Short Stories
I wrote a few short stories that I would like you to read.
Story 1. Ghosting
Story 2. The Urn
Story 3. You’re A Napkin
Ghosting
Quinn Kingston
Jake held the phone with his left hand and tightly gripped the book he hid under his hoodie. The book terrified him in a mystical good kind of way.
“This book.” Jake whispered “It belongs to a ghost in Hunter Hollow Grave.” Jake was worried his mom was listening in on the phone call with Timothy.
“How did you get it?” Timothy was talking with a loud voice. “Speak up more, I can’t really hear you.”
“I found it.” Jake whispered much louder this time. “Where I found it is just bad.” Jake stopped himself. “I’m going to have to tell you in person.” He felt himself start to worry. A cold chill ran down his spine while he had flashes of how he stole the book.
“Does the book have any real practical sorcery or is it just a bunch of hocus pocus?”
Jake did not reply. Not wanting to speak any further about it, instead he shook his head, hoping the memory would leave.
“Listen to me Tim, drop the talk about the book for now.” Jake hung the phone up. The phone cords dangled scratching along the kitchen wall.
Gracie had asked Jake to go with her to the graveyard to visit her mum’s grave. Gracie’s mum had been like a second mother to Jake. She would always tell Jake to call her his auntie. He missed her dearly. It happened to be her mum’s birthday and Jake wanted to show his support. At the graveyard Jake decided to give Gracie some time alone with her mum. Gracie was trying to hide her tears and Jake felt awkward, pretending not to look her way. He told her just to call out for him whenever, then he walked off a little ways around the graveyard.
He saw Mr. Whitlock, the grave tender, walked out from behind a corner of the graveyard.
“Good day.” Mr. Whitlock said as he passed Jake. When Mr. Whitlock was out of sight, Jake followed the trail leading behind a clearing of tall oak trees. The end of the trail had a little wooden shack hidden by overgrown grass and brush. From the street, no one would have known there was a little house in the cemetery.
Drawn by curiosity, Jake had gone in, wondering if Mr. Whitlock lived in the house. The interior of the house was dark and musky. The house looked to be bigger inside. The curtains were black out and had ostrich feathers hanging off them. The house smelt like something had rotted inside. He saw a dead bird lying in a bird cage that hung above the covered window. He walked around the house, picking up objects and replacing them until he stumbled upon a book, half hidden under old newspapers. He bent down and picked it up, admiring it.
It was made of dark wood and had engravings all around it. He was about to open it when he heard footsteps outside. He immediately hid the book in his hoodie and scrammed to hide behind one of the foul-smelling curtains. Mr. Whitlock stepped in holding another bird by its legs, he carried it into another room. The bird was chirping loudly, trying to get away. Jake made a run for the door. Quickly he made his way back to Gracie clenching the heavy book.
Gracie stood up and swung her backpack around her shoulder. With tears in her eyes she looked ready to leave.
“Stop!” Mr. Whitlock yelled from behind them, halting. He turned around and the grave tender was watching them with raging eyes. He was wearing a black robe and his hands were covered in mud like he had been digging and he was heading right to them. He looked disheveled, coupled with the dark circles around his eyes like he hadn’t been getting enough sleep. He saw how Jake was staring at him and whispered, “Nightmares”.
Jake held the book under his hoodie, pressing it hard against his belly.
“Please, don’t go with the book. It belongs to a ghost.” Mr. Whitlock took a few heavy breaths. “Hunter Hollow has ghosts, and this book belongs to one of them. It brings bad luck. The book it’s bad.” Jake and Gracie stared at the man as though he was crazy.
“I’m trying to purge the book. Please don’t go with it”, he begged.
“Let’s get out of here.” Gracie said. “Come on, let’s go!” They both started running. Then Mr. Whitlock smiled as he walked briskly past the graves and into the woods, heading home.
When Gracie and Jake got to the park, they both went separate ways home. Jake started to feel sick. He felt the book making his stomach hurt. His heart suddenly felt heavy, and his eyes closed.
*
He sat down on the curb across the street from a playground near his home. He watched a group of children playing while he caught his breath. Suddenly he saw a dark shadow following one of the kids. It was a shadow figure shaped like an adult. He stared with disbelief thinking his eyes were playing tricks on him.
