Settling In Gently by R.A.Davis

We just got back from a lovely midmorning stroll around the station. I was painting up some panels for my classroom (because what I should be doing is actually PLANNING my day-to-day instruction for the next 5 months but, nope. Acrylics. Boards. Single words. GOLD PAINT) and Rosie became hammering at door--- "Letʻs go! Letʻs go for a walk!" Big sister dressed herself and little sister-- both with matted hair and long dresses. Rosie has a giant plastic jewel tied on itchy-looking white yarn around her throat, and another length of string around her waist. She tucked her yellow plastic bow and arrows into her belt, and a dangerous-looking plastic tent stake. Maybe for cyborg vampires...? Maile was armed too-- a piece of tinkertoy construction with a snappy hinge. "Itʻs my bad-guy eater!" she said. She is into bad guys lately. Saying that she fights them! or that she IS a bad guy, especially if we are watching a scary show and she wants to keep her eyes open. ...

Just now Maile, 2,  turned to me, waved her pink magic wand at me, and said, "Bing! I bing you into a ghost." I hammed it up with a spooky: "Ooooohh!" But then my imagination clicked and hissed alive like a gas flame. Suddenly, to be bodiless. Ghost neurons firing along invisible electric paths through the compact air. The growing dread-- the permanence of your own corpse paling, cooling, coagulating. The urgency to somehow take it back, to undo the few tiny microseconds that clipped the umbilical chord between soul and body: the connection that can never be reknit. Not a fantasy. An inevitability. If something of me exists out of, in spite of, beyond my body, then that moment will happen. Bodies die. If there are souls, they don't. That knock-the-wind out of you shock, the splash into glacier water, the flayed shocked of conscious experience of death? If there are souls, that will happen. Maybe it will just be the last flickering spasms of cells climaxing w...