He was the kind of person I loathed. Always looking both ways before crossing the street. Always checking his pockets before leaving the house. Always weighing the pros and cons of every single action before he took it, whether it was as trivial as saying hello to someone or as important as whether to sign on the dotted line for another thirty-k in credit.
Of course, I suppose his caution, extreme or not, had paid off. After all, he was still alive. More than I could say for myself. But that worked for me. It meant he hadn’t put many miles on the meat-suit, meant everything in his life was just so and able to withstand a bit of a shake up.
The perfect body for me… once he was out of it, of course.
It had taken me a decade to learn how to do it, a decade of squeezing the spiritual slime that made up my “body” after I died into various things. First objects, progressively smaller. Then animals, progressively larger. I’ve seen some shit, man. Trust me, testing out the ability to possess objects is an art best practiced somewhere other than a sadist’s house. The things they came up with… but that doesn’t matter, now.
What matters now is that I’ve crammed myself into a quarter, that is jingling lightly in the pocket of one Thurston Brown. A quarter that knows how to scootch to the side when it looks like it might be spent or shoved into a turnstile. A quarter that’s sentient, and has a finger poking into Thurston’s overly-ordered mind, picking through it the way a bored housewife picks through old issues of Vogue while waiting for a gynecological exam.
I’m looking for the weak points, you see. That’s the key. Almost everyone alive has got a little chink in their armor somewhere, some mental void that sums up all the things they fear and refuse to confront. A little blind spot, if you will. If I can get into that blind spot, then I’m in like flint. All I have to do from there is start sending little pulses of fear into the rest of his brain from there, shutting down his circuits like a bank of lights in an old warehouse.
Sooner or later, that leaves the warehouse empty. But it won’t be completely empty. I’ll be there, waiting to take over and turn all the lights back on, and he’ll be trapped in the blind spot, nothing more than a faint voice in the back of my head.
I’ll be alive again, piloting the vessel that used to be Thurston Brown into a brave new world of my own making.
I can’t wait.
Insomniac Nightmares 
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