to work.
    I made my way back upstairs and into the main bedroom that was now void of other previously living beings. Once I had drawn the curtains I looked around the room, mildly impressed. The previous owner had put up a bunch of band posters of awesome music groups from the ‘80s and ‘90s. There was a Bon Jovi poster next to Def Leppard, Mariah Carey on the cieling over the bed, Seal next to the window, and a bunch of others. Along the far wall was an old-fashioned stereo with a box filled with cassette tapes on the floor in front of it. Now you have to understand that I’m a sucker for good music, and from the looks of the decorations this guy had great tastes. I decided my work could wait for a few minutes while I found something to listen to.
    The box had a lot of mix tapes with really corny titles, like “Awesome Mix 1” and “Great Riffs”, but there were a few proper albums. One of them was a Billy Idol tape of my favorite album, “Rebel Yell”. My favorite song of the ‘80s was, of course “Rebel Yell”, and I can’t tell you how long I had been trying to find this exact cassette. I was ecstatic. Well, about as excited as someone physically incapable of excitement can be. I immediately flipped on the stereo and popped in the tape.
    Once the music started, I figured I should start working while I listen, so I began to pick up things around the room and throw them onto the bed, nodding my head to the song as I worked. What? It’s an awesome song.
    As the song wrapped up, I turned to toss a folder of useless papers onto the bed only to find that I wasn’t alone. There was the palest person I had ever seen standing on the far side of the bed watching me, emotionless.
    I stared back for a moment, but they didn’t say anything or move, so I just went back to my work.
    As I turned around and opened the closet doors, the pale guy was standing inside of the closet, still staring at me. I looked over my shoulder to see that he wasn’t by the bed anymore. So he was a ghost, then. Great.
    There’s something that you should know about our society. Humans, zombies, ghosts, and other supernatural beings keep to themselves. Zombies do the menial labor that no human wants to do, while humans run society. Ghosts are just kind of there. The other “supes”, as the humans refer to them, all keep to themselves. As long as the groups don’t interfere with each other, our world moves forward in relative peace. This ghost was not keeping to himself. He was in my way, interfering with my job. So I just reached through him.
    “Dude, watch it!” The ghost sidestepped, as much as he could in a closet, and stared at me in mild disbelief. “What was that for, man?”
    I’m not exactly what you would call a conversationalist, especially when it comes to associating with other being that are not like me. So I did not bother answering. Instead, I just grabbed an armful of shirts that were hanging and turned around to put them on the bed with the other things there.
    “What’s your problem?” The ghost was standing on the far side of the bed again. “I’m talking to you, man. What’s your deal?”
    To reiterate, I do not do conversation. Quite literally, I am incapable of it, though I am not, in fact, incapable of communication. But I don’t communicate with ghosts.
    “You’re supposed to look at someone when they talk to you. What’s with you? Are you deaf?”
    I glanced up at him momentarily to show him that I was not, to his annoyance, deaf, and then promptly returned to my work. I pulled some more clothes out of the closet and put them with the rest, growing rather amused at how the ghost seemed to get more angry by the second.
    As I was reaching for a box on a shelf in the closet, a cassette tape slammed me in the back of the head. When I turned around, the ghost was standing next to the stereo and glaring daggers at me. I sighed and stared at him. Now he was starting to annoy me.
    He stared me down for a solid minute before asking, “What are you doing here?”
    I motioned to the pile of things on the bed, then pointed to the window that looked out over the front yard.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    I motioned again, and he still did not get it. Not only was he annoying, he was also thick in the head.
    “Just tell me,” he said angrily.
    I shook my head and sighed, then gathered up the cover on the bed, wrapping the large pile of items in it, and carried it down the stairs and out to the dumpster. When I returned, the ghost was standing by the window and staring at me, yet again, in disbelief. So, yet again, I stared back at him.
    He jerked a thumb at the window behind him. “Did you just throw all of that out?”
    I raised an eyebrow. What else did he think I could have just done?
    “What else are you throwing out?” he asked, his voice faltering a bit at the end.
    I glanced around the room, then looked back at him.
    “Everything?”
    I blinked. Seriously, did I have to spell everything out for him?
    He glanced uneasily at the stereo. “I don’t want to spend my eternity in a dump, man.”
    I shrugged and went back to work. What should I care? I didn’t know the guy, and quite honestly he had done nothing but bother me ever since we had met.
    He continued to pester me for another half hour or so, until he finally got the point that I wasn’t interested in listening to him, and he disappeared. I can honestly say that I was glad when he poofed out of existence. He was really starting to annoy me.
    I cleaned all through the night and most of the following day, and once I had finished I grabbed the cassette I had found and tucked it in my pocket before heading out and making my way back to my apartment, expecting to relax for the following few days until my next gig. Boy, how wrong I was.