Death is Boring

Glen was dead.

It was pretty obvious. He was staring right at his mangled body after all. He dimly examined the cuts on its face, crimson blood mixing with turbid rainwater and flowing into the gutters. It stained the pavement a rusty pink color, muted orange under the street lamps' flickering light.

As his cadaver's remaining heat was slowly leached away by the freezing night air, muted voices drifted around him. Some were sympathetic. Others were mocking. He knew that pictures had already been uploaded to social media by a few sickos. It made no difference to him. They would be banned sooner or later.

Glen turned to watch as police officers, lit up by dazzling red and blue lights, blocked off the road with yellow caution tape and shooed away lingering spectators. Paramedics passed him, lifting his body onto a stretcher and covering it in white cloth.

"Finally," he thought, "everything has been cleaned up."

Glen wasn't afraid. He knew that he had done what he could during his lifetime, and in the end, he died a relatively painless death. For ways to go, his wasn't too bad. Just a second of panic, a loud CRUNCH, and then he woke up again without his body. He only wondered about his family. Would they be upset? Probably. Would they blame themselves for the accident? He hoped not. At least his older brother was still there to carry on the family line.

Glen carefully sat down on the road, avoiding the bigger puddles. Not that they really made any difference to him now. Maybe in the future, when his brother had kids, they would visit his grave and their father would tell them about his idiot little brother who decided it would be okay to run to his friend's house in the middle of the night, essentially blind.

…Glen felt that his death was embarrassing.

Why couldn't he have died pushing a child out of the way of a truck or something!? That would've been way cooler! His parents would probably get interviewed on national news or something. He might've even gotten a cool medal dedicated to him. His brother could have proudly told friends that he sacrificed himself for a kid. Instead, his death would probably be made into a cautionary tale by preschool teachers. He could already hear them saying in their stupid sing-song voices: "Now children, always remember to look both ways, but only if you can actually see~."

"Fuck seeing!"

Glen felt like flailing around on the ground. God, it wasn't his fault he had really bad myopia! (Although it was his fault for forgetting his glasses at home.) He wouldn't have started running if it wasn't for the rain either. Seriously, what was with that! There weren't even clouds when he left! (Again, he couldn't see anything because he left his glasses at home and because it was eleven o'clock at night. There were clouds. He just couldn't see them.)

He threw a tantrum for a while: rolling around, cursing out every religious figure he knew, kicking things (not that he actually made contact with them), and screaming for a good ten minutes straight. When he finally calmed down, huffing and puffing face-down in a muddy ditch on the road, he immediately apologized to the religious figures. And to the preschool teachers too, for good measure. After all, he was dead, and he did not want the nice religious people to hurt him. Besides, it wasn't their fault that he was crushed under a giant orange-carrying truck. Maybe. Probably.

Glen sat up. There was nothing he could do anyways. He just hoped that his parents milked all the money they could from the company who owned that truck. That would have to do as his revenge, as bitter as he was. He sighed and cradled his head in his hands.

… he knew he should've gotten life insurance…

Now that he had reached the acceptance stage, Glen sat nicely like a good boy and waited for the next step. He definitely wasn't betting on which religion was correct nope not at all. Hours slid by, and he stayed still. Before he knew it, a day had passed, then a week, then months. At this point he had counted every crack in the sidewalk ten times, apologized to every religion's god nine times, tried finding his family thirty-seven times, kept running into the same damn barrier at least two hundred times, and finally gave up, hanging off of a lamppost upside down.

He was hella bored.

During this time period he figured out that he was in a circle shaped enclosure, around one hundred Glen-feet in diameter. He measured it with his feet, of course. Twice, for good measure. The cellophane wrap-like barrier seemed to be there to keep him from escaping. It felt flimsy, but even when he rammed himself against it nothing happened. No shaking, no bending. Nada. Glen was the only one affected by it too. Cars and people went straight through, to his great annoyance. There was no point in trying to find a way out, so he finally gave up and decided to keep waiting for something to happen. After all, he was probably stuck there for a reason right?

So Glen started experimenting. Firstly, he tried to fly. With a running start, he channeled his inner airplane, crouched, and sprang powerfully off the ground and into the air like a comet, no, faster than one. He was so fast and so strong he shattered the sound barrier, then the actual barrier, fought god and the devil at the same time, won, and lived happily ever after with his hot elf harem on the moon! Where did the elves come from you ask? Of course, they came from his ultra-rare creation skill that he took from god when he defeated him! Really, you ask? Of course! Not! In reality, Glen flapped his arms like a chicken and face planted like he was the world champion in a no-hands pie eating contest. But wouldn't it have been nice if what he thought would happen really did? As for how he got onto the lamppost from earlier? He climbed, you silly silly goose. If he slipped, he would have plummeted into the pavement face-first. Again.

Anyways, long story short, Glen learned that he, in fact, was completely unlike a ghost in every way except for the fact that he was dead, intangible, and invisible. Actually, he was basically already invisible when he was alive, so dead and intangible it is! He did also figure out that he emitted a cold blue light when he cracked his knuckles, but that's not really a ghost power. More like a glow stick.

Thus, after his brief moment of excitement, Glen became bored and depressed, so he did what all bored and depressed ghosts do: he started attacking people. Well actually, at first he tried talking to the passerby, but when they ignored him he got even more sad and started throwing rocks at them instead. Of course, they reacted to being pelted by pebbles, so Glen began acting like a grade schooler with a crush and annoyed people to no end for attention.

At first he could barely pick up small stones, then through some very strenuous training, slightly larger rocks, and finally mighty trash can lids. He could truly be described as growing with no end, shooting past his competition and easily crushing yesterday's foes beneath his feet today! Cliches aside, he was actually very proud of this growth. It was like someone who could only bench five pounds finally did two hundred. Granted, he did take a couple of years to make that progress, but he had no way of knowing that.

Once he tired of his daily workout, he started observing people up close. From karate-chopping a punk's mohawk to pulling on a random lady-with-an-excessive-amount-of-eyeliner's nose ring, he found entertainment in playing with and judging people's fashion choices. Once that became boring too, he finally lost it.

He started roleplaying as a fashionista in a truly painful way, putting on random accents and screaming "DAHLING" at the top of his nonexistent lungs to any poor soul he set his eyes on. Truly, boredom made people mad. How tragic.

Years passed, and eventually, after he had noticed that fashion styles and technologies had drastically changed for some time, he realized that people were also beginning to hear him, if only slightly. So he did the natural thing: he stopped screaming. It was just too embarrassing. Even the possibility of being heard criticizing overcoats in a flamboyant New Jersey accent made him want to exorcise himself. Where was the ghostly prestige!? The demonic wrath that made tough guys scream like little girls!? Ghosts were supposed to be horrifying creatures of the darkness, not glittery divas dressed up in fuchsia boas! Glen groaned loudly, startling the high schooler he had been messing with that day.

He could hear his reputation as a ghost drop by the second.