"You look like the after photo of a haunted doll restoration," Mira said, poking Vanessa's cheek with the end of her chopstick. "Are you sleeping in a coffin now or just doing full-contact wrestling with the office printer again?"
Vanessa Cross blinked at her lunch tray, trying to focus on the sad little heap of rice and tofu staring back at her like it knew things, like how she'd accidentally decapitated a ghost yesterday by sneezing mid-reap. The spectral head still hadn't stopped floating around the Land of Death, yelling, "She did it! I saw her soul! She aimed for my head!"
"I slept for thirty minutes," Vanessa muttered, dragging her face off the table. "Then I had to go harvest a soul from a hoarder's basement. The ghost was hiding under a mound of Beanie Babies and old pizza boxes."
Mira's eyes narrowed. "You've been acting really weird lately. You talk to the bathroom mirror like it owes you money, your left eye twitches every time someone says 'death,' and you screamed bloody murder when the new intern wore a hooded cloak on Casual Friday."
"It looked official," Vanessa hissed.
"Officially Gothic," Mira said. "You also keep whispering 'I see dead people' in meetings." She continued, feeling scared of what her bestfriend whispered during the previous meeting.
Vanessa buried her face in her hands and groaned. She couldn't tell Mira the truth that she was now a part-time, contractually obligated, soul-harvesting, scythe-wielding intern for the Bureau of Reaper Affairs (Mid-Mortal Transition Division). Also known as Hell's HR.
And being back in the human world didn't mean freedom. It meant double shifts.
By day, Vanessa was just another exhausted, caffeine-addicted analyst at Solstice Financial. By night or whenever the Buzzer of Doom rang she was expected to don her borrowed cloak, stumble out of her body (yes, literally), and go yeet lost souls into the afterlife. It was not great for her skin.
---
2:00 AM, Midglass District, Human World
BZZZZZT.
Vanessa's reaper-issued Soul Pager vibrated against her ribs like a demon was trying to text through her spleen.
"Ugh," she groaned, rolling off her bed like a dying walrus. "Not again."
Her apartment was barely lit, her blanket still tangled around one leg as her soul slipped from her physical body like a sock sliding off in a tumble dryer. She drifted toward the glowing portal that had opened up in her closet because apparently, she couldn't even have a normal IKEA wardrobe anymore.
Tonight's assignment? A spirit haunting a discount supermarket over an expired box of cereal. The ghost wouldn't move on until someone personally apologized for the Raisin Bran.
When she got back at 4:00 AM, the ghost still hadn't crossed over, but he had accepted a coupon for 50% off his next spiritual cleanse.
---
The next day...
9:15 AM, Solstice Financial Office, Graydawn City, Human World.
"Vanessa, do you have those Q3 reports?"
Vanessa jerked upright in her chair, eyes bloodshot, shirt buttoned incorrectly, and the distinct smell of sulfur and ectoplasm clinging to her jacket.
"Depends," she said, blinking slowly. "Is this the living world or the veil between dimensions?"
"...I'm calling HR," her manager muttered, backing away.
Vanessa winced. "No! Sorry! I just didn't sleep well. Super normal dreams. Not haunted or cursed at all."
To make things worse, the ghosts wouldn't leave her alone even here.
The office bathroom was now a hotspot of ghostly activity. The automatic soap dispensers had started going off on their own. One of the spirits, a Victorian lady who died while waiting for her engagement proposal, liked to scream at Vanessa for "being too forward" in life. Another ghost, an edgy teenager who died while attempting a TikTok challenge, tried to teach Vanessa how to floss mid-pee break.
"Give it up, Maddox," she snapped one day, brushing spectral glitter off her shoulders. "No one flosses in real life anymore. Go toward the light and leave me alone!"
"But the light has no Wi-Fi!" he wailed.
---
12:30 PM, Break Room, Solstice Finance Office.
Mira eyed her friend with deep concern.
"Okay, real talk. Are you okay? Because I just saw you spooning an empty coffee pot and whispering, 'You're all I have left now.'"
Vanessa laughed. Then it turned into a sob. Then a laugh-sob hybrid.
"I'm FINE," she said, voice cracking like a cursed floorboard. "Just a little overworked."
"Overworked? Vanessa, I found one of your Post-it notes that just said: 'To do: Fight Death. GetMilk.'" Mira uttered with concern in her eyes.
"Yeah, well," Vanessa muttered, "Death owes me oat milk."
---
2:35 PM, The Conference Room, Solstice Finance Office.
Boss Lang, he who is the Suspicious Eyebrows and Monotonous Voice walked past Vanessa during the afternoon meeting. His nose twitched. Then twitched again.
"Miss Cross," he said slowly, "Is that… incense? You smell like a cremated forest."
"It's... a new perfume," she said with a forced smile. "Eau de Burnout."
Boss Lang narrowed his eyes. "Are you on something?"
She froze. Not expecting the bizarre question. "On something like what?" She asked, confused at what her manager referring to.
"Something like... hallucinogens. LSD. Bath salts. Ghost mushrooms. I don't know what the kids are doing these days."
"I'm not on anything except anxiety and caffeine," Vanessa snapped, her eyes widen as she shouted "Which are both extremely legal and extremely ineffective!"
"Then why have you been staring at the office plants and whispering 'Tell me your secrets' for the past three days?" Boss Lang crossed his arms to his chest as he asked emotionlessly.
Vanessa stood up with a crazed look in her eyes. "Because they know things, Lang! They've seen things!"
Boss Lang stared. The intern who has been eavesdropping next to them fainted.
---
6:00 PM, Apartment From Hell, Midglass District, Human World.
Vanessa collapsed into her couch and stared at the ceiling. "This is unsustainable."
A pigeon ghost flew through her window.
"No," she told it. "Absolutely not."
The pigeon looked offended and phased through her toaster.
"Look," she muttered to herself, "I didn't sign up for this. Okay fine, I did sign something. But I was disoriented, dehydrated, and peer-pressured by skeletons in cardigans."
She opened her fridge. It contained one moldy lemon and an ominously glowing apple labeled 'Do not eat. Experimental soul fruit. – DeathCorp.'
With a sigh, she shut the fridge and slumped to the floor.
Just as she was about to fully dissolve into a pile of burnout and spiritual residue, her Soul Pager buzzed again.
Assignment: Spectral Interference at Local Park, Jogging Ghost complains no one hears his complaints about knees.
She stared at the pager, dead-eyed.
Then she looked at the ceiling.
"Why knees?! Why now?!"
---
Later That Night…
Vanessa sat on the park bench, exhausted, beside a translucent jogger who wore a reflective tracksuit and had no knees.
"They hurt so much when I was alive," he lamented. "Now I don't have them. Isn't that ironic?"
"I'd say that's karma," she muttered. "Also, spectral anatomy is not my field. Can we please move you on?"
"I didn't finish my 5K!"
"You're dead! There's no record to break!"
The jogger sobbed. "I just wanted to beat John."
Vanessa summoned a glowing ticket from her pouch, scribbled 'Jogger Kyle Wins By Default' on it, and handed it to the ghost. The man sniffled, nodded gratefully, and faded into the mist.
---
She returned home at midnight, peeled off her cloak, flopped onto the bed, and whispered to the darkness:
"I swear... if another ghost shows up in my toilet, I'm going full exorcist on my plumbing."
Then the toilet flushed by itself.
Vanessa screamed.