If Only

 

If only there had been more time.

Everyone told her it wouldn’t have made a difference. Nothing would have changed the outcome.

But it haunted her every day and took over her dreams every night.

She couldn’t eat and was consumed by the guilt of it.

Eventually, she had to quit her job and spent all of her time locked in her apartment with the drapes closed and the lights off.

Calls went unanswered and mail was returned “Recipient unknown”. It was very sad, but people had their own lives and routines and pretty soon she was all but forgotten.

Yellow

 

People always said, “Yellow is such a happy color!” and he’d just turn away.

They were commenting on the flowers in his yard; hundreds of  daffodils and lilies and roses and daisies- all yellow.

His wife had planted them, adding more and more every year, she said because yellow made her happy.

He wanted to pull them out, poison them, set them on fire, but he couldn’t do it.

Because of her. Because she loved them.

He’d sat by her bedside as the liver failure turned her lovely skin sickly yellow and eventually killed her.

He hated the color yellow.

Lamp

 

The lamp was ugly even for that vintage.

Made of ceramic, in the shape of a pyramid of fruit, it was glazed a shiny iridescent pink. Its shade was fringed, of course.

She was looking for a makers’ mark, when she saw the note tucked inside, and she unfolded it.

The note was in spidery handwriting and notated the wedding date of the couple who had received it. It also included their birth and death dates, as well as the birth and death dates of the relatives who got it after the original couple died.

Did the lamp kill them?

Fifteen Minutes

 

He turned the corner, then stopped.

Confused, he looked up at the street signs to verify that this was his street, his block, where his house was.

There was a neat row of houses on either side of the street, but he didn’t recognize any of them.

He walked up and down the block, slowly, trying to find something familiar, but all the houses and their neat yards and cars in the driveways were strange. Completely normal, but strange to him. He’d never seen any of it.

“What the fuck” he whispered to himself. He’d only been gone fifteen minutes.

Unhinged

 

 Gingerly, she checked her jaw, sliding it left, then right.

She told herself every time to act scared, lower her head, but she never did. Her tilted up chin was just too tempting a target for his anger.

It was a miracle that she still had all her teeth.

Over time, her jaws started popping, becoming more loose with every blow.

One night it finally happened, and she smiled to herself.

He never saw the blow from behind coming, and the sledgehammer made a satisfying sound- like smashing a frozen watermelon.

Her jaws unhinged like a snake, and he disappeared.

Cabin

 

The faded little cabin perched on the shores of a peaceful lake. Even the road to the cabin was peaceful; the honey-colored sand of central Wisconsin.

It was surrounded by planted pine forests, where nothing grew under the trees, and the fallen needles were deep and soft, muffling all noise save the whistling wind through the pine branches high above.  

An old rowboat swayed next to the wooden pier, waiting for children and old men and their fishing poles.

Summer smelled of lake water, earthworms, and hot pine sap, and sounded like a creaky hand pump, surly chipmunks, and crickets.

 

House

 

She’d spent hundreds of hours inside the grand old house as a child, and now it was for sale.  She asked the realtor why it’d been on the market almost yearly since the owner died and the realtor laughed nervously and said everyone who tried to live there swore it was haunted.

“I’ll take it” she told the realtor, before even walking through it.

The realtor asked if she was sure, and she smiled and said, “Yes. It’s OK. I know the ghost.”

Slowly, the house was restored to its original façade and décor.

And they lived happily ever after.