Haunting Spirits, Tormenting Spirits; Chapter 1

Abandoned old places can make people who enter feel unsettled, and believe it haunted. Spirits haunt houses, and cemeteries, not people. The most frightening thing is- spirits are vibrating energy, chaos, waiting for something to sup upon so as to create order for itself. They can, and will, inhabit empty, wandering souls of people who feel powerless, dismissed, and invisible.

The opera of the shrouded moon illuminates the quiet evening of sopping skies after a rainy day, and smoky auras that ballet among the people on the streets...  A young girl walks out of a palm reader's room, skeptical. she was told that there is a spirit around her that wants her to fail. 
"Nonsense."
Skeletons of buildings, looking sketched by a rueful hand while tears dripping onto the paper blurred the ebony ink, loom over her. Standing close together on the streets are the burnt, solemn- faced brick buildings trying to uphold each other through the times, staring agape with black tears smeared under hollowed eyes. 
She scurries off to her favorite place.
Spindly, bare trees in epic Shakespearean pose bow and sway as if under water. Among them, she dances an unknowingly seductive ballet. All around, leaves cascade like fairy rocking cradles. Gangly, gaping- mouthed black wreaths of vines and branches mournfully moan through the woods . She studies the trembling, delicate droplets, holding swirling universes within that gather on the budding branches... The wind, breathing out eternally, stirs the dead leaves that begin to sound like approaching footsteps. Feeling a little unnerved, she stops suddenly like a wide eyed rabbit. 
She spots an open grave. She kneels down and peers under the beams and wooden cover. She spends the next 15 minutes scooping away tumble weed-like things from falling into the open grave that seem to be propelled towards her by the wind- perhaps all the spirits flying around. 

The kitchen window yawns a cozy glow as she approaches the house. She is excited, happy, knowing that she is near her love. Her cat, Willow, greets her. She takes the light from the window, kneels down by the cabinet and lifts up the loose floor board as the lantern gently sways in her other hand, illuminating her treasure. Willow meows and nudges her knee. The cap glows in the darkness surrounding it. She cracks open the seal, puts the bottle to her lips as natural as a baby goes to its mother's breast, and feels calmness as the acrid elixir of Life slides into the little pool her tongue has created, an embrace; then her lips form a curtain over her teeth as they make a suckling sound as it slides down. The whiskey brings a soft blush to her cheeks. Her eyes begin to float on the placid, tingly sea of her mind. 

Willow nudges her hand, stirring her to pick up the bottle and drink more and ponder...staring... the dark house behind her lingering, looming, like a cloak of depression. 

She gets up; Willow leaps from the table fervently meowing and swirling round her shins, staring up at her human mother. 

she goes to the cupboard and takes the cat food and doles it out into Willow's dish. Willow dives in, purring and devouring the meat. 

Willow sits now, contently licking her paw and wiping it over her ears and face... 

"ohh,  mother dear, see here, see here, our mittens we have found!" and she goes to the floor and nuzzles her face into Willow who bats at her face and leaps away into the other room. 

"cheeky wee bitch!" the girl calls out, then laughs and drinks. 

Her work-soiled and scratched. yet delicate hands carefully take up her chipped tea cup with a broken handle that she has set aside for sentimental reasons; she endears things such as these; she keeps broken ships and dusty plates with chips; she does not sweep out corners because little spiders make their webs there...

She looks at the bouquet of dead roses hanging on her wall- their face once unfurled peachy and silky, now decrepit mummies trapped under a claw of dust. She smiles slightly at them, thinking them still beautiful, like old age; they bowed out gracefully like a stage actress at the conclusion of a drama.  She is haunting a place of a loved one she once knew. she reads through her journals she filled with her prose when she was alive. 

She sits with her hand on her prostrated forehead- as if checking for a fever- or a pulse of creativity- from where her words used to flow fluidly before  she met that specious, handsome devil that convinced her that she can't live without it... tells her that she is nothing without it, that she needs it to be strong and calm, makes her black and blue, and feel so abandoned, and then kisses her wounds, comforting her... sticks its tongue down her throat, sups on her sweetness, replenishing the void with bitterness, anger, and whispered philosophies of self-righteous indignation.  She hates it. She loves it. She never felt as powerful as she did in it gripping, comforting, warm, dysfunctional embrace.