When one of the boys got on the slide, the shadow person rushed into him. The boy then jumped off the swing, landing on his head and breaking his neck. The boy started screaming and crying in pain. Jake immediately exhaled and opened his eyes wider, trying to understand what he just saw when he looked forward and saw another little boy leaping off the slide and breaking his neck in the same manner. It looked as if the kid did it on purpose. Like he was trying to kill himself.
Fear gripped his heart, and Jake began to shiver. He didn’t understand what had just happened, but he was scared. While trying to wrap his head around what he saw, his breath hitched, and his eyes closed again. He had two visionary thoughts at the very same time. First, the blood splattering all over the slide. He could hear the one boy still screaming in misery. The other boy, he could not hear him anymore. Maybe the boy was unconscious or unfortunately dead.
Second, he saw himself sitting on his bed facing a wall in his room. He couldn’t see clearly what was written on the wall but he saw the black smoke again and this time, it went in through his nose, choking him. The shadow man looked like a cloud of smoke. And this time, when he opened his eyes, he knew the book was bad. He stood up and walked away from the curb. He walked to the nearest bin and dumped it in. Scared for his life he hurried home.
When he got home, he went upstairs to his room, but when he opened the door, he thought about the book. He was utterly terrified, but he wanted the book. He couldn’t fathom why. He desperately wanted the book back. He ran down the stairs hoping the book would still be in the bin.
“Where are you going?” Jake’s mum asked. Jake ignored her slamming the front door behind him.
He didn’t have to run far. The Trash can was just down the street from his house. He climbed up and jumped in, on a pile of trash. The book was right in front of him. He held up the book and opened it flipping through its pages. He started hearing harsh whispers all around him. It didn’t bother him, he just wanted to keep the book for himself.
He saw a lot of strange shadow creatures surrounding him, floating around him in circles like crows in the sky and he could still hear the whispers. Faintly, he heard Mr. Whitlock’s voice yelling, “It’s cursed!”
He started to scream. He closed the book and held it tight as he ran home. He opened the front door and heard the phone ringing. Quickly he went into the kitchen to answer the phone. It was his best friend Timothy calling.
A few days had gone by since Jake stolen the book. Timothy had visited to borrow a book from him for a book report he had put off until the last minute. Seeing Jake sleeping on his bed, Timothy went to take what he came for when he saw the book with the engravings. He had gotten fascinated by it and brought it home, with plans on returning it the next day.
Jake was surprised when he got a call from Timothy, asking where he had found the book. When Jake rushed to the drawer where he kept the book hidden, he found the book no longer there.
“Where did you find it?” Tim pressed on, pulling him out of his memories while he eagerly held the phone tightly to his ear.
Jake breathed quietly as though he shouldn’t be talking about such secretive, and sensitive things. He wanted to tell Timothy about the kids on the playground. His cold hands shook, and he wiped a sweat that ran down his temple. “Listen, Tim. I’ll explain everything when we meet. Please stay off the book; I feel it’s cursed. I know factually it is cursed’’ Jake demanded like a crazy man.
“No, Jake, please.” Timothy didn’t want to waste time wondering where the book really came from. “Tell me where you found this?” The book was open lying on the kitchen counter in front of him.
“I can’t. We need one hundred percent privacy.”
“Then stay by the phone.” Timothy turned another page. “Jake, please just quietly whisper where you found it so I don’t have to keep calling you all night long.” Jake ignored him, ending the phone call. Timothy hung the phone up on the hook, bothered. He read the current page title. “GHOSTING” – From your body to the heavens and hell or anyplace on earth your heart desires.
He wanted the writing to be a reliable source because the idea of ghosting stroke Timothy’s curiosity. He suddenly wanted more than anything to do exactly what he continued to read. He wanted to travel from his body to Florida’s beach in mind and soul. He wanted to go to Alaska, or Japan. He thought about going to some place crazy that no man had ever gone before. He thought about the center of the earth, the core. Then he wondered if he could even go to the moon.
He picked up the book from the kitchen counter and headed down to the basement. Down in his basement bedroom, he stared at the cover, fascinated by its engravings. It had an engraving of a goat, standing on its hind legs, with really twisted horns. Something about how the goat looked made him uneasy, but he waved it off. He locked the bedroom door and began. He closed the window curtains, and turned off the light. With a match, he lit a candle that hardly brightened the room, leaving him reading out loud in the darkness.
