E-Book, Englisch, Band 3, 501 Seiten
Reihe: Of Words
Paone / Gardiner / Vogel A Haunting of Words
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9979485-1-6
Verlag: Scout Media
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
30 Short Stories
E-Book, Englisch, Band 3, 501 Seiten
Reihe: Of Words
ISBN: 978-0-9979485-1-6
Verlag: Scout Media
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
From Scout Media comes A Haunting of Words-the third volume in an ongoing short story anthology series featuring authors from all over the world.
In this installation, the reader will experience a multi-genre journey beyond traditional haunts; from comedy, to drama, fantasy, romance, and horror, these stories put eclectic spins on the every-day ghost tale. Whether you are running from the ghost of a vengeful mother, falling in love with an apparition, touring with a deceased famous musician, saving a newborn from a possessed crib, or having a specter cat as a sidekick, these stories of hauntings and apparitions will warm your heart, send shivers down your spine, and tickle your funny bone.
Whether to be enlightened, entertained, or momentarily caught up in another world, these selections convey the true spirit of the short story.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
I watch you from the walls, and I see your pretty life playing out like a shadow show. I watch you whenever I can because I have nothing else that I can do. I’m sorry if I scare you, I don’t mean to. If I could, I would be part of your life, and I would learn to love you. I speak this to each of you who have lived in my house, to all those I have tried to love, and lost. Time doesn’t move the same for me as it does for you, although each moment for me is honey-sweet or bitter with my own mistakes. I’ve had a long time to think. When I was living in this old house, I knew every creak of each board of the floors that I scrubbed gray, cleaning on my hands and knees. They walk across the floors, and I try to stave off the deep anger that I feel when I see how little they care for the planks that came from living trees, that were carefully milled and installed by my father, still so rough they gave me splinters. In those days, there were no mops on sticks. Now I see lazy cleaners putting rags on sticks and smearing the filth around, then they say they have cleaned the floor. Not only have they not cleaned the floor, but by being haphazard in their ways, they show a disrespect for what had once been towering trees that danced in the wind. They had lived and died as summer turned to autumn turned to winter and then, like a miracle, they were reborn each spring with infant buds. The same could not be said for me. I aged and my life turned into the grays of a winter sky, and spring never came to renew me. My sister and I were only a few years apart: pretty Alice who could do no wrong and me, the elder, the spinster. My name is Elizabeth. The difference between us was that she was sugar that melted away and vanished in death, leaving nothing of herself behind. Meanwhile, I was, and am, a salmon bone that stuck in the throat of death and refused to leave anything behind and move on to wherever those fragrant blossoms who move on go. Beautiful Alice, who had married Lawrence, the boy two years younger than me, who had thought I was an old lady when I was eighteen and he was sixteen. How I had loved him, his ochre eyes and his curly dark blond hair that fell into those same earth-toned eyes. I thought about the color of ochre his eyes might be; it’s a family of tones and in some lights, they shone like sienna and others—like ferrous ochre. I thought about his colors while scrubbing the floors even after their wedding. Pretty Alice with her smiling children. She never grew old, she only dimmed her light, and I tended her until her light dimmed and then went out. There was no horror of death in her. It wasn’t violent or disgusting anymore than a flower dying for want of water is anything but a sorrow rather than a visceral showing. I thought Lawrence would marry me after her death. He cried on my shoulder like a little boy, and Alice’s son held my hand while I held her infant daughter in my arms, and they lowered her into the rain-soaked earth. Earth the colors of ochre. Sienna, ochre, umber—the ground was colored like layers of cake as they laid my beloved sister to rest. I envied her ability to rest when I must go ever on, but still I thought of Lawrence and how he needed me and how I needed him. Alice and Lawrence had moved back to the family home when I was twenty-three. Alice had married Lawrence at the respectable age of seventeen, only a few days after Lawrence had turned eighteen. I was twenty, and after Alice married, everyone whispered behind their hands that I would never marry. They were right, but the ones who said I would never know the embrace of a man were wrong. My parents’ deaths, sudden and brutal, were the catalyst that had brought Lawrence and Alice back home. It was a big old house that cried out for a family. The gray boards chattered merrily to the sound of the children’s feet. The boards had ceased to be trees a long time ago, they had ceased to feel the wind blowing on their hardened skin or the rain