The Ungrateful Dead

(A couple of times a week, I am going to be posting quick first-draft responses to short writing prompts. The goal is to go from start to finish in less than an hour. If you’ve got a prompt you’d like to share, please let me know!)

WRITING PROMPT FOR WEDNESDAY, APRIL 27, 2016

You are a medium in a universe where the dead can convince a living relative to take their place.

When it comes right down to it, the biggest challenge I face in my job isn’t dealing with the dead. Comparatively, the dead are easy. It’s the living that make life difficult.

Now mind you, it isn’t any one person that’s hard to deal with. Any living soul can be a nightmare to deal with, but once their dead, they do tend to settle down a little bit. And, to be fair, the inverse is true as well: once an otherwise agreeable dead man’s got a bit of wind in him again, he immediately becomes about as much fun as the wrong kind of priest at the right kind of orgy. It just goes to show that while personalities may be particular, people are generally all the same if put in the right circumstances.

Let me give you an example. A few weeks ago, I did a deal on behalf of a late old man of Wall Street that gave him the right to inhabit the body of his twenty-two year old great-grandson for a period of no greater than two weeks for a tidy six-figure sum. The old man was a soul of some renown — the building next door to my office has his name on the side — but the great-grandson was one of those wastrels who grew up with everything he could ever want in life and now thought being dead for a while would be a laugh. That was a welcome relief, actually — I didn’t have to talk this kid into anything, which isn’t usually the case. Convincing young, healthy people to part with their bodies for even a couple of days is usually a nightmare, but not this time. He was ready for it, he said. But when it came time to actually suck his soul out of his body and begin his sojourn through the great infinite beyond, suddenly he’s all, “I don’t want to die, please, I’m too young!”

Once he’s out of there, the old man sweeps in and is all smiles and, “I say, I’m immensely grateful, sir, thank you.” And then he proceeds to spend two weeks absolutely wrecking this young man’s body — drinking, drugs, anything he can get his hands on. Why, it’s not his body, and his family tree has a lot of branches on it. And he’s on vacation! Live a little, I say, no regrets. But when it comes time to be dead again, suddenly the old man is all, “Nooooooooooooooo”, like he’s got anything to worry about. He’ll be back again next year, probably. And then my supervisor asks me about the “Noooooooooooooo” and suddenly it’s my fault. What, do everyone else’s spooks go quietly? I harnesses the forces of darkness and brought this guy back from the dead and gave him two more weeks of life that he wouldn’t otherwise have had, and I’m the bad guy here?

It wouldn’t bother me so much, you know, if I could just get a thank you every once in a while. That’s all I ask. Maybe, just maybe, instead of moaning about how miserable it’s going to be to go back to being a disembodied specter adrift on another plane of existence, they could thank me for putting in the time and energy to draw up the legal forms necessary to ensure that their time back on Earth isn’t spent cooling their heels in a federal penitentiary. And maybe, again, just maybe they could thank me for helping talk their sad-sack relative into giving up their meat bags for a couple of weeks at a time so that Rich Uncle Monkeybrains gets to enjoy all of the earthly pleasures that killed him however many years or decades or centuries ago that it was. But no! It’s almost always a “Please don’t send me back to that horrifying existential nightmare, that realm of shadow where one’s very soul is stretched to the point of breaking but can never break”, and not a “Thanks for the wonderful weekend! Glad I got to see Billy Joel before he died!”

Truth is, I’m not being paid enough to do this job. I could make twice as much going into business for myself. I’d open up my own shop, offering artisanal resurrections, hand-crafted spells of my design, the kind that you just can’t get from Big Lazarus these days, no sir. Good old-fashioned American mysticism, that’d be my trademark. None of this impersonal corporate raising-of-the-dead, no, you’d get the personal touch that only a real honest-to-goodness necromancer can provide. I doubt it would make them any happier when they had to trade places with their still-living-but-temporarily-suspended, but maybe they’d enjoy their time back on Earth a bit more if they were given a bit more attention during their stay. That’s the kind of hands-on approach I’d offer.

But, like everyone, I’ve got bills to pay and a family to support, and I’m in line for a promotion to Senior Necromancer in the next year or so, and I suppose that’s good enough for now. It’s not necessarily the life I planned for, I’ll admit, but it’s a pretty good one nonetheless. Everyone hates their job. Why should I be any different? And besides: if I want a second chance, my company benefits kick in and the first two temporary resurrections are free, and I have lots of nieces and nephews to choose from.

I just hope that when my time’s up, my necromancer can at least convince one of my negligible relations that a few weeks in the afterlife is worth it just for the experience. If so, I’ll try to remember to thank him for it, coming and going.