Story a Day

They gave her a one-minute head start. Heart beating quickly, she ran down the unfinished, splintering stairs, onto the city street. She spent too long deciding whether to turn left or right, and in that frozen moment she felt a cakey, dry shower cover her head and shoulders. She spluttered.

They had gone to the streetside window and opened a bag of flour above her head. Brushing off most of it, she chose left.

The city was a small one. No crowds to get lost in, no bustling marketplace where a small, flour-covered girl would go unnoticed. Her only hope was to duck into a building before her pursuers reached the street, and hope they would pass her by.

Thin, Disney-princess sandals slapping the pavement, she opened the first door that looked like a business and ducked inside. There was a tiny square foyer, with a staircase to her left, doors ahead and to the right, and three women standing anxiously tapping their feet. Piano music filtered into the foyer from other roms.

The women were staring at her. She muttered, “I’m waiting for my sister.”

“She’ll be out soon enough,” one of the tense mothers replied, and all three of them promptly ceased paying attention to the flour-covered girl.

Quietly, she sat on the stairs. A large window was between her and the street. The wood of the door behind her was vibrating with the notes of a Beethoven sonata. She peered out the large window into the street. A smarter girl might have ducked into a movie theater, bought a bus ticket, dyed her hair, dressed as a boy. But she watched the window instead. Sure enough, there were her captors, running gleefully down the street. They had everything but butterfly nets. She scrunched up against the stairwell wall, hoping there was enough shadow to hide her. The window was huge.

They stopped. One of them pointed at the ground, stooped to touch the sidewalk. He showed his finger to his partner, who nodded. The two of them looked slowly at the ground all around them. Then, horrified, she realized the flour trail went right up to the door of the piano conservatory. Creeping up the stairs, she went unnoticed, but when she opened the door, the dampened piano music became clear and sharp.

“Don’t go in there,” snapped one of the mothers. “Heidi’s playing in there.”

The girl went in anyway, hoping the small room would have other doors. Instead, she saw a girl about her age, in an expensive silk dress, playing a grand piano. A small man in Reeboks and a gray suit sat at a card table, adjudicating Heidi. There were no other exits: only two windows, one facing the street she had left and one on the opposite wall.

The judge and the pianist watched silently as her enemies entered the room, stately and otherworldly in their top hats. They watched silently as the child opened a window and climbed outside. They let her take her time, only getting close enough to see which way she ran when she landed on the pavement. Their faces were slightly green. The judge and little Heidi saw the men’s excitement grow and then taper into disappointment and disgust as they saw the girl hit the concrete, blood and flour and dust forming a cakey abstract painting beneath the tangled hair and rags.

“I just hate it,” the taller one said, as they exited the piano school and strolled back to headquarters, “when they do the job before we get a chance.”

“Yes,” agreed the shorter one. “It takes all the sport out of it.” Into a Nokia cell phone, he spoke their address and gave a few short instructions. “Let’s have a drink,” he said to his partner.

“Marvelous.”

The ghost of the little girl decided to make sport out of the two of them. It was only fair. She found them in the bar, drinking brandy and discussing deer season. Quickly she hid in one of their hats. It was a comfortable place to hide. She thought she might make this last for a while.

image: rattyfied on flickr

Tina and Allen met in a Costco. She was there with a friend, thinking about buying huge bulk cases of toilet paper. He was working there.

Tina and Katie walked past the books and the cupcakes and the patio furniture and the craft supplies (she’d been clutching a scrap of yellow yarn that morning when she awoke).

“Can I help you with any yarn today?”

“No, thanks. I was just thinking.”

“That’s fine. I don’t work here. You just looked like you needed help.”

She looked at the man in the Costco uniform and smiled.

He would bring something over every night, and she would bring it back. They eventually settled on a little statue of a monkey.

They even got a cat.

image: kymineko on flickr

Allen Trail also died every night and returned to the world of the living every morning.

Every night, Allen brought something with him to bed: a dinner plate, a receipt for green beans, an address book. When he died at night, he brought the objects with him to the world of the dead. Each morning, the object he had brought to bed would be gone.

Needless to say, Allen was a little wary about having lovers. He even had to think very hard about getting a cat. What if the animal jumped onto his bed and was taken to the world of the dead?

Allen lived alone.

When he brought the address book across, he was distraught the next day. Would something happen to his friends and family? Would they get calls or letters from dead people?

“Mom,” he said, “Did you get any strange phone calls today?”

“No, Allen. Why? Have you been doing something illegal?”

He had to think about that question for a second.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

image: Rafa from Brazil on flickr

Tina Travers died every night when she went to bed. She came back to life every morning.

Every morning, she brought something back with her. Sometimes it was a paperclip, or a bit of string or yarn. Once it was a baby bottle. She held the baby bottle close to her eyes, looking through it. She wondered if she’d taken it from a dead baby, and what a dead baby would be drinking.

She never had any memory of being given the things, or of happening upon them, but she always had something in her hand when she woke up.

She kept the things from the world of the dead in a shoebox. There soon got to be too many of them. She started using a curio cabinet that had been sitting empty in her sitting room.

The dead things all had some unexplainable flatness to them. They weren’t dirty, just somehow colorless, like if you looked away they would disappear.

She started giving them away as gifts to her friends. That worked all right with the dartboards and scarves, but no one wanted the bits of string.

She didn’t feel right giving the baby bottle to anyone.

image: Maproom Systems on flickr

All the pieces of toast got up and walked across the counter. So we built a moat of jam and waited for them all to fall in.

Angela dug a hole. She dropped a blueberry pie in the hole. Fifty years later, she had a giant pie tree.

The pies were tasty, especially warm with ice cream. But what a mess to clean up. You think plum trees are bad.

Robert was her next door neighbor. He dug a hole and dropped in a Ding Dong. He watered the Ding Dong every day.

Nothing happened. Robert thought maybe he shouldn’t have unwrapped it. But that’s ridiculous. Ding Dongs just don’t grow on trees.

Maggie had come to the concert alone. It was some local, Trail-of-Dead-inspired, spacey rock band. The venue’s poor acoustics turned the reverberating guitar notes into oatmeal. She toed and heeled in her eighteen-hole boots. A boy with shaggy, flyaway hair and a hoody, some emo band’s patches on the sleeves, started to dance next to her, and then soon enough with her. She let him.

Then the boy reached out and touched her hand, and they both shrank. They got smaller and smaller, until they were the size of two tubes of Chapstick. Read the rest of this entry »

Carly was six when her aunt died. That meant Carly’s aunt was her first dead person.

The wake was well-attended, about a hundred people in a church. Carly and her parents walked in, and all they saw were the backs of heads, gray and black and blonde, black-hatted and bare and bald. Carly didn’t know most of the heads, or the faces in front of them.

Carly’s dead aunt was her father’s brother’s wife. Carly and her parents barely knew her, but it was obvious that they had to attend. Read the rest of this entry »