Shelter from the Rain

CHAPTER ONE
Shelter from the Rain

         Whoever understands the first truth
         Should understand the ultimate truth.
         The last and first,
         Are they not the same?


         It was late spring. A strong wind brought with it a few things, a shimmering mist, the dark smell of storm, waves of grass, the sound of an angry god banging on the sky, a cloud fighting with the peach sun, and a ghost. A nameless young ghost waddled along, feet heavy plodding on the side of the highway, belly hanging to the ground, skin wrinkled and gray like a rotting prune, mouth puckered and shriveled, throat drawn out long and thin, Oreo cookies in hand. She clung to them with a loving fear for their well being, afraid her cookies would be ruined when the rain began. Every time she tried to eat one her mouth would shrink into her head, like a raisin shrinks away from the sun, tingling, numb, a freeze dried sensation, and it always left her unable to eat. She wanted it to stop. She was hungrier than she'd ever been before, but couldn't die from starvation even if she tried. Her belly was large but hollow. She wanted these Oreos in almost a sexual way, but she didn't feel ashamed – Oreos are far too delicious for shame.
         The young ghost toddled for a while along the highway with her weak, gray, brittle little legs, legs like stilts made of sun flower stocks, heading toward a pale rainbow which hung in the sky next to a distant lightning bolt, only stopping in order to check and make sure her Oreos were still in their pack. She just had to make sure her cookies didn't disappear; they were all she had. While checking them, she thought about kissing them; she really did. But she decided against it.
         She toddled and waddled until she found a broken down sedan, blood colored, rusted and waiting for her on the side of the highway. With only the driver seat door missing, the car would make a good shelter until the rain passed. She got in, and she was sitting inside the car, attempting to shove crushed Oreos through her resistant mouth, when the rain fell harder. The sun shower turned to a sunless storm, surrounding the car with an ocean of gray that battered against the reverberating metal of the car's hull, like thousands of long fingernails tapping on an empty bucket -- even with her sitting inside it was still empty. This went on for ten minutes, in which time she crushed two Oreos but only succeeded in pouring one or two crumbs into her mouth. The rest of the crumbs didn't make it. They laid defeated on the mildew car floor, having been rejected by her magical mouth. She scratched up as many crumbs as she could, mildew and all. The car felt homy and safe, safer than the rest of them. It felt like home. Maybe she could stay here. She also, in this time, was able to look inside the glove compartment, looking for a place to hide her Oreo babies from the evil things, and she found the car belonged to a twenty something year old boy named Hideo Saitō, a name that sounded familiar but felt wrong for some reason.
         Then, far along the road, the young ghost saw a silhouette fading through the gray sheet of rain. As the rain fell harder, the figure came closer, foot after foot, foot after foot, foot after foot, a steady rhythm against the roaring of the rain, until the figure stopped a few feet from the car.
         "Do you have room?"
         The young ghost hugged her pack of Oreos to her chest, and remained silent.
         "I have no need for sweets," said he. He was so painfully hungry, like a thousand needles in his stomach, and this was the first food he'd seen in months, but he hadn't lied -- he certainly didn't need sweets. "I simply want escape from the rain".
         The wind howled and nudged an ashen cloud, revealing a strawberry sun that turned the downpour of rain into a shimmering drizzle. The red sun's light fell through the mist onto the traveller's crows feet face, the old ghost's crinkled strong old face. He had a long black beard hung down to his waist, and a mustache, both needed a shave, and on his head he wore a hat that was green like the grass, his skin tan like the end of the day.
         Said the old ghost, "You don't have to worry about me."
         The young ghost was nervous, but she couldn't just let this poor old man sit out in the rain. "There is room in here," she said.
         The old ghost sighed, "Thank you" and then got in the car, the sun shower rain tapping on the metal roof. He took off his soaking boots and dropped them on the floor, beginning to rub his feet.
         The young ghost held her Oreos closer, "Your mouth is normal."
         Play it cool, he thought, scheming for some Oreos, You may be old, but you've still got your cunning, and your dashing good looks. He had maybe one of those things, maybe.
         The old ghost laughed, "Yes, my mouth is normal."
         The young ghost was confused by this. "Looks like the rain is letting up, it would probably be fine to leave now," she said.
         "Oooh It hasn't let up yet." He meant to sound wise and ominous, but as the old ghost said this, the rain let up completely. When it did, an expression of bewilderment donned his face due to the poor timing, like when a fart wasn't exactly what you thought it was, which unfortunately was something he was a little too used to in his old age. He composed himself. He needed to come up with another reason to stay. "Be.. Besides, I need to rest these tired old feet."
         The young ghost looked at him. He seemed different from the other ghosts she'd met, both of which had seemed mindless. One tried to eat her alive; it tried to scratch off her skin with its nails and suck out her blood. The ghost had sharp claws and teeth, and they hurt her to the point of tears. The other tried to take her Oreos away. The second one was worse. Her Oreos were impermanent; her soul was eternal, but she'd rather it be flipped. The young ghost was a new ghost, a ghost for a day, and she was unsure of what, exactly, was going on. She decided that it was best to stay away.
