Flash Friday 1-24-2014 Every photo prompt in Flash Friday

I deal in ghosts. Not the disenfranchised spirits of the dead, as far as I know there is no such thing. When I try to entertain the possibility it doesn’t make much sense; why hang out on this shit heap once you’ve shed the meat puppet? Yeah, sorry, it’s why clerics are called clerics and not cynics.

I deal in dead moments, events, the meat rotting in its early stages. I take pictures, people give me money; private Dicks, magazines, the father of the bride, and so on and so forth. The perverse thing is that I keep them; two dimensional ghosts stuck in an album like a butterfly. Hundreds of albums. Dead and sticky.

I have almost a full album just for this old dance hall. I took some urban art shots; brick façade, cheesy marquis, blue sky above. I took more than a few crime scene photos, and when the place burned down I took maybe three rolls and ate a lot of smoke.

I’m rifling through my brittle ghosts and Bam! Right in the middle is the kid; Sam Mcloughlin Jr. He had the sort of trust fund makes a certain kind of woman squishy and a certain kind of man hard. I thought the Old Man, Sammy senior was just being a cheap bastard, hiring me instead of a dick. I bring him a couple of shots from back of the club where he’s all chummy in a never-been-kissed sort of way with this chick who, refusing to speak ill of the dead, looked like a dollar in her pocket would get awfully lonely.

Three days later she’s in the same place, taped off with crime scene yellow, and uniforms looking busy trampling the scene. Ask me it’s why Senior didn’t want a dick; gold diggers get holes dug for them. No one did ask me, yet here’s the photo, months before the club is ashes. Senior is gone, congestive heart failure, and Sammy is competing with the legacy of world’s biggest asshole. It worked out fine, I’m sure.

If I didn’t write this down I might think it’s not a waste of time, poring over ghosts and my inglorious days, my browned leaf salad days. Not healthy for a man to live with ghosts. The disability check comes today, fifteen TV dinners and, if I sell a pint of plasma, a quart of Canadian Mist. It’s how to kill a ghost; you set an ulcer on fire and then drown the son of a bitch. I could do it quicker, I guess, send junior his ghost shot, maybe he’ll send some goons around.

I had this lady for a while, she’d eat what I cooked and she let me kiss her sometimes. She had a story for every ghost. She saw junior relaxing into the bricks and missy lone buck smiling and just knew they were in love. Last I saw her she was breaking a coffee mug and hissing what a cold bastard I was. Don’t even remember why, but hell, I could have lead with that; Hey, babe, you look comfortable, I’m a cold bastard, wanna come to my place and look at some ghosts?

I look at the ceiling, have hoping it’s crowded with the dead. It needs painting. The mail man should be here soon.

Prompts

Tethered, unfettered, chained