Oil Smudges

This is no time for pranks . . .

George Wishing is the middle manager for an oil and gas service company's technology department. He has a proven track record of delivering the projects under his supervision with a minimum of trouble. However, an increase in tech burps during field trials as well as outright failures in jobs that rely on his department's creations are now leaving marks on his record and smears on his credibility.

Upper management wants someone's head . . .

When smudged fingerprints begin to appear on his office door, his monitor, and his desk, George suspects a malicious prank. Fastidious attention to detail comes with a price: George Wishing has an obsessive intolerance for blotches on either his record or his world. Who is responsible? The disrespectful clown on his team? Is it one or more members of the cleaning staff who smile at George without any real friendliness in their eyes? This is not play time. Upper management is looking for a sacrificial lamb, and George finds himself in the unenviable position of delivering one to them.

Is something else happening here?

As prints appear in increasingly unlikely places, George fears something unnatural is at work. When the faces of dead contractors appear in his periphery, he suspects the supernatural. Is George Wishing being haunted or are all these strange details merely figments of an unraveling mind stressed to the breaking point?

Oil Smudges is a 10,000 word novella of ghostly terror set in the high stakes corporate world of the oil and gas industry.