Grace Buchanan Audiobooks — Let's Build Bridges Together — renovating

Happy Day of the Dead!

I like Mike’s sense of humor/horror. This is one of my favorite ghost stories.

I’m haunted by my family.

No, really. All my dead relatives hang around as ghosts. When someone dies, you don’t lose them, they just gain the ability to walk through walls.

It’s been like that for generations. They gradually fade and become harder to converse with, so I can’t ask the original Scoville, but according to family tradition it was some sort of curse. Offended an old homeless woman, you know the sort of thing. We’re always careful to be nice to the homeless these days.

Not that it’s entirely a bad thing. Oral history projects are super easy, and you can go back a lot further, not that anyone will necessarily believe you. And family reunions are especially well attended.

The problem is that they do hang about at inconvenient times. In particular, they’re fussy about us–the male members of the family, since we carry the name and the curse–and who we marry.

It’s a wonder, really, that anyone gets married at all. Though coming from such a large, close family, you do want to carry on the tradition. The girls are lucky; although they see the ghosts, and become ghosts themselves, their husbands and children don’t. But we men transfer the curse to our wives.

That means we have to tell them all this at some point. The coward’s way (I’m looking at you, Great-Uncle Gregory, and you needn’t make that face; nobody’s frightened), is to wait until they see the ghosts, generally the morning after the wedding, and then tell them. The more risky way is to tell them first and propose afterwards.

The problem with that is that it sounds delusional.

You’re backing away, and I don’t blame you.

Um, is it too late to just do the proposal part? See, the older ghosts like it that you dress modestly, and it’s good that you wanted to wait to get, you know, more intimate, because with your family in the room all the time, that just wasn’t going to…

Oh, yes, fair enough. Well, goodbye.

Dammit.

How would  YOU  handle the marriage proposal?

Read more by Mike Reeves-McMillan

Photo Credits:

“Family Ghosts” composite by Grace Buchanan. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

“Mom’s Bedroom” by Moto “Club4AG” Miwa. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

“Ancestors” by Sylius – Own work. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

“Black, Chinese & White Laborers In A Gold Mine In South Africa” by Frank & Frances Carpenter [RESTORED by Ralph Repo]. Licensed by Ralph Repo under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

“Easington Pit Disaster” from Eastington District Council’s Past and Present Archive. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

“Moise Cherezli and Claire Crespoin wedding“. Licensed by David Lisbona under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.