Death - “Old Habits”
The ghosts’ current status is credited to mortality. The narrator recounts, “just the tiniest bit, and it’s making him shudder. Goose walking on his grave. I go and sit by Black Anchor’s head. I hope, for the umpteenth time, that I’ve passed through the security guard that killed her. I hope he can feel me doing so, even Maybe he’ll die in this mall too someday, and become a ghost. Have to look Black Anchor in the eye.” The narrator’s assertions imply that after death, human beings convert into ghosts. However, the ghosts cannot convert into human beings because existence is analogous to a one way traffic. The narrator’s elucidation underscores the association between lifelessness and ghosts.
Ghosts - “Old Habits”
Fundamentally, “Old Habits” sheds light on the events that could be ensuing in the ghosts’ lives. As the narrator spells out, “There’s a rumour among the mall ghosts; kind of an urban legend or maybe spectral legend that we whisper amongst ourselves when we’re telling each other stories to keep the boredom at bay. There was this guy, apparently, this ghost guy before my time, who got so stir-crazy that he yanked open one of the big glass doors that leads to the outside. He stepped into the blackness that is all we can see beyond the mall doors.” The mall ghosts reside in the mall, where they misplaced their lives. The ghosts engage in storytelling in the identical way that existing people do particularly at the hangout settings in the malls. The mall is the ghosts’ only habitat, so they are not acquainted with what supervenes in the world outside the ghost malls as it is a world that is overshadowed by darkness.
Brutality - “The Glass Bottle Trick”
Samuel is a vicious, sadistic being. Hopkinson illuminates, “This was how Samuel punished the ones who had tried to bring his babies into the world, his beautiful black babies. For each woman had had the muscled sac of her womb removed and placed on her belly, hacked open to reveal the purplish mass of her placenta. Beatrice knew that if she were to dissect the thawing tissue, she’d find a tiny foetus in each one. The dead women had been pregnant too.” Samuel’s inhumanity is credited to self-hatred and inferiority complex. Samuel abhors himself to the degree that he manslaughters women who are committed on making him a father. He murders them alongside the unborn children because he cannot bear to see a black child. The black child would discomfit him omnipresently about his blackness. What is more, after slaying the women, he does not entomb them fittingly. Samuel’s self-contempt is so concentrated that it increases his callousness.