         "Well, I'm going to go. It was nice meeting you," she said.
         "You've died recently. I can tell," said the old ghost "So you probably don't remember what happened to you, wouldn't you like to know?"
         "Nah," she squeaked through her tiny mouth, "as long as I got these old girls," she shook the box of cookies "I'm all right. Thank you though."
         The old man's old man plan was falling apart. He had to keep her here, but he couldn't lie. "Wait," he whispered, with a sternness and urgency that made the young ghost halt. He set his ears on the woods to their right without looking.
         "Don't be alarmed, but you're being watched." This alarmed the young ghost. She slowly began turning her head. "Don't look. There are demons about. If you look at one it will eat your soul," said the old ghost. Her head whipped back; she'd been wrong about the permanence of her soul. The old ghost hid his giddiness well. He hadn't told a single lie yet. There were certainly demons about in general, and looking at them would prompt them to eat your soul, and someone was watching her (it was him). It wasn't his fault if she thought a demon was lurking in the woods to her right. The young ghost sat back down. "It's best we keep talking as normal," said the old ghost. "Do you remember your past life? Do you remember who you are?"
         As he asked this, she began to remember some vague aspects of her previous life, a fog of a dismembered life. A car. College. A city that was a terrible place. Jordan. Her best friend Jordan. Suddenly, the thought of Jordan brought up a fire of yearning inside her that she couldn't explain. She felt she needed to remember her.
         The old ghost caught her eyes as they searched through her memories. "I can help you remember," he said.
         She held her Oreo's closer than ever before. "How?"
         "As a hungry ghost, your mouth becomes small and your belly becomes big when you lie for personal gain, and more importantly," he pointed at the Oreos with his eyes "when you are selfish and don't want to share. If you show compassion, and let someone else have the Oreos, both your mouth and your memories will go back to normal."
         He was partially wrong about this, still trying to figure the rules out himself. But as far as he had gathered, this wasn't even a stretch of the truth. He was so proud of his plan. Not only was he being honest, but he was doing a compassionate act for this poor young ghost, teaching her the ways of this world, returning her memories, and showing her how to get a normal body back. The Oreos were merely a consolation as far as anyone else was concerned.
         "I'm in hell because I like Oreos too much? You expect me to believe that?"
         The old ghost chuckled, "I wouldn't know why you've been reincarnated into this realm. But thats not what I said. I only told you the rules. Thats how you know I am not lying to you, because if I was, I would be like you. No offense."
         "None taken... I guess." She did look like a gremlin had sex with a raisin, after all.
         "Think about it, why do you care so much about cookies? Where did you even get them?"
         The young ghost realized she didn't remember. The old ghost held out his creaking aged old hand. "I'll share with you" he said. He had a crooked yellow brown smile on his face that she simply had to trust, there was something divine about it. She lightened her grip on the Oreos and looked at him, searching for lies. If he was telling the truth, then maybe she would finally be able to bite into one, maybe she'd finally be united with her one true love. He held out his hand further, grinning more. "It's okay," he said. His eyes glanced down at the Oreos, but he stopped himself immediately and returned his gaze to her face.
         She decided to trust him. Slowly, she moved the Oreos toward his hand, and as she did so, her skin began to return to color, her mouth grew a bit bigger, her belly a bit flatter (although the hunger was still there), and most importantly, her sanity was coming back. She handed the Oreos to him more insistently, feeling stronger than she had in a long time, and realizing that he was telling the truth. However, when her hand was about half way to his, her trust at its peak, the old ghost snatched the Oreos away and ran out of the car.
         "Sucker!" he said, with his shaky old man voice.
         Before he ran away, he quickly pulled a crumb out of the packet and threw it at her, 'sharing', so that he wouldn't shrivel up and turn into one of those pitiful crumbled up hungry ghosts again.
         It was the way he did it that pissed her off.
         He began to giggle, proud of his cleverness like a daycare child proud of a coloring book page, running along the highway. The sight of a running man as old as he was one to behold, like he was running to the bathroom a little too late.
         A curse had been lifted. As soon as the cookies had left the young ghost's hand, she'd returned to a normal ghost of a body -- a mortal might even recognize her for a college aged young woman -- and with strong legs to run with, she'd be damned if she'd let this old geezer take her cookies. If he hadn't run away (and she wasn't so hungry), perhaps she wouldn't have cared anymore, now having the clarity of thought to realize that getting eaten alive by a ghost was far worse than losing some cookies, and that Oreos kinda taste bad without milk. But now it wasn't about the cookies; it was about dignity. It was the principle of the matter.
          He cackled, his voice sounding like the kind of old voice that would tell a kid to get off his lawn. "I'm going to eat these cookies all by myself, chump!"
