Ben Segal: “Hungry Ghosts,” a Haunted Passages flash fiction

Hungry Ghosts

Ghosts eat ghost hamburgers from ghost cows. You can’t kill a ghost though, so the ghost cows are eaten piece by piece, fog slabs sliced off their lowing bodies. Such practices of piecemeal slaughter flourished in the time before refrigeration and were banned as cruel by Kosher law. Ghosts are in this way heretical, or ancient. The ghost cows wither, steak by empty steak. A field of spectral utters and hooves, of disincorporated nostrils. So now the ghost packs wander, knives drawn, starving, trailing plasmic sacks of poppy-seeded buns.

Ben Segal is the author of Pool Party Trap Loop, co-author of The Wes Letters, and co-editor of The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature. His short fiction has been published by Georgia Review, Tin House, The Collagist, Tarpaulin Sky, and Puerto del Sol, among others. He currently lives in Los Angeles.

Image: dergreif-online.de

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