Get out of my head, I'm busy!

Sometimes it gets sad, though.

It was my first walkthrough of the night when I saw the girl weeping beside the grave. It happens sometimes, and I never chase them. The cemetary is for the dead and the grieving. They’re always welcome here.

I went over to her, careful to keep the grave between us so I wouldn’t scare her. “What’s the matter?” I asked gently. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

She shook her head, still weeping. “No-one came to my funeral,” she sobbed. “No-one at all.”

I checked the stone. She’d been about seventeen. An age of strong emotions and fierce resentments. “I’m sorry,” I told her, and meant it. “That’s… always hard.”

“If they cared about me, they would have come,” she wept. “This means nobody cared at all.”

“Not always,” I told her gently. “Sometimes it means that something else happened. If you like, I can try to find out.”

“Really?” She wiped her eyes. “I’d… I’d appreciate that. I’m Lucy.”

“Stanley.” She couldn’t shake hands, so I gave her a friendly nod. “Come with me, Lucy. I’ve got a laptop in the watchman’s hut.”

She followed me, drifting silently, back to the hut. I brought her in, and made two cups of tea, offering her one. “I’m not solid,” she said, her lip quivering. “I can’t -“

I showed her how to take it, the ghostly echo of the solid cup, and told her I’d learned it from the day attendant over at the columbarium. She’s Korean, and knows a lot about hungry ghosts. She sipped her tea while I opened the laptop and ran the usual searches.

I do this a lot.

Sure enough, there’d been three major car accidents between the area she’d lived in and the cemetary. There’s almost always at least one - there’s this one intersection that no exorcism, ritual purification or cleansing spell has ever worked on - and it usually helps. A lot of spirits want to know why someone they loved didn’t come.

So I go down to the basement, which is well-lit and finished and indeed there are more pepsi but also in the fridge is a massive tortise. This animal was the dimensions of a desktop computer and probably outweighed a labrador. It’s not moving, and is set in the middle of a plastic tray so it’s apparently supposed to be there. I go back upstairs.

“Hey Andrew.” I say, nonchalantly. “So is the tortise in the fridge down there for soup or what?”

“The what?” says the other member of the group project. I don’t remember her name, just that she always wore her hair in pigtails with butterfly clips that were based on real butterflies and she had at least a dozen species.

“Oh! No, that’s Andrew Too.” he says. “His species hibernates so he stays in the fridge for the holidays.”

“You named your tortise after you?” I ask.

“No, uh- Well, my grandfather got him in Egypt or somewhere while he was on leave during the war and He was named Andrew, so he thought it would be funny to name him ‘Andrew Too’. …Then Mom named me after him so Gandpa left me Andrew Too in his will. He’s pretty cool when he’s awake. Lets us dress him up for summer holidays, doesn’t bark.”

“Oh!” Said Butterflies. “My dad served in the Gulf War too! What unit was he in?”

AND FINALLY THE GAY ICON EVERYONE NEEDED