A Little Ghost Story

It's Halloween and while I feel dead, I’m not quite there (yet). The past two weeks of “vacation” from the dayjob consisted of the Viable Paradise Writing Workshop (VPXX represent!) followed almost immediately by the World Fantasy Convention, to say nothing about all the requisite travel. So given the holiday and my current state, how about I share an old ghost story...

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Sitting in the kitchen, staring out the patio door into the darkness past the deck, I’m reminded of the story of my grandmother, one of many things my mother handed down to me:

At midnight, every night for months, my Lola dressed in her finest Spanish gown, went out on to her front porch, and screamed for her husband to come home. No one tried to stop her. See, her generation wasn’t unfamiliar with visits from the dead. A young woman calling out into the humid, Philippine night, was pitiable, but not beyond the bounds of reason. My grandmother’s family and townmates shrugged it off, until the night the screaming stopped after only a few moments. They rushed outside, afraid she’d hurt herself, or worse. Instead, they found her standing on the porch, smiling.

“He heard me,” Lola told them. “He came home.”

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“Life After Wartime” by Don Pizarro is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License