E is for Emma

Hello, I’m Emma. I was supposed to be the great experiment on our scribbler’s part in second person perspective, the main character in a Work in Progress called Your Name is Emma. Only I’m here talking in first person. I guess that’s the nature of this BloggingFromAZ project. 

I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to talk about character conflict. In particular mine. 

I’m dead. This much I know, only I can’t remember much. I used to hang out at The Angry Roast a lot, only I can no longer drink coffee. I’ve got to possess someone to do that. The same is true for writing poetry, taking photographs, or reading. 

I never got published. I did something awful to Esther, the closest thing I had to a girlfriend. Only I now have a doppelganger called Lily. She’s one of the few other people besides Esther who can see me. 

I’m not sure how or why Lily came into my life. What happened with Esther may be one of the reasons I’m haunting The Angry Roast. That and the fact that I never got published. I can only go somewhere if Esther or Lily does. Or if I manage to possess someone, but that only works for a short time. Sooner or later I end up back at The Angry Roast. Only Esther or Lily can keep me away from it. 

I think this may be a part of my unfinished business. I read a lot of ghost stories before I died, so I might be able to guess a few things about my current state from their common themes. I think I was murdered at The Angry Roast or right outside it. I don’t remember dying. I just found myself in my usual seat at The Angry Roast. No one could see me. I drifted around, unable to interact with anyone or anything. Not until Lily showed up and introduced herself. She told me I’d died with no marks of violence on my body. There were only two puncture wounds on my neck. 

Ooo, was I killed by a vampire? That would be a dream come true if being dead didn’t suck so badly. Get it? Suck?

For me, there are worse things than my death or unfinished business. There’s the Soul Collectors. 

You might ask who they are. I’m not entirely sure. Their forms change. Sometimes they seems like door to doo salesfolk or religious evangelists. Sometimes they look like lawyers. Every once in a while, they let their true faces show. Those hungry eyesockets, like the hollows in a skull, only they’re filled with all the emptiness of the abyss. Only one thing fills their emptiness and that’s souls. They hunt and gather them which is why they’re called Soul Collectors. 

I’ve been unlucky enough to catch their eye or lack of an eye. I’ve managed to say one step ahead of them. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to do that. If I could figure out how to move on, maybe I could do that. Move on, out of the Soul Collectors’s reach. This means I’ve got to resolve whatever’s keeping me here, all of it. 

I’ve got a lot of work to do for a dead woman.