I entered the NYC Midnight Microfiction contest again this year. I skipped last year, but did surprisingly well the year before. My assignment this time was in the genre of ghost story, using the activity of speaking into a microphone, and including the word save. I wrote a story and got it submitted in time, but I don’t think it was very good, and the others who read it agreed. Ghost stories aren’t really my thing, and this one-day writing assignment could not have fallen on a worse day. My daughter and her husband have been staying with us for a couple weeks, as his mother was terminally ill. She, of course, died the morning I had to write about the undead, which I found suddenly inappropriate, although I never had him read the story and he never offered to. Then the dryer died, although I did nothing to shield its feelings from my story, and its ghost has not been a problem yet, it was a distraction as well. So there are my alibis, excuses, complaints for another year. I’ll find out what the judges think in a month or so. Here it is, in all its mediocrity.
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Moving On
I crossed the unkempt lawn and squeezed my way through the plywood-covered doorway, into the boarded up house. I fumbled for a button on my voice recorder and whispered into the microphone, “In grandma’s house, very dark.”
My heart was pounding as I felt my way to the hallway and turned left toward the room she had died in. “Hey grandma, just you and me, no more renters to scare.” I opened the bathroom door. In the deep gloom I could see the room was destroyed, and it reeked of mold.
Suddenly, there was an icy breath on my neck and I panicked and jumped, hitting my back awkwardly on the wall. The grey outline of an old woman stood before me, “They’re coming to take this away,” she said. Her voice was soft, and I wasn’t sure if I was hearing her or the words were simply appearing in my mind.
It took a few seconds to compose myself before I stammered breathlessly “You weren’t afraid to die, why didn’t you move on?”
“This is my home.”
My knees trembled from the adrenaline. “Yes, but it’s over. It’s time for you to accept that you’re dead. Even the house can’t be saved. Go find family, be at peace.”
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There is a certain feeling of this being a nearly-true story, as I have considered going into my grandparents’ boarded up old house and having this conversation with my grandma’s ghost, who evidently is still hanging around. One of the criticisms I got on my story is that it’s too personal. Might be true.
Back in the summer we went to Kamloops to hang out with the kids for a weekend. On the way up we stopped in Merritt for lunch with our daughter and her son. The waitress brought the cute little three and a half year old a Darth Vader pencil case to play with, which I of course stole from him and squirreled away in the Death Star, aka my car. Don’t worry, he had other toys to keep him amused and didn’t miss it. He doesn’t read or write yet, so the joys of using Galactic Empire office supplies was going to waste on him for now.
I am doing another course for work now. It is a course on water works (yawwwn…) that I have to answer questions and mail them back to Sacramento, California. The fine people at California State University will never guess that the little pencil marks on the sheet are from Darth’s pencil! Mwahaha!
Fall kind of sucks sometimes. It is dark, it has been raining for days on end, and everyone is busy busy busy. Oh, and I cooked chicken thighs tonight using a cajun spice I purchased at the dollar store, and it just tasted like salt. Not really fall-related, but still it’s a cautionary tale for anyone buying bargain spices.
Until next time, stay safe, warm and dry. Time is whizzing by, so in no time it will be spring again and we can go outside and enjoy the world.