Fred & Mary

by Kipjo Ewers

  “I’m sorry; I should never have done that.”

  Slowly he rose from the bed taking timid steps back down the hallway into the living room. He found her sitting in her usual spot on the daybed near the window sill looking out into the world of the living.

  “I’m sorry,” he swallowed. “I … didn’t mean …”

  “Yes, you did,” his phone buzzed cutting him off. “You meant it. And don’t lie to me, because I know you meant it. You do not want to be where I am. People go and visit graves thinking that they are visiting with their loved ones. The dead do not hang around cemeteries, those that have not passed on are where the living is, watching, and wishing that they were still alive! Wishing that they could have one more day, one more second to feel! So, I don’t want you to ever even think about dying because living is precious!”

  Fred slowly lowered his head, realizing that he deserved to be slapped and then some. This reunion though in some ways joyful carried a planetary weight of pain to it as well. Though they were in the same room, they were now living on two different planes of reality.

  Forever separated by the worlds of the living and the dead.

  So, caught up in rejoicing her return to him, he failed to see that she was hiding her suffering and sorrow.

  “You need to get ready for work,” she buzzed a text to him.

  “What? No!” Fred scowled. “I’m calling out! We have a lot to talk about!”

  “And we’ll talk when you come home from work. We also have the whole damn weekend to talk.”

  “I can’t go in!” Fred slyly smirked. “Barney thinks I blew him off to binge watch “The First.” You know he’s going to grill me at work, so if I go in and can’t answer his questions, he’ll know I was lying and did something else.”

  “And?” was her reply.

  “I’m just saying,” he painfully cleared his throat. “It could be kind of …awkward.”

  “I married an adult, Fred.”

  “I know I’m an adult,” he mumbled.

  “Then you can take your adult ass to work, and tell Barney that you were worn out and fell asleep before you could watch it. It’s not like you would be telling a lie.”

  She purposely moved her legs so that the towel would split revealing a good portion of her thigh. Fred jumped backward as the memories of last night flooded his brain and caused blood to rush down to the smaller head with the one-track mind.

  “Or we can just pick up where we left off,” he swallowed advancing toward her.

  “Take your ass to work Fred!” She fired off with caps as she held a hand up stopping him.

  “Why are you so dead set on me going to work today?” He sneered.

  As his phone buzzed, he glanced down to read her answer.

  “Ever since my death and I refused to pass on, I have been trapped here powerless, watching as your life slowly screeched to a halt. You have no idea the agony I have felt watching it.”

  Her words brought sobering mist to Fred’s eyes which he quickly wiped away, as she raised and moved around her right hand while giving it a look over.

  “I don’t know how long I have on this plane of existence until I pass over. But with what time I have left, I’m going to make sure my husband lives again.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Day after day, Fred became a clock watcher. He mowed through his work and meetings while counting down the time to leave. Almost every day Fred was the first person out of his office door the second it hit 5:30 PM. He feverishly rearranged his calendar to ensure he left on time, opting to take his work home when he could, or delegate it to someone on his team.

  Fred became a child once again, eager to walk through his door into a private imaginary world with his make-believe friend waiting for him to play.

  In this case, it was his deceased wife inhabiting a life size female doll, but it was all the same to him.

  For the most part, they did the only things that allowed them to connect with one another. They talked, played, and role-played which a hundred percent of the time led to sexual intimacy. Their talks were about what happened after her death, and what she had seen, mostly the goings-on of the real world.

  She was at her funeral.

  She thought everything was nice except the dress they put her body in. She would have preferred something loose, flowing and blue. The white number she saw they stuck her corpse in was too tight, stuffy, and not something she would ever wear.

  In between watching Fred and family deal with the aftermath of her death, she traveled the planet to keep her mind off being dead. From her account, a spirit could only go to locations they initially visited in real life just by thinking about it. However, a willing spirit could share their memories with another spirit allowing them to travel to destinations those souls ventured in the past. Spirits frequently traded memories by soul touching to prevent from remaining stuck in their current location. She started with old vacation spots and then began traveling until she had seen almost every continent on the planet. She told him how easy it was to find spirits willing to trade considering how many spirits from foreign countries were eager to visit the United States, especially New York and California.

  The memories from soul touching were, however, temporary lasting up to a day. Once the memories were gone, the spirit got whisked back to their original stomping grounds. They still were allowed to retain the memories of the places they traveled.

  She lightly touched on Fred’s slow deterioration that he successfully cloaked from the outside world. He knew she was making sure not to press. Her focus was bringing him out of the hole he was in, not sinking him further into it with miserable memories.

  Instead, she went to work establishing some normalcy between the two of them. She assumed her role as the woman of the house gladly given back to her by Fred.

