Ghost Handler Chapter One

Ally here with this month's piece of short fiction y'all! Based on the prompt where Abby is Tara's new manager. It got a little longer than I anticipated so it's not all coming this month, this is chapter one of two or three! It takes place in an Alternate Universe, so don't worry about any spoilers. Anyway! I hope y'all like it!

There were eighteen blue jays sitting outside the kitchen window this morning. Tara sighed. There was always some kind of weird animal thing going on whenever Abby was involved. Last time Abby went into the back yard she came back inside covered from head to toe in squirrels. She’d only been outside for like… two minutes but in that time she’d also managed to name every single one of them. That one ended up being a nightmare. As soon as Maddie tried to get them off her they scattered throughout the house. Dozens of them. They’d had to call animal control and Tara still woke up that night with a squirrel trying to bury a roasted peanut in her nose.

Abby wasn’t allowed in the back yard anymore.

This morning—to Tara it was still morning at least—wasn’t that bad. Although the blue jays were kind of freaking out. Dancing and chirping and pecking at the window. Seven of them had stacked themselves up and were performing some kind of synchronized dance. Left wing, twirl, head bob head bob, twirl, right wing. It was pretty impressive and actually the perfect thing for her show. Who cares if people thought they were trained; who trains seven blue jays to dance like that? That’s still cool.

Unfortunately the moment Tara pulled out her phone the birds stopped moving entirely. You couldn’t even see their little chests rise and fall as they breathed. Of course, when she pocketed the phone again they started right back up. Tara just made a mental note of it as another annoying thing about living with a ghost. With human roommates it was always like “Tara please do the dishes for the love of god” or “Tara stop taking showers with your clothes on” or “Tara why is the fridge packed with pudding cups?” Ghost roommates presented an entirely different, but much more awesome, set of problems.

Tara, turned her attention away from the weird birds. There was plenty of time later for bird weirdness especially since her life had become Bird Weirdness: the Musical. Abby was also in the kitchen and didn’t seem to have even noticed the blue jays outside trying desperately to get her attention. That’s because she was focusing on frying eggs. Probably not enough though, considering she’d already gone through about three cartons of them from the looks of the kitchen.

“Having fun there, Ghosty?” Tara said. Abby seemed to be too deep in egg-contemplation to hear. “Hello there. Abigail. Abigail the Egg Whisperer,” Tara said, walking closer to Abby and getting louder with every step.

Still nothing. Abby was just standing there at the stovetop, staring down into her frying pan in a trance. As Tara got closer she could tell the egg was already burnt.

“I think you need to start over,” Tara said, and put her hand on Abby’s shoulder.

Abby jumped reflexively. And with her came the frying pan. And out of the pan flew the badly charred egg that Abby had so lovingly carbonized. It sailed across the kitchen until it landed straight on the window on the other side of the room. The one with all the birds. And the birds. Went. Wild. Tara didn’t realize birds could even make sounds like that. It sounded like a bunch of airhorns having a crazy hotel party.

“Oh! Good morning, Tara,” Abby said, also as if nothing had happened. However this was normal for her. “I didn’t see you there.”

Tara laughed a little. “Yeah I could tell. How long have you been at the whole egg thing anyway?”

“Since sunrise.”

“Since sunrise,” Tara repeated in disbelief. Sometimes when she talked to Abby, Tara thought she could tell what Maddie must feel like talking to her. “Well. You make any good ones?”

Abby shook her hands excitedly, almost hitting Tara in the face with her spatula. “Yes! Lots!” She bounced over to the fridge and pulled out a big plate of eggs. None of them were particularly good but Tara didn’t have the heart to tell Abby that.

“Unfortunately we don’t have any picture frames for them. Do you think you could take me by The Goodwill this afternoon to pick some up?”

“Like. So you can frame pictures of them? Why don’t you just put them up on Instagram or something?”

