GHOST WATER

Spine is shivering right now.  How much do you believe in the unseen?  I'm in bed last night with a visitor.  She's cute, slender, friendly, laughs a lot, has an Edith Bunker accent, not great in bed -- frankly, pretty stingy, sexually speaking, and therefore failed the audition -- but we're just kind of talking, holding each other, when suddenly the sound of a bucket of water pouring, spilling onto the carpeting, is loud in the room.  At first I thought one of the candles leaked its wax.  That sound is unmistakable, like someone peeing right on the carpeting.  It makes you vault out of bed to find out what it was.  So I do, all naked and silly looking.  Turn on the lights.  Nothing out of place.  No leaking candles.  No water.  It was, apparently, an audible apparition.  A sound hallucination.  I look at Kendall Jackson Girl.  She's stunned -- she heard it too.  What the hell was that?

 

So tonight I'm on the phone with Legally Blonde Attorney Girl.  Sort of an ex-girlfriend.  We were great friends, loved each other, but couldn't get sex to work.  Tab A just didn't fit into Slot B.  Never could explain it.  We fell apart about the time she was talking to me on the phone late one night and her lamp started flashing.  Her ex-boyfriend, a guy she was deeply in love with, was on his way to her house two years ago.  There's a circle, a rotary, off the Parkway near her town.  She gets a call from the State Police.  "Do you know James Whateverhisnameis?"  She says yes.  She goes to the hospital but he's dead on arrival.  Killed from an accident in the circle.  Be careful, she'd say to me, in the circle when you're on your way here.  So her lamp used to flash in her bedroom.  "James, is that you?" she'd ask.  The lamp would flash off, then back on.  But this had never happened to her in her office, just the bedroom, but there she is talking to me and the lamp goes off, then on again.  "Hold on, honey," she says to me.  "James, is that you?"  Lamp goes off, then on.  "Is this something about Michael?"  No answer. 

 

I took it as a warning.  Why would he speak to her with me on the phone if it were encouragement?  No reason.  But warning?  That, he'd do.

 

So tonight, I'm on the phone with her.  She hears pouring water, then splashing onto her carpet.  She turns on all the lights, gets everyone up there.  What spilled?  What leaked?  What happened?  Nothing.  Just ghost water.  I'd told her about my incident, but she wasn't listening, she was doing something else.