  Per her orders, Fred found his way to his doctor for an appointment, where he discovered that a year of bad living shot both his blood pressure and cholesterol through the roof. With that knowledge, she restricted him to a ninety – five percent vegan diet. She forced him to get back into the gym and start running again.

  Fred didn’t go down without some fierce protesting. He didn’t mind changing his diet, even though he did whine about not having his peanut butter and snicker doodles, but any time away from her to workout was too long for him.

  Her ultimatum was a simple one to get him in line.

  “No ghost nookie if you don’t get your health in check, period.”

  After that Fred not only became a health warrior, he went into beast mode. She in turn compromised by allowing him to exercise at home from time to time with her being his workout partner, which usually led to sex in the middle of their sessions.

  In between their conversations, repairing Fred’s health, and getting back to some semblance of a couple, they played a lot.

  The apartment transformed into their very own play ground.

  Because of the doll’s facial design, they were able to reenact a bunch of anime cartoons they both loved. Fred ended up using the catalog, after all, to purchase additional accessories such as various wigs and eye sets with different color pupils to change the doll's features slightly. Every day Fred found himself coming home to a set of packages containing either regular or cosplay clothing for the both of them to wear for their games. For Mary, she got to pretend to be a quirky redheaded high school teacher with purple eyes who was an alien that came to Earth to study humankind and secretly married her student, who happened to be an eighteen-year-old trapped in a fifteen-year-old body.

  For Fred, it was playing an awkward college student from the country that started going to school in the big city and found a female android in the garbage.

  They even used his phone to duplicate the one word the android would say throughout the majority of the anime.

  “Chi.”

  But their most intense moment was something they both thought up on their own.

  Fred in his suit and gear with a H
ollywood approved replica proton pack strapped to his back skulked around the apartment in the dead of night waving around a working facsimile P.K.E. Meter.

  “This area seems clear,” he whispered.

  At the right moment, he pressed the switch causing for its wings to expand as the lights on the scanner lit up. It beeped and whistled as if it located a specter.

  “Oh shit, detecting a 450-455 apparition,” Fred swallowed. “Yep, something is definitely here.”

  The next to follow was the terrifying and haunting clicking, and groaning sounds synonymous with a Japanese horror movie remade in the United States.

  “Heading to the hallway to investigate.”

  Before he took two steps, heavy shuffling footsteps came in his direction. A jittery Fred reached for the wand on the pack arming it. As he swallowed aiming, she came around the corner.

  One of the wigs they got from the Real Doll website was similar to the specter from the original movie. Even though she was wearing a skimpier version of the soiled white outfit, the wraith wore in the film revealing a significant portion of her legs up to her upper thighs, the combination of the makeup she applied to the doll. The vaporous death rattle sound she vibrated the apartment with and the rigid jerky movement she mimicked from the movie both horrified and aroused Fred at the same time.

  “Holy shit, lighting her up!” he hollered.

  With a press of a button, the replica proton pack roared making the sounds it would make if it worked and was striking an actual full blown poltergeist. Unfortunately for him in this storyline, it did not affect her.

  “Oh shit! It’s not working guys!” He screamed to his fantasy team while backing up. “I’m going to need some help! Guys!”

  A petrified Fred lost his footing while retreating backward, and fell into a chair in the middle of the living room. As he looked up, an advancing Mary had disappeared.

  “Mary? Mary?”

  The morbid silence choked the room. Fred gave himself borderline whiplash as he scanned the room for her whereabouts.

  “Okay, ha ha …this ain’t funny anymore. Mary?”

  His entire body convulsed as the ominous croaking, and gurgling resonance filled the room to a fever pitch.

  “Mary?” Fred whimpered.

  A mortified Fred screamed louder than Ruby Rhod as he turned to see her drop from the ceiling now sitting on his lap inches from his face with her countenance contorted while her eyes slowly rolled in the back of her head.

  A hyperventilating Fred clutched his chest as she moved closer straddling him while Baby Bash’s “Cyclone” pumped from the surround sound system in the living room.

  Fred met his grisly end to the spookiest lap dance he ever had.

  Arousal and horror played tug of war with his psyche as she laid down some sensual grinding and twerking on his groin. It also helped that she took his trembling hands placing them on her hips.

  As Fred finally got into the morbid fantasy role-play, they concocted a loud knock at the door cut through the music.

  Mary shut the music off springing to her feet with the demeanor of a frightened school girl.

  “What? What’s the matter?”

  With his phone in the other room, she took his hand and traced the words with her finger into his palm.

  “Ms. Santiago?” He made out. “And Mr. Robinson?”

  She answered with a frantic head nod.

  “They’re at the door?”

