Reflected Memory
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 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.
As soon as the assigned insurance Adjuster walked down the stairs in the train station he himself saw and understood the ghost phenomena.
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 someone's eye who he had since lost.
As soon as the adjuster looked at the marble wall, where the people reported seeing terrifying reflections, he saw the reflection of a beautiful young girl in a red dress and immediately understood the ghost problem in Milan. For his 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 his 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.
As he began to work-out a solution to the problem, the adjuster willed himself not to think of the girl in the red dress, and focused on the business at hand of how to deny the Insurance claim.
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"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 someone's eye who he had since lost."
ReplyDeleteThis is my favorite part of this story. Like a few other stories, this one has an element of the paranormal juxtaposed with a very real reality.
It would be nice to see an "About the Author" section under About Me...even if it were another work of fiction :~)
About the Author
ReplyDeleteSoar upward my horses,
the author was of little renown,
now and then buying a new pen
desperate to start his life over again,
finding and writing of connections between random events
and seeking in history the missing coherence from his early life, however, he was proudly
descended from the original 600 homo sapiens
who desperately clung to keep the species alive, 50,000 years ago, huddle on the Mediterranean shore, and he later, this author in his bloom produced a fine daughter, who protected cats and horses, and later wrote herself.