Jack was an Opter, Jack was a Scryer, Jack was plainly once an Exorcist, but now Jack was a Saviour of Ghosts, indeed, Jack had been a Hunter as well as a Finder of Ghosts, and, moreover, Jack was, as some said, a Ghost himself, making this developing career easier as an unstemmed flow more unstoppable than the thrusting thermals of air that his activities engendered under the auspices of climate change. Anne, meantime, was Jack’s familiar, not a cat, not a shadowy third, as there was no shadowy second, indeed, Anne was a woman who had been a ghost of a dead person but one that had re-hardened into flesh, and now laced through with several lives, if perhaps not as many as nine, but she was a continuous thread through eyelets while maintaining a string theory that she tightened now and again within the sewn leathery appearance her acquired skin was said to have grown into, since changing from ghost particles into guts and garters. She was now air flows with G strings woven through them, as a complement to Jack’s more tenuous skills of insidious occultation.
Their first subject was a near neighbour called Shona, who had been a living retreat, a sleep-walking hermitage as a shell of what she once was. Her face scarred and livid, with nicks that Jack could ‘read’ as a Scryer Supreme. Once invited in, Jack helped diminish the souls of Shona’s shoes that now seemed to haunt Shona’s apartment, because when she had been a socialite she had spent all her money on fancy footwear, fashionable in their era and often high-heeled, as well as various types of walking boots and they had now silently decayed in her wardrobe, but their souls had escaped along with strings of ectoplasm laced through their virtual eyelets. Anne — being a ghost-insider, as it were, while Jack, after all, had never been a ghost himself, despite masquerading in certain circumstances of surveillance as a ghost — advised against utter upfront confrontation with these ghosts that Jack hoped to Optimise rather than Exorcise, but to snip, at strategic points, the laces that bolstered them — such a snipping being a mere means of ‘holding horses’, ‘breaking and taming unruly pigs’, as it were, rather than outright war with them.
Shona faded into the background as Jack proceeded to curate all manner of scissor devices on the floor of her apartment, with Anne looking on facetiously from the open doorway to the hall that linked Shona’s apartment to Jack and Anne’s own. A preparation for whatever the night would bring. Arches and aches, and several false starts. Tongues and levers. Gales of laughter, Nobody knew when the task had been completed, other than the tags and tassels of grey matter that littered Shona’s carpet. And hardened souls now with skid-proof ridges in shapes of more than just a cubic design. As if the once discardable boxes were the items for sale and the shoes were now used as wrapping to contain these boxes.
Jack and Anne returned to their own apartment, sure they had been successful in Optimisation of what once had been Intimidation by shoestrings without their leathery bodies. But Shona, freshly shod, was not so sure, as she shed other shoes more like new-born than anything that had been fully tamed. She superstitiously resisted making any predictable joke about virtual re-booting, though.
The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews 
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