  She nodded again while smacking him on his arm to get up and answer the door.

  “Alright! Alright!” He leaped up. “Calm down, and I’ll handle this.”

  A worked-up Fred muttered a curse as he quickly pulled off the proton pack tossing it into the couch, and jogged over to the door.

  “Fred! Are you in there? Fred? Fred?” Ms. Santiago howled while steadily knocking the other side of the door with her knuckles.

  “One second Ms. Santiago!” Fred barked while pulling himself together.

  He adjusted his engorged little head protruding from his jumpsuit and inhaled some calming air before opening the door to a much concerned and slightly irritated Ms. Santiago and a very unhappy Mr. Robinson, their seventy-year-old neighbor on the third floor in between them and Ms. Santiago. Both were taken aback by his attire.

  “Hello Ms. Santiago, how you doing Mr. Robinson?” He tensely grinned.

  “I'm all right, but what is going on up here?” She asked.

  “You have disrupted my evening and traumatized my poor dog Zippy with whatever you’re doing up here!” An angry Mr. Robinson got in.

  “Mr. Robinson, please! I am taking care of this!” Ms. Santiago stopped him before continuing her interrogation of Fred. “Now Fred, the sounds and music coming from your apartment is shaking the whole building, and what are you wearing? Are you going to a costume party or something?”

  “Well, you see …”

  An edgy Fred rubbed his sweaty bald head as his mind tried to put together a proper explanation for his attire and the strident disturbance caused within his apartment.

  His gears of thought came to a grinding halt as both Mr. Robinson and Ms. Santiago let out startled screams while stumbling backward.

  “Oh my god!” came from Mr. Robinson.

  "¡Oh! ¡Oh, mi señor!"

  Fred instinctively turned around to see Mary still in costume with her hair still in her face standing in the hallway of the foyer. He gave her an ‘Are you crazy?’ look which caused her to scurry to the bedroom while he tried to keep poor Ms. Santiago and Mr. Robinson from having simultaneous heart attacks.

  “Ms. Santiago, Mr. Robinson it’s okay … please …calm down.”

  “Oh my …my Lord,” a trembling Mr. Robinson gasped while patting his chest.

  “Dear Lord …who …?” Ms. Santiago squeaked.

  “I have been seeing someone discreetly for awhile,” he began to explain.

  “Oh …well she scared the bejeezus out of us!” A flustered Ms. Santiago answered. “Why would she come out like that?”

  “She’s deaf and mute,” he swallowed. “And we were kind of playing a game before you knocked.”

  As she gave him a look up and down, Fred prayed she would accept his wacky explanation and not press any further.

  “I see,” she exhaled. “Look, Fred, you know I’m not a prude, but please remember you all don’t live here by yourselves, that noise level is unacceptable, try and keep the horsing around between you and her to a respectful minimum please.”

  “Yes ma’ am,” he remorsefully nodded.

  “Come, Mr. Robinson, I’ll make you some tea to calm you down.”

  “Okay.”

  He stood at his doorway watching Ms. Santiago taking a still shaken Mr. Robinson back down the stairs to her apartment to take care of him. She looked back up giving him a look that he was not sure read disapproval or concern before disappearing from his view. Fred closed the door falling against it as he expelled all of the air out of his lungs.

  He then hightailed it to the bedroom to reprimand a particular stripper spook who almost sent their landlord to the hospital. As he barged into the bedroom, he found her sitting on the bed looking like a cat that ate a canary.

  “Are you out of your ever-loving mind? Are you trying …?”

  She sprung to her feet rushing him up against their dresser drawer. Locking lips shut him up. She kept her hands busy by pulling the zipper down to his jumpsuit. He forgot about Ms. Santiago and went to work undoing her haunting cosplay dress.

  Intimacy meant more for them than just getting off. It was the only working physical connection they had between one another when they touched souls. They scraped the bottom of the barrel devouring every morsel of it so that they could feel one another.

  When Fred asked in passing why she made herself appear before Ms. Santiago and Mr. Robinson, she replied, “I just wanted to be seen again by someone else other than you.”

  ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜
˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜

  One night, Fred awoke from the icy chill that came into the bedroom and Mary absent from the bed. His heart quickened as he searched the room through sleep fogged eyes.

  They eventually became focused as he found her in front of the standing floor length mirror looking at herself with the aid of moon light. She had her pink bed shirt partially raised as she stood there rubbing her belly.

  Fred's eyes became blurry as he sat there watching her. Any minuscule of doubt he had in his heart melted away. Slowly he rose to his feet and made his way over to his wife standing behind her, and rested his hand on her stomach. He did not need to read the message that buzzed on his phone as he gently kissed the side of her face.