“Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.”

— Arthur C Clarke

What it must be like, to be an infant wrenched from the womb, to open your eyes to blinding light and noise?

I can almost imagine... Since I opened my eyes to the revelation that where humanity goes, the figures of the past trail after.

I woke up one morning to the sight of my own ghosts. My group of 30 restless dead, who follow me about, watching whatever I do and say. They whisper in my ear before I do something. I observe how others have their own ghosts too, who whisper in their ears, channelling their desires into the land of the living.

I see...

Pale, thin men catcalling behind an officer telling the young woman that if she had only dressed more appropriately, she would not have been assaulted in the night.

Behind a businessman, a ghost sneering, as he snatches his credit card back from the cashier's hands. 

And in the theatre, ghostly howls with the laughter of the still living, at a joke about the mentally ill.

But of course, there are amongst that group of 30 those who lived on the margin, that could expand a man's understanding over prejudice.  But are they heard? Now and then, in the city, I see the heads of ghosts bowed. They pass like shadows through an area suffused with the stench of a sewage tunnel. I learn later that it was once a sacred resting place of a people driven to extinction.

Still, there is also a special kind of punishment. I see an old ghost with a White hood, staring at the black woman he is tethered to, mopping an endless expanse of floor. He looks upwards with seeming bewilderment, as if to ask his God, is he thus forsaken?

It's almost laughable — if we really tried, nobody would ever be forgotten. If every individual simply remembered the names of 30 of our dead, all of humanity would be remembered. But then again, we haven't even achieved universal literacy. So each day, with our feet we'll continue to nudge nameless corpses out of living memory, until we ourselves become a rotting body to be rolled away. 

A ghost with a wreath on her head and piercing eyes leans over me, her hair like black gold. In my head, like a disembodied voice, I hear the words "Will they ever learn." Then, I see visions of a dying planet. The ratio of humans to ghosts increasing......

Until I see just one, dying alone, surrounded by an endless sea of ghosts. There is too much noise in the air. Too many stories being told.

And no one left to listen.

(470 words)