Devonne Brown

To look into the face of the ghost of an idol you have is humbling. The ghost leaned over my work table like it was absolutely the right thing to do, and picked up a handful of printed pages and began to read. He rubbed his brow, looked both aghast and defeated. He knew bad writing when he held it in his hands. He had questions. I had questions. I vaulted way past bipolar and straight into a whole new dimension of mental illness at the sight of the famous spirit. 

Apparitions apparently do not remain transparently white for very long before they take on the solid corporeal characteristics of the humans they once were. I thought that the transformation was creepy-cool, but subtle. I was very brave…of course. Shakespeare shimmied a bit, and sighed slowly.  There was a ghost, then there was a man in grey and black velvet, pointy shoes, and lace everywhere else. A gossamer veiled  ghost was a simple concept to wrap my mind around. It was much easier to accept white flowing ectoplasmic fog than an ill dressed, fully fleshed anachronism.

Always rising well before daylight to do the things I like to do before the boys got out of bed, I must have been too tired to be afraid of the spectre who began to rail at me..“This is nothing but prose, no meter. Rhyme? How do you expect to distinguish one character from the next? Your scenes should have been painted with a wordsmith’s white hot quill, instead you slathered words on paper like soap on a dirty babe.” Shakespeare’s head seemed to explode a little.

An angry argument with the ghost of William Shakespeare about writing was probably the most arrogant moment of my life.

Shakespeare’s ability to humiliate with words was legendary for a reason. I had never felt so small and insignificant. All I wanted in the whole wide world was a match to light my printed pages and a chainsaw to destroy the computer.  Screw the Bard and his scathing judgment. 

“Listen, I had chickenpox the day Mrs. Wheeler taught iambic pentameter in elementary school. I had the black death when Mrs.Gill taught rhyming couplets in high school.” Sarcasm had neither a small nor still voice, even inside my head.

I was not in the mood for Elizabethan criticism at three in the morning. Days and hours of unproductive writing had given me the balls to correct William Shakespeare on literary technique. An angry argument with the ghost of William Shakespeare about writing was probably the most arrogant moment of my life. It took me exactly  seven seconds for me to figure that out. I had just been in a mother of a pointless semantic argument with the Bard. I let that sink in.    

”Why are you here?” A simple question, I thought, but it took him a long time to answer. Ghosts have been thinking for ages, usually by themselves, so it takes a long time for them to organize their thoughts. For them, there is no such thing as a simple answer. Everything is a crucial philosophical issue.

“I might as well make the best of the presence of the master, the master hallucination, and use that mind as long as this didactic illusion allows me.” I reasoned with myself. “I need blood work done. This is weird, even for me at three in the morning.” I actually did admit. 

Rumor has it that everyone has at least one good novel in them, but the trick was getting it out and on paper. I had been struggling with this book for years. I had moments of brilliance in writing, Pulitzer moments, laureate moments, and garbage moments. Most of the time, I worried more about the story I had to tell than the quality of  my writing. Had Shakespeare showed up to save me?

“I heard you ask for help to finish your book, and I needed something to do.” He shrugged his shoulders as if materializing in someone’s dining room at three-thirty in the morning was part of his routine. “If this book is for your boys, your legacy, you need to get on with it. You can’t live forever, you know” 

“We walk alongside death but never cross his path until he waves us on. It never seems fair to the kin we leave, they grieve, how they grieve. Think, their end is proper and done. Even the very, very young.”

Ghosts have been thinking for ages, usually by themselves, so it takes a long time for them to organize their thoughts.

“Four hundred odd years have made you crazy. There is nothing proper and done or fair with the death of the very, very young.”

Having your mind read and spoken back to you made you feel like your skeleton had jumped right out of the closet and tried to beat you to death with your own shin bone. All those secrets that you had only spoken to your most intimate and closest friends, those that you would 

not dare tell anyone, ever, were readily accessible to this specter. My stomach turned over and my eyes went back and forth without me moving my head. But, he would be gone by dawn, like all self-respecting wraiths, and his presence would be told to no one, ever. 

“Are you a ghost?”

“No,” was his lying reply. My armpits were sweating. I worked hard not to act scared silly. There was a pale man, who had just materialized, dressed in the garb of every English teacher’s poster that  I had ever seen of William Shakespeare looking at my grandmother’s china. Maybe I needed more Xanax, maybe less. He looked straight at me, “William Shakespeare’s recorded birth was April 23, 1563. If I am here, is it really possible for me to be a ghost?” His dark eyes might have been Dracula brown; I made him smile in case his teeth were fangs. I just was not in the mood for a writing tutorial from a vampire.  In the wee hours, anything was possible.

“ Am I hallucinating, or can everybody see you?” I said in fifteen rhythmic syllables.

“What do you think?” Sarcasm was no stranger to Shakespeare either, but he didn’t  answer my question. He was reading The Joy of Cooking. 

I had surmised that Shakespeare was no angel. Not only the beloved playwright, but in addition to his artistic ventures, he was a grain lord. He bought up grain, jacked up the prices, and sold it to the poor folks around him at an enormous profit. Shrewd. He was a businessman, a genius, and messed around on his wife.   

 Like all self-respecting actors, Shakespeare dissolved in a dramatic exit of cascading tossed paper. Rosy fingered dawn stretched her digits just a split second before the dining room exploded with morning life. It was then six o’clock in the morning and the sounds of flushing, slamming doors, big feet, and thumping cats came tearing toward the dining room. 

The ghostly chickenshit vanished