Come With Me, Little Ghost

I.

Death arrived swiftly. The boy struck the man twice – once across the chin; another, a kick to downed chopper. He did the deal in one, and so he fixed the pistol to his belt and said to the Little Ghost, “I have helped you. Is this all?”

The Little Ghost flickered and rose, and the boy admired him all the more for it.

“I have helped you. Is this all?” said the lad, again.

But the sprite closed his mouth, if he indeed had one.

The country priest, ragged and red, was only the first of the symbolic deaths. Next was a lawyer. Then, perhaps, a rotten, bloated heir, but that would come later. From them he had his pick, be it the lord, his wife, the doctor’s son or someone entirely other.

“No need to hurry,” said the Little Ghost, perhaps a bit evilly, “‘One to one and one is three.’ Paint it on the Main Street wall, and I will come to you.”

The boy did this all out of love for the Little Ghost, no matter the wicked things he bid him do, so he took his can of red bromine and drew that single phrase:

ONE TO ONE AND ONE IS THREE.

No man saw what he wrote, how he wrote, when he wrote. That night he walked home, and the Little Ghost followed him.

II. 

On a silver platter is a pound of flesh, sheared from a bicep.

The Bishop laughs. A sprite crouches in his ear, green and chittering. It screams as loud as it can, pulling at the spindly hairs, knee-deep in honey-sweet wax.

'You be careful with the guttering! You see, he's drying out!'

So blood pours from the limb. This man, no different from any of the others, this ram, this son of Abraham, is strapped on his back to a gilded cross, like a marble Christ. The head hangs limply to the side, the neck avian, as if it were boneless. His name is MARTYR. It is carved on his soul as much as it is on his body. It means he is nothing else.

The Bishop, giddy as a whistling rat, has severed an artery and left it. Such is his concentration on the weighing.

By the time he presses the wound, the man is nearly dead. The stream congeals down peeling gilt, damaging it further, sticky and dark. It winds up in the Bishop's clothes, ermine and red, the dotting decorative, the same not to be said of the smears.