Timothy focused hard on meditation with relaxation. His eyelids were closed tight.
Suddenly, he felt cold as snow; the window curtains flew crazily while a harsh wind blew into the room, rattling things and papers into the air and blowing out the candlelight. Timothy didn’t seem fazed by the change in the atmosphere as his eyes remained closed in total concentration. While he repeatedly muttered the spells he saw in the book, the temperature began to rise until it became too hot in the room. His skin became wet and clammy, like his skin was melting off his body. Then he couldn’t feel anything. He felt nothing.
Timothy felt nothing.
He opened his eyes with thoughts of the beach.
“What the…” Tim couldn’t believe what he could see. “Wow.” He said out loud. Timothy, Mind with soul whether the body was less in Florida. He was looking at the beach from above the water, in the sky. It was so peaceful and beautiful. The sun was setting and halfway hidden. He floated over the calm water from one end to the other, enjoying the view and the quietness. The beach in Florida was a place he had always wanted to visit, and he was happy to have made it there. He made a mental note to see more often with his newfound power, but for the time being, he wanted to explore. He looked out into the pink and redness, thinking of where he wanted to travel next. He thought of his best friend, Jake. With a blink of an eye, he was in Jake’s bedroom, but something seemed odd. Jake sat cross-legged on his bed, staring strangely. Staring without blinking at the wall ahead of him like someone was in the room. For some reason, Timothy was getting a lot of feelings from Jake, and the most dominant was fear.
“Jake!” Timothy called, but Jake couldn’t hear him. He found it strange that Jake was still looking at the wall without blinking, so he looked closely at the border, and suddenly, it was as though someone had written in red paint. Words. He wondered if it was blood as it was still wet and dripping slowly from the wall.
His eyes widened when he read what was written, and his heartbeat accelerated.
“TIME TO DIE”.
He turned sharply towards Jake and noticed that Jake had started rocking himself on the bed, his arms wound tightly around his body. The rim of his eyes was bright red, and he seemed to be shivering. Then suddenly, he screamed and held his hands up to his head. While Timothy watched in absolute terror as his best friend called, Jake fell to the floor as though someone knocked him off the bed, and he began thrashing around on the floor, holding his neck. It felt like he was being choked, and he started spitting blood from his mouth while jerking uncontrollably. Timothy desperately wanted to help, but he couldn’t move. He hovered above his best friend watching him in pure agony.
*
Timothy didn’t know what to do as he waited helplessly in his ghost form. How can I help Jake, he thought. He needed to return to his body, so he thought about home and his bedroom.
He was back in his bedroom within seconds. He was gliding slowly above his wrinkled body that remained on his bed. He looked at his body confused. He could see himself and it looked as though he was passed out, no longer breathing. Something felt wrong. Timothy saw something nightmarish in his bedroom’s darkness with him.
In the flicker of candlelight, he could see someone hiding in the shadow of his closet. A shadow monster. It scared him more than anything had before.
“How do I get back in?” Timothy wondered, hovering frantically above his body. He tried to get in, but something kept blocking him out. It felt as though his body no longer belonged to him. Timothy was shifting slowly upwards away from his corpse-like body. Slowly.
Suddenly, the shadow stepped out of his closet. The monster looked up at him. It was faceless but Timothy could feel him looking directly into his eyes.
It looked like a floating black smoke with a form, a distorted form. It headed straight for Timothy’s body, floating slowly towards the bed like it had all the time in the world.
“Help!” Timothy screamed with all his strength. The ghoul began creeping closer to Timothy’s body, hungry for life. Now gliding higher above the basement bedroom, Timothy watched as the ghoul started to take over and poke through his body instead of devouring it. The deadly monster tore into his body from his mouth, making Timothy’s body jerk uncontrollably. Timothy kept screaming while watching helplessly as the strange creature crawled through his open mouth, morphing into him and becoming one with his flesh.
And worse still, he started floating higher, past his house, when his body came in contact with his house roof, he thought he was going to fall back down. But when he passed through the zink like it was nothing, he knew he had embarked on a journey of no return. He cried out to anyone who could hear him, but all that came back were echoes and regrets for touching the book.
The Urn
Quinn Kingston
It was a dreadful night. The kind of night one turns up the television to sound out the noise of the rain. Katie sat on the floor next to her father who rocked back and forth with anxiety. Football was boring to Katy but she watched trying to avoid her boredom. She listened to her father’s breathing.