         "Fuck you!" she yelled.
         The old ghost looked over his shoulder to gloat, but his smile began to fade. Maybe she was a bit faster than he thought she would be, or maybe he was a bit slower, either way, the storm had travelled from the sky to her eyes, and she was sprinting towards him like an olympic athlete, her black hair in a ponytail behind her, her breath puffing in and out of her cheeks like a steam engine, a well oiled cookie craving machine.
         The old ghost's eyes grew as he returned his gaze towards his front, sweat shooting from his black head pores more from nervousness and embarrassment than exhaustion. In his past life, he had outrun arrows, trains, jet engines, bullets, shooting stars, lightning bolts, even a god or two. Now, he wasn't even able to outrun a dead person.
          The young ghost was about two steps behind the old ghost when something happened. With her hand out reached and memories flooding her mind, the legs of the ghost previously known as Hideo Saitō buckled as she remembered the fullness of her death and the void of her life. Her skin crinkled up and her mouth became small, and her throat became thin like a straw, and she toppled to the ground.
         As the old ghost was laughing at her, his face too decompressed, and his mouth sunk into his face, and his throat stretched out thin and long, and his belly inflated, and then he also toppled, face first, into the ground.
         I don't understand he thought, I thought I understood how this worked.
         The remainder of the storm clouds had travelled to another place, travelled for another highway, happening in another town, and now only a fading sky surrounded, shared by the land of living, and shared by the land of dead.
         The old ghost picked himself up off the ground, his hurting gray legs wobbling under his own cursed weight. He looked back at the young ghost. She was a sincere sight. She hadn't attempted to pick herself up, she was simply laying face up in the grass, looking at the peach colored cage of a sky.
         Rei (Rei, that's a good name for her new life, better than Hideo) Rei'd had a simple life, a mundane life. And she realized that there were only a five things worth remembering.
         The first was that she'd been a college drop out.
         The second was that she had an acquaintance or two who lived in her home town, but not many. Most of them had moved away, having done their four years of time at the local college.
         The third was that she'd had to stay in her home town, for her mom, who wasn't really the most independent of people. She was concerned with her wellbeing. There weren't many other people who could take care of her, but she shoved the thought aside; there wasn't much she could do about it anyways.
         The fourth was that she had a best friend named Jordan who she knew since elementary school, but moved to LA for college, and they'd talked a lot on the phone. But over time, Jordan gradually stopped answering calls, instead preferring text. And then it began to take longer and longer to get replies. Perhaps it was Jordan's job as an actress, she worked longer and harder than anyone, and she was starting to go places. Perhaps she was spending more time with her boyfriend of three years, who she lived with. Perhaps something had been said that made Jordan angry or sad without realizing. But Jordan took longer and longer to reply, until one day six months before Rei's death, there was never any reply at all. Whatever the case, Jordan was Rei's best friend, but Rei hadn't been Jordan's for a long time.
         It was a platonic relationship of course; it really was. Jordan had a boyfriend, after all. But Rei loved her in a platonic way, and indeed, Rei accepted Jordan's choice to live a life separately, accepting that she would probably never talk to her again, loving her just the same. It was Rei's fault; she knew that. She hadn't done anything with her life after all, and Jordan simply had.
         In the sunset of Rei's life she'd spent most of her time at a grocery store, a full time job which helped support her mother, or in her room, not doing much of anything at all. That's okay, she thought, it's just the way things go sometimes.
         The fifth and final was that she died in a car crash.
         The sun was setting and the silhouette of nameless cars that had no where to go and no where they'd been drifted along the highway, lost in the routine of life. In a way, they were ghosts too.
         The old ghost thought. This realm is where the murderous greed of humanity goes. And he realized that he'd assumed this ghost was like the rest of them, but maybe, like him, she was in hell, this second spoke on the wheel of death and rebirth, for reasons she didn't understand or couldn't control.
         He sat down next to her. "Answer honestly," he said, looking up at the wisp of a moon, "are you a good person?".
         "I... thought I was," she said, "I try to be."
         A good enough answer for him.
         He handed her the pack of Oreos. The old ghost couldn't help but hope that the simple action would transform him again, but it didn't; he was still a wrinkled gremlin of a man. He'd get out of this place; he'd figure out rules of this curse and then he'd break it.
         Rei opened the pack of Oreos and set them between them. "You can have some too I guess," she said.
         They sat there, crumbling up Oreos and trying to shove them in their tiny mouths, and watched the sun set.
         The old ghost thought, where did she get these Oreos? A thought that was quickly overtaken by a more sinister one, night time in the underworld is not a fun place.
         
         That's the story of how the old ghost King Yama learned:
         
         Selfish deeds and
         Selfless deeds with
         selfish intentions are
         often one and the same.