A Free Short Story - "Forever Clementine"

I thought I'd try something new and give away a short story I wrote for an anthology project back in 2013 or 2015--I forget. The anthology project was a horror anthology. I don't really write horror. I'd like to, but I find it so difficult. How do you scare someone on paper? It's not like you can easily do jump scares like in film. It has to be slower, more psychological. Stephen King is good at that. So is his son, Joe Hill.

This one is a ghost story. I hope you enjoy it.

Forever Clementine
Sean Patrick Little



Clementine liked to play with Abigail. They were the same age, roughly, and Abigail was a pretty thing, blonde and rosy-cheeked. Clementine was shy at first, unaware of how to act around this stranger, but Abi was friendly from the start. She invited Clemmy into her room and asked her to sit at the play table strewn with tiny, child-sized dishes. They would have tea poured from a fine China set that Abi’s father had bought in New York and pretend to eat biscuits and talk of things like kittens and toys they liked and what it was like at Abi’s school.

Abi and Clemmy were the best of friends, often talking in bed long after Abi was supposed to go to sleep. When Abi finally did sleep, Clemmy would watch over her, keeping the covers from shrugging off her shoulders and making sure Abi’s cat, Snowball, never jumped on her during the night, waking her.

On sunny days, Abi would play out in the yard and Clemmy would watch her from the window. Abi’s father hung a swing in the grand oak tree in the front yard. Clemmy remembered the old oak as smaller, healthier. Now it was large and skeletal, with as many dead branches as living ones. Abi would swing back and forth, sometimes so high that Clemmy thought she might leap off the swing and soar into the bedroom window. Abi always wanted Clemmy to come with her, to explore the woods with her, but Clemmy could never oblige.

More than anything, Clementine wanted to follow Abi, but she never could. She didn’t know why; she just couldn’t. Clem would wait for hours until Abi finally came back. Then, they would play with Abi’s dolls or take turns riding her rocking horse and pretending that they were cowboys.

Clementine loved Abigail, and she thought that Abigail loved her as well.

Abigail grew into a fine, beautiful young lady. As she grew, she no longer had time for the tea parties and pretend. She stopped talking to Clementine for the most part. Some nights, when Clementine was feeling bored and naughty, she might play hide-the-trinket with Abi, taking Abi’s favorite hairbrush and stowing it in her toy box or under her bed. On those days, Abi would comb over her room until she found the brush and then she’d smile and make a clucking noise with her tongue and say, “Oh, Clemmy.”

That always made Clemmy happy. She missed her friend.

When Abi grew even bigger, she stopped even thinking of Clementine, even when Clemmy hid her brush. Abi spent hours in her room pouring over her school books and writing long papers. Clemmy sat on Abi’s bed and quietly watched. She didn’t want to interrupt her when she was so intent on her studies.

One day, Abi and her mother came into her room with a giant old steamer trunk. Clemmy hid under the bed that day. She watched from beneath the dust ruffle as they loaded the trunk with clothes and other items. They left most of her childish things: the tea set stayed in its wicker case in the closet, the rocking horse, dusty with disuse, sat idle in the corner, and the porcelain dolls, forever staring straight ahead with cold, dull glass eyes, stayed on their shelf.

When Abi and her mother left, Clemmy came out from under the bed and sat at Abi’s desk. She didn’t feel like playing.

Clemmy watched out the window for Abi’s return. When Abi did return, she was different, older. She had a baby--a real baby--in her arms. A handsome young man in a smart suit and bowler hat stood by her. They were climbing out of a clever contraption, a wagon-like machine that propelled itself without a horse. Abi’s mother and father rushed out, exclaiming wildly over the baby. Abi and the young man and the baby came into the house, but Abi never came up to her old room. Clemmy had to sneak down the stairs and hide in the pantry to watch Abi visit with her parents.

Abi’s visits became more and more infrequent. Clemmy felt terribly sad. Some days, she did nothing but cry for hours. Some days she tried to play with the tea set or hold one of the dolls again, but it wasn’t the same without Abigail.

On a cold, fall day, men came into the room and slowly took apart Abi’s old bed. Piece by piece, they moved the bed out, the desk, and then all the toys and trinkets. Clemmy hid in the closet, smushing herself into the tiny crawl-space behind the wall. When the house was quiet, Clemmy emerged into a barren home. All the furniture, the pictures from the walls, and all the odds-and-ends were gone. The house was completely vacant.

At first, Clemmy liked running through the house, not worried if Abi’s parents could see her or not, but after a few days, the loneliness was unbearable. Clemmy took to hiding in the upstairs closet, the one in the hallway. It was a small, square closet with no window. When she closed the door, the darkness pressed in on her from all sides. When she couldn’t see the emptiness of the house, she felt less alone.

One day, Clemmy heard voices again. When she emerged from the closet, there were boxes and furniture cluttering the house again. When she ran back to Abigail’s old room, there was a new friend, little Jacky. Clemmy hadn’t played with boys very much, but she was so happy to see someone her own age, that she would not have cared if it had been a boy, girl, or dancing dervish.

Jacky was a sweet boy. He wore knee pants and smart, white shirts. He had wonderful toys: building blocks and metal cars and tractors. Jacky was as happy to see Clemmy as she was to see him. Together they played for hours, laying on the floor of his room, building sprawling mansions with the blocks and crashing tractors into the base to make it topple. When it would fall, they would howl with laughter, laughing until they had to wipe tears from their eyes. Then, they would do it all again.

At night, Jacky slept and Clemmy stayed crouched next to his bed. Jacky talked in his sleep and he had nightmares. When he cried out, Clemmy would stroke his hair and whisper in his ear until he stilled. If a dream woke him, Clemmy would be right there for him. She would cuddle next to him in his bed and they would talk of