Gordon would breathe harder when he was tired. She could hear the football game and a little rain on the windows behind her. The night had already been long. When the rocking chair would stop Katie thought her father had fallen asleep and she waited to change the channel until he had.
Picking up the remote control from Gordon’s arm rest, Katie moved about as slowly as she could. Quietly she got up on her knees and crept over just enough to peek at her father’s face. His eyes were closed and his face looked different. It was the sound of him snoring that she waited for.
She turned down the volume to listen. Gordon would normally breathe harder when he slept, sounding like the way a bear would breathe. Long heavy breaths like his lungs had given out while not awake.
Katie waited for him to breathe harder. She wondered what her mother was doing at this very moment. Before she could change the channel to see what else was on t.v. she had to be sure her father was asleep. The hand she held the remote with had her mother’s bracelet. The bracelet she tied to her wrist before disappearing for what felt like to Katie, forever.
She thought her mother had to be watching television right now, too. Like the movies and shows they would watch together before bedtime. Her mother had to be somewhere in another house, maybe in a neighborhood close by, watching something better than football. The commercial breaks were the only thing Katie paid any attention to until the heavy breathing started.
Katie knew her father finally fell asleep. She changed the channel with excitement. She wanted to find what channel her mother would be watching at this very minute. The antique roadshow was just a channel over. It was something her mother would often watch. Katie looked towards the fireplace. On top was the Urn that had not been there for very long. The Urn looked like it could easily be an antique for her mother to take to the show.
Katie thought about seeing her mother on the show holding up the antique Urn trying to find out what it was worth and being shocked when the value was more than expected. She wondered about what it was inside the urn. The question she had asked her father many times. She decided that she would ask him again in the morning before school.
Katie changed the channel again. This time she turned up the volume a little more. It would be a boring night if she couldn’t find anything worth watching. Katie flipped through the channels quickly this time. Stille nothing caught her attention. She put the remote on the ground and kept the t.v. on as she looked around at the corners in the room. All the plants in the room had died since her mother had run away. The rubber plant next to the bookshelf had leaves that turned brown. The peace lily on the side table had a white flower blooming from it but now the flower has crumpled up and what’s left is a brown, weed looking, stick poking from the dirt surrounded by dead leaves.
The plant hanging above the t.v. was called a chlorophytum comosum.Katie remembered her mother telling her the plant had a nickname. “The spider plant.” She could hear her mother’s voice in her head. Katie took another long look at the Urn. She wanted to know if it was really someone’s ashes inside of it.
Katie had never properly asked her mom where she was going. She figured her mom would be back home any day now. But the months had passed after Katie’s mom left, and every time she would ask Gordon where she went, or when she would be back home, he wouldn’t give her a real answer.
“Mom will be home next week.” Her father would say. Katie wanted to wake her father up and demand he tell her. First, where her mother had gone. Second, what was in the urn. Katie walked quietly to the window and looked at the neighbor’s house. The windows were all dark and people in all the houses were all sleeping by now.
“Soon it will be snowing.” Katie whispered to herself. It was cold outside and it was that time of year when all the leaves fell off the trees and made a mess of the neighborhood.
There wasn’t a couch in the living room, only her father’s rocking chair. Katie wondered if that was the reason her mom had left. She wondered if she was another reason her mom had gone. Tears filled her eyes as she got an idea.
Katie walked to the kitchen sink. She decided to wash a clean cup for when her father wakes up. Picking out a glass from the dirty dishes in the sink Katie started washing it. She rinsed out the cup a few times then filled it up with water and took a drink. She filled the glass back up and went into the living room. The sound of a commercial made it hard for her to hear her father breathing.
She put the glass on the side table next to his rocking chair and looked at her father. She gasped. His eyes looked like they were closed but they also looked like they were missing. His face had no eyes and where the eyes used to be, skin covered the area. It scared Katie. She stared at her father’s face for a good minute. The news was playing on the t.v. back behind her and she could hear it as she questioned what had happened to her father now.
Katie thought about how much time was left of the night. The clock on the wall said it was 7:00 but it did not have the correct time.
“That clock has never ticked right.” Her father had once told her. The clock on the stove read 19:00 in army time and it wasn’t made to the right time after it had been unplugged and plugged back in.
You’re A Napkin
By Quinn Kingston