What a wondrous world, in which one can start one’s day with a shoe shine and end it with immortality. Neither Monsieur Durand, nor the shoe shine boy—who has chosen centuries of obscurity and cannot answer, but we can assume—ever had a franc to spare to sit for a painted portrait to safely tether their souls to the earth. Only years later would M. Durand realize he had unwittingly sat for the first photograph of a human by Louis Daguerre.

Soon, photography, and with it, immortality, exploded. This utterly confused the ghosts. They used to intrude occasionally upon those wealthy enough to afford portraits. Now, they stopped by often to check in on loved ones of all classes long overdue to join them in the afterlife, usually at afternoon tea when their descendants were in pleasant moods and open to delightful tales of the beyond. However, this never succeeded in moving them to give up their own ghosts, as they remained moored to their Earthly lives. Only when their fortunes turned did the police find them sobbing into the smoke wafting up from their burning portraits. By then, nothing could be done except alert the mortician.

But, to the point, most human beings in receipt of immortality are not in a rush to give it away. Ghosts frustrate their listeners with riddles and present hazy outlines of the afterlife. How can such opacity compete with the animation and verve of life? Oh, but the ghosts tried. They crashed dinner parties, hovering over each guest with menacing stares. They interrupted lectures enough that the “Spirit Rule” took effect and cancelled classes after fifteen minutes if the professor couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Some pontificated uninterrupted to captive audiences on the commode. Others just wailed in the streets. They numbered so large they blocked the sidewalks and passersby swatted them away like swarms of gnats. 

“This is ridiculous,” complained one such swatter. “I didn’t mind a charming visit from my grandmother on occasion as a little girl but now I’m confronted with this legion of strangers. One has no peace or privacy anymore, something must be done!” The scamp gripping her hand and struggling to keep pace said nothing but clumsily mimicked her swats with determined eyes.

“I do not enjoy this!” retorted a wispy, floating woman in a dress popular some fifty years prior. The swatter, startled, lowered her hand and stopped. Her boy crashed into her legs. The woman continued in a belabored voice, “Where are my children?”

“Madame,” the swatter began as she picked up her son and held him tight. “I do not know your children but if they are not with you, then they are alive and you should be glad for that.”

Tears floated away from the woman’s eyes like snowflakes. She buried her head in her hands so they blurred together. The swatter ignored a muffled, “So lonely,” while barreling through her and continuing her journey.

“Ghosts used to visit people who couldn’t let go of the dead,” she whispered to her shaking son, “Now, it seems, the ghosts can’t let go of the living.”

The dead attempted to stem the tide by sabotaging photo shoots by appearing in front of the lens or obscuring artists’ eyes so they could no longer paint. Irritated customers left in a huff and as the doors slammed shut, the ghosts shot triumphant smirks to the artists before they disappeared. As such, the creatives were the first to organize against them. Makers of canvas and paint and film marched with beautifully decorated signs demanding the banishment of banshees, the exile of the ethereal, the suspension of the spirits.

The anti-ghost lobby was strong and lined the pocket of politicians willing to sign laws banning them. Though nothing more than symbolic, they succeeded in so depressing the ghosts that they lost the energy to fight back. Every appearance on Earth drained them, and they missed the comforts and warmth of the afterlife. After realizing they were fighting a losing battle in a place that made them so unhappy, they faded away. The Ghost Plague tapered off until everyone forgot about them.

Everyone except M., now Agent, Durand. Distraught by the invasion of privacy and the underhanded recording of his likeness without his consent, he allied with the ghosts’ cause to limit the number of the living. Now 127 and an ambitious employee of the Département de la longévité et de la ressemblance humaine (DLRH), he tracked down unsanctioned immortals and raided their stashes of death-defying portraits. The jailed centenarians watched their portraits burn, dying amongst the fog of waiting ancestors, who nodded their gratitude to the indefatigable agent.

Agent Durand recognized his hypocrisy, but he simply could not locate and destroy every copy of Daguerre’s famous photo. He could, of course, take his life the old-fashioned way. Such whispered suggestions tormented him from seemingly-friendly colleagues at DLRH. Even the cat he dubbed his tigre gris, who had scampered along the cramped alleys of Montogureil with him in his youth, appeared and offered evanescent head bumps to coax him into the afterlife. 

But he persisted, fearful of the monsters now defying death. An equally concerned media ceased recording the likenesses of villainous politicians. The DLRH and its foreign partners toiled for months finding and destroying video and photographic film. But the painted portraits remained, hidden, ensuring long reigns for aspiring destroyers-of-worlds. So, with war on the horizon, the DLRH drafted Agent Durand to infiltrate and destroy the self-portraits of a particular failed artist-turned-dictator. Agent Durand’s army of ghosts, aided by the horrified ancestors of the enemy, phased through walls of secret bunkers until they located their quarry. They bewildered the guards, letting Agent Durand slip past to set the room ablaze. The dictator clutched his throat. An underling scribbled his likeness, too sloppily, too late. Hordes of jack boots pounded down the halls and burst through the spectral mist toward Agent Durand. With no escape, he inhaled the fumes of melting paints, smiled, and prepared to follow his ghosts to his next life.

Karly Foland is a writer of speculative short fiction from Omaha, NE, USA, who has spent over a decade living in Africa, Asia, and Europe. She lives with her husband, daughter, and the two cats they rescued from the streets of Rabat. Her work has appeared in print and online and can be found on karlyfoland.com.