The Mountains of Misplaced Papers

The days that I took to recover from my cold allowed Chaz and I to have conversations that weren’t Christmas hunting related.  I learned that Ghosts were born for their specific duty, but that they still had to learn how to use the knowledge that was naturally programmed in their brain.  He learned that my dad was a truck driver, which was why my family wasn’t going to officially celebrate Christmas until the twenty-eighth since that was when my dad was going to be back in town.

Ghosts, it seems, create their own personality within the first few moments of their creation.  They pull their personalities from the people around them plus from the inherit knowledge they have.  There are a few other factors, but that explained why this Year’s Present was a bit of a prick.  I really hoped we wouldn’t run into that particular Ghost again.  Especially not while we were in a place that could give me a million paper cuts.

The Mountains of Misplaced Papers, Chaz had called it.  I looked around as we continued up the mountain range.  It really was a mountain of papers.  Everything was paper.  Paper flowers swayed in the breeze and origami butterflies fluttered by.  It snowed for a short time, but the snow was just confetti.  I hoped it wouldn’t rain because it would probably be spitballs.

“So, the feeling doesn’t get stronger the closer you get?” I asked Chaz.

“Not at all,” Chaz sighed.  “I can only tell when I’m near an hour, and near can be such a relative term.”

I laughed.  “Can all Ghosts of Lost sense hours this way?”

“It’s…complicated.”

“In other words, you don’t know the answer at the moment,” I guessed.  “You’ve got to sort through your brain archive.”

“Sort of,” Chaz said.  “Actually, I think that’s about right.  We can find things that are lost, but some of us can more easily find specific things.”

“Like the Ghost of Christmas Lost finding Christmas.”

“Pretty much.”

“So, after we finish finding the hours of Christmas, you’ll go looking for whatever you want?”

Chaz made sort of a non-committal noise and I could tell he shrugged.  He probably needed to sort through all the innate knowledge in his head to find out the exact details.  I wondered if they had a sort of detectives brigade or something that helped little kids find lost puppies and mothers find the glasses on top of their heads.  Well, it was probably more glamorous than that.

Several different birds cheeped in the construction paper pine tree that we passed under.  Rolled up tubes of paper created the needles while origami and paper cutting resulted in both two and three dimensional birds.  It was gorgeous, like a surreal reality crossed with a third-grade art project.  A very skilled third-grader at that.

“So, how much farther till we reach the place you sensed the hour?” I asked.

“There’s a bridge up ahead and it’s just beyond that,” Chaz answered.

I watched an origami bunny hop off a crumpled grey rock.  “Is the bridge made of paper?”

“It worried me the first time too,” Chaz teased.  “But it held me.  I even jumped on it to test its strength.  A lot sturdier than it looks.”

“What does it look like?” I demanded.

“Like a paper chain and wrapping paper tubes,” Chaz stated matter-of-factly.

“Sounds delightful.”

“I thought you would like that description,” Chaz smiled.