caressing their cheeks. Their leaves caught the raindrops, and the old roots, gray under the earth like worms or the dead boards or my dress, were the only reminder to them that they were alive. Then, like a girl who realizes all at once that her dreams will never be realized, the trees were cut down and crashed to the earth, their branches broken under their fall and sap leaking from their wounds. They were fed into the board planer and laid out by my father while I watched the wonder of something built where once there had been nothing. When my mother taught me how to scour the boards with damp sand and then wash the boards, oil and repeat—something I would do for the rest of my life—I had taken to the task with joy. I didn’t notice how the sand roughened my hands, even as it smoothed the boards, or how my dresses slowly merged to a uniform gray that blended with the aging planks. “I don’t know why you do that every day,” Alice said. She was leaning on the doorjamb, flowers entwined in her blonde hair and pulled back in a crown of braids. Golds and pinks were the colors that surrounded her the way I was shrouded in gray and Lawrence always the colors of the earth. “To keep it clean. Doesn’t it look lovely?” I answered, my mind thinking cross, petty thoughts I would never speak. Brassy-colored hair, I said internally, instead of Golden tresses, as was only fair, proper, and true. “It looks clean,” she offered. I sniffed. “You don’t get splinters in your delicate, pink feet anymore. I should think you’d be happy.” “Beth—” She knelt beside me, careful to lift the hem of the white lace that trimmed the rose pink of her dress from the floor. “—there’s more to life than the floors and the gardens and the dishes.” “I know that. There is needlework, quilting, embroidery—” She had been fifteen then, and I still dreamed that Lawrence would ask me to marry him. I was seventeen, but my birthday was only a few weeks away. “Have you thought about a husband?” “Of course I have. You’ve seen my hope chest,” I said proudly. I wished she would stop talking to me. I wanted to get the floors done so I could check on the garden and then get in to work on some squares for my new quilt before the bugs started to come out for the evening. “There’s a dance tomorrow. I’m going to ask Father if I can go. You could ask to come too. Put away your gray dress and put on something pretty.” She brushed a loose dark hair out of my eyes. “You’re so beautiful, Beth, but you insist on being so plain.” She had asked Father to go, and he had let her. She had asked for us both to go but I refused. I was tired, and my back was sore. I had only a few more squares to finish before I could begin the edging of my Bachelor’s Despair quilt. I had anguished over the design and saved for the fabric to make it perfect. What man could resist a woman clever enough to make a flawless, complex quilt such as the Bachelor’s Despair? That night Alice and Lawrence danced together while I sat at home and sewed. The charcoal-colored seams at the edge were thick where the layers of fabric gathered together to make the border with the crimson edging, and I pushed the needle hard into the fleshy pad of my index finger. A large drop of blood dripped like a ruby onto the virgin-white central square of the fine quilt I had made for my hope chest. I knew then that I had made a mistake. It was not for Lawrence to despair for me, it was I to despair for all. The only color I had put into my quilt was blood red and blue, all the rest was grays, whites, charcoals, and black. It was the last quilt that I made for my overflowing hope chest, although not by far the last quilt I would make. When the nights are right and the realm between your world and mine is particularly thin, I can leave the attic door at the top of the stairs open and hope that someone from the pretty world of life will follow me and look at my hope chest with the specter of me. Few of them follow me. Most curse the wind or the foundation of the old house that makes doors open and slam with my humors. The ones who come, and the very few who open the chest, find a box of rags. The Bachelor’s Despair is now faded all to grays, like the wood, like my dress. They are eaten by moths, despite the cedar the chest is made of, and fall to pieces like forgotten dreams in the hands of the living. Why do I keep showing them to the living? What insanity besets we, who are dead, to repeat the same actions while failing again and again? After Alice died, Lawrence came to me for comfort. He was no bachelor; he was, in fact, a widower, and there is a different quilt that one makes for a widower. He came to me, first in the garden, and then in the kitchen, and finally in the sterile sanctity of my maiden’s bed. I spilled blood again, this time on my white sheets. The quilt that covered my twin bed was a simple Roman Cross. I had made it from one of my old dresses and two of Alice’s, so her gold and pink brightened my room like a gust of wind in a stale attic. I didn’t mind the spilled blood or how quickly Lawrence fell asleep. I traced out the Roman Cross with my fingers, the dusty rose satin soft under my coarse finger tips. When I woke in the morning, somewhat later than usual I confess, Lawrence was gone. He...
