get on with life

get on with life

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Reflected Memory/edit 2

fiction
edward w Pritchard

Business began to drop off rapidly at the main train station in Milan, Italy after ghosts began to appear in the gray marble wall on the large wide stair case leading to the main concourse. Railway and foot traffic remained busy because of the strategic location of the rail way station in Milan, but when people began to see terrifying apparitions, related income sources at the station such as sales of newspapers, coffee, tea, gum, and candy all but stopped because of the commotion caused by the sightings. However, it wasn't until a British Insurance Company received a claim for business interruption insurance by a large American fast food company that decisive efforts were undertaken to locate, understand and remove the ghosts that were upsetting the customers and business in the main train station in Milan. 

As soon as the assigned insurance Adjuster walked down the stairs in the train station he himself saw and understood the ghost phenomena. The adjuster knew where the ghosts were coming from.

To the world the adjuster would appear as an over-weight, balding, and rather uninteresting middle aged business man. But, the adjuster had once been young, and the apple of someones eye who he had since lost.

As soon as the adjuster looked at the marble wall, where the people reported seeing terrifying reflections and apparitions, the adjustor saw the reflection of a beautiful young girl in a red dress and immediately understood the ghost problem in Milan. For the adjusters worst fear, his horror, was to be reminded of that distant heartache of his lost love, and seeing his young love again in the wall, in spite of his long efforts to forget her, was the adjustors terrifying reality that he saw reflected in the gray marble wall.

Now the adjuster could tackle the source of the business interruption insurance claim head-on. Everyone must see the apparition that was most terrifying to them. It wasn't exactly that no-one saw a ghost that wasn't really themselves, but that they saw their own repressed fears reflected in the wall of the train station in Milan appear as ghosts specific to their fears.

As he began to work-out a solution to the problem of the ghosts in the railroads station in Milan, the adjuster willed himself not to think of the girl in the red dress who had been gone so many long years, and focused on the business at hand of how to deny the Insurance claim and then move on with his life.