Part One

 The monster, had taken over the body of an overdressed and over botoxed heifer...the kind with the huge bubbies that look as if she had taped a couple of soccer balls to her chest. it glared balefully, then ripped itself out of the poor woman and flew in my direction. 

I spit at it and did not miss.  It hissed, shrank down into a wrinkled, white albino bat, and flapped off on leather wings that took it, whirling like a sick maple leaf, down the street and over the heads of the unwary lifers. 

I glanced at the woman, who looked as if she had just experienced the heartburn from hell, but still managed to recover to enough of a pale, clammy state to fake her way through her daily anorexic's special: lettuce and more lettuce.

Three of us came out of her body, giving a thumbs up. The monster was kept from laying any of it's deadly eggs.  We followed it, a group of us that had grown to twenty. 

Some of us were able to grab molecules and form into a presence that is visible to the lifers. I'm relatively new and had a terrible experience with that. Fortunately, only a single homeless paranoid schizophrenic saw the results, but he is still screaming about the "inside out person" at a hospital in New York city.

The old timers say that it's common for a newcomer to go for too much detail at first.

Most of us prefer to be our essence, which appears to us as a mere weight to the air, and to lifers as nothing at all but a brief thought.  

A debt collector made threats against a man's wife?  What kind of thugs are operating in that industry these days? Former mob enforcers? 

A man took his wife and little son out to the edge of a cliff, where they fell off the edge. He is in prison for life now, but it took years in order to prove the case. He also plotted to kill his own parents.  

A couple of soul eaters appeared, much to the monster's dismay. The monster hated soul eaters, even though they weren't that interested in itself. They were after a dead man who was standing next to his body on the sidewalk. Someone said that it was a heart attack. Someone else said that it was a stabbing. 

The spirit looked lost until it saw us and tried to call for help. But the Soul Eaters were on him like wolves, tearing his fragile presence into bits and swallowing them whole. The whole, terrible event took about five minutes, with the ravaged soul screaming in rage, filthy imprecations, and agony the entire time.

In India, five women were suspected of being witches, were stripped naked, dragged into the street, and were beaten up. They were rescued by the local police, according to the Hindustani Times. A witch doctor and four other women apparently instigated the attack. 

This was the third soul eating that I had witnessed, and it never got any easier to see.

We continued to pursue the monster.  It was now occupying the body of a homeless man in order to hide from us. 

...to be continued.