I'd Rather Not Be Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

but it clings to me as I move through it and it
hangs on for several steps later. Which is seriously weird, but at
least I'm not trapped.
    Or I'm not trapped by the door
anyway. It's raining out and the drops tickle like anything,
driving me back inside. Boring though it may be in here, I couldn't
get far in the rain. Not without going crazy.
    Crazier than I already am? I do,
after all, think I'm a time-traveling ghost. That's not exactly
sane.
    I pace the room for a few
minutes before realizing it's not going to make the rain go away
any faster. There's a TV remote on the bar and since I can't think
of anything else to do, I start poking my finger against its power
button. After about half an hour of being bored out of my mind, my
finger doesn't sink into the button, but presses it.
    The television springs to
life.
    I gape stupidly while that fact
sinks in. I look around, making sure there isn't anyone else who
could have turned it on. There isn't.
    Holy crap. I turned the TV
on!
    I cheer. I whoop. I dance. I
spin around on the barstool screaming out my glee. I turned the TV
on!
    I stop spinning. I spun the
barstool. Grinning, I turn the seat slowly to face the bar.
    There's a man on the screen
wearing a flashy suit and a sleazy smile. “And Jesus? What would
Jesus say?”
    “That if you took half the money
you spent on that outfit, you could feed all the homeless in New
York for a week?” I hazard.
    “Jesus would say we must help
these people!”
    The crowd choruses in with an,
“Amen.”
    “We must help them to resist the
devil. Because it's the devil who's behind their actions.”
    Using my newfound ability to
touch stuff, I press the channel button. The weather in Charlotte
will be rainy. Highs in the low fifties. Click. Big Carolina
Panthers football game later today and our Fox affiliate is very
excited about it. I click the button a few more times, as much to
do it as to change the channels.
    An inner door swings open.
“Barney!” a woman with large breasts and even bigger hair yells.
“It's on again! And it just changed channel!”
    A weary middle aged man follows
the woman in. “It's a short in the remote,” he says, coming up to
the bar and grabbing the remote from in front of me so he can shut
the TV off.
    “It's not a short.” The woman
shakes her head forcefully. “That's a brand new remote.”
    “See?” The man shrugs. “New
stuff's always quirky. Them Asian factories don't test anything.
You know that.”
    I sigh and go to the front door.
The rain's gone down to a lazy drizzle and it doesn't bother me too
much to step out into it. If they're not going to let me watch
their TV, there has to be something better to do than hanging
around with the downtrodden tavern keeper and his big-haired
sidekick.
    Downtown's deserted. A veritable
ghost town. Ha ha.
    I follow Main Street past the
school, then turn on the route I always take home from there. It
leads me through the oldest part of town, the section dominated by
large Victorians. Cooper Finnegan's truck stands outside of his
house, but I keep to the other side of the street and refuse to do
more than glance at the place or the harvest-themed decorations in
its yard.
    The large homes give way to
smaller ones, two bedroom places slapped up when World War II came
to an end and the town was flooded with soldiers coming home in
search of brides and VA loans.
    And then I come up on Fort Jesus
and it's packed-to-overflowing parking lot. With three stories of
solid stone, the church is more like a military stronghold than a
place of holiness. The only indicators it's a place of Christianity
and not something owned by the National Guard are the billboard in
front and the lone glass window depicting Jesus on a cross. Ten
times larger than life, the messiah looks down on us with
condemnation and repulsion. Whoever designed the window clearly
didn't get the “Jesus is love” memo.
    After that, I finally get to my
neighborhood. The oldest house on my street