“Oh no. I was going to put the eggs in the frames, of course. Why would we put framed pictures of eggs around that house? Now that would be odd!” Abby giggled obliviously.

Tara just nodded and grabbed a yogurt out of the fridge. It was cotton candy flavored because she was eight years old. She pulled the top off, threw it in the kitchen sink, put the yogurt container up to her mouth and squeezed the entire blue and pink concoction into her mouth, before then tossing the empty container into the sink along with the top.

She swallowed it all in one gulp.

“Yeah that really would be weird.”

And at that moment her phone buzzed three times. The all important triple buzz. A single buzz meant it was something unimportant, like a text from Maddie or a tornado warning or something. A double buzz meant she had gotten a response on one of the many lesbian cryptid dating sites she frequented (it was kind of surprising there was more than one but there were as many variations of the website as there were variations of the lesbian flag). However there was only one thing that was set to triple buzz. That meant a story she was following on cryptidtracker had updated.

She opened her phone and to her delight this update was huge. Multiple videos, tons of pictures, and even an eyewitness interview. This was exactly the kind of thing she loved to get it was like a Christmas present.

“Abby it’s happening!!” Tara said, grabbing Abby’s hands. They were cold and ghostly. Because Abby was a ghost.

“What’s happening?” Abby said, sounding like a confused and concerned aunt at a graduation party.

“Sorry Abby! No time! Good luck with the eggs, I have to get to a computer.” Tara said, then she tore through the kitchen, back up the stairs, and into her bedroom.

The room was absolutely covered in clothing. The room was a mess and worst of all, Tara had no idea where her laptop bag was.

When Abby floated into the room Tara was digging through the various mounds of crap. Clothes, piles of magazines with titles like UFO Smoocher and MothMania, and greasy fast food bags. A pair of jeans smacked Abby in the face as she crossed the threshold.

“Tara, what are you doing?” She said, pulling the pants off her head. Instead of putting them back on the floor, however, she immediately started folding them right there, doing her best to dodge any other pieces of flying debris.

“I’m looking for my laptop! I have to read this post!”

“Isn’t that it on your bed, under your pillow?” Abby said, pointing.

She was right, it was sitting right there when she moved the pillow. There was also a burrito behind there from the other day.  Score.

Tara hopped onto the bed and opened her laptop, and the burrito, and while munching absent-mindedly she began to go through the post with the utmost attention. This was about the only thing anyone could ever get to her focus on.

Abby floated over to the bed and looked over her shoulder. Abby still wasn’t quite sure how computers worked but Maddie assured her it definitely wasn’t ghost magic and that was all she needed. There was so much about the modern world Abby still didn’t understand, but she had lots of time, and she had Maddie to show her the way, so there was no rush! Besides, the important thing was that people seemed to mostly be the same as always.

Abby tried to read the words on the screen, but her English still wasn’t very good. 

“What does it say?”

Tara looked up from the screen. Even at her most focused she wasn’t able to match the intensity of Abby cooking the eggs.

“This cryptid I’ve been following. Well, I’m not sure if you can technically call it a cryptid, since it’s an ice cream truck. Machine cryptids are kind of controversial at the moment so I don’t want to get you involved in any discourse. Anyway there’ve been all kinds of reports of this weird ice cream truck driving around cities at night giving out this weird, incredibly spicy ice cream. People have been hospitalized.”

“Anyway, it’s been going west for weeks now and last I heard it was in Cheyenne. But get this! This post says it was seen in Fort Collins, just last night! Which means we could expect it to show up here any day now! I really want to make a video on this, this is so exciting!!”

Abby didn’t quite get almost any of what Tara was talking about. But she did know one thing. She knew there was no way Tara could make a video right now.

“How will you make a video? Isn’t Maddie visiting her grandma’s onion farm in Georgia?” Abby couldn’t go with her because she was deathly allergic to onions. It was a ghost thing.

Tara just smiled mischievously. “Oh don’t worry, I have something in mind.”

Abby was not going to like what she had in mind.