The ghost postie continues to deliver ghost letters to where their recipients used to live, but who is writing them?
*
It’s the ghost postie, of course – he pretends to be the dead aunts and other ex-relatives of the long-gone householder, and sits up at ghost night (which we call ‘day’) writing about things they used to do when they were alive, or things the dead do as though they were normal.
*
The trouble with a ghost letter is you can read it through the spirit envelope and indeed the ghost paper. When all the letters lie there on the ectoplasmic doormat it’s just like a pile of slightly faint words. You can even see them through the former door.
*
So, once he’s posted the ghost letters through the phantom letterbox he stands there, reading what he has written through the woodlesswork, and wondering if he got the tone right, and if his handwriting would fool the dead nephew or whoever, who isn’t there.
*
He also wonders where all the other ghosts have gone, or if he is the only ghost in the entire next world? He often puts messages in the spiritual echoes of smashed bottles, and throws them into the ethereal sea. No replies arrive.
*
Mostly, he sticks to his rounds. As there are no other ghost posties, his route has gradually expanded to take in the whole city, and he writes tens of thousands of fake letters, bills, dead doctors’ appointments, and late reminders about late library books every ‘night’.
*
If only a living postman would say, ‘How goes it, Ghost Postie?’ he thinks he could just about manage, but they never do.
*
In his opinion, the ghost postie’s greatest invention is a version of living stationery which he calls the ‘past-it note’. Or is it a stupid thing, given his circumstances? He no longer knows. So one night the ghost postie decides to retire, and open up a ghost stationery shop.
*
He ‘rents’ premises in a demolished part of town he remembers from his childhood, forging the necessary insubstantial papers, and lodging them in a see-through filing cabinet he himself supplies to the Town Hall, then settles down to his new post-life.
*
Because no-one ever comes into his ghost stationery shop, he’s able to stock it somewhat impractically according to his whims. For instance, he displays far more ex-pencil sharpeners than he could ever hope to sell. They are all the same two models – after-steel single or double.
*
He also stocks a complete range of ghost paperclips, which start out microscopic and continue to sizes wildly larger than any real paper size. His largest paperclip he just leans against the side of what used to be a skyscraper.
*
He is particularly proud of his hole punchers, which will punch holes in anything and nothing, as long as it’s flat enough. He also sells the ghosts of those portable holes he used to see in cartoons. He often sits behind the counter, punching holes in holes.
*
The trouble with ghost rolls of sellotape is it was see-through when it was alive (to the extent that sellotape was ‘alive’), so it is doubly difficult to locate, unpeel, snip, and attach to parcels. It hurts where his head once was to think about it, let alone wraith-wrap.
*
The best thing has been inventing ghost stamps. Sourcing the ghost of gum, spirit-deckling, thinking up new designs using the skulls of former monarchs for portraits no-one can see. He collects all his own stamps, of course, in his phantom album – a range of which he also sells
Over the course of your lifetime, you will weep exactly the same number of tears as the total number of raindrops which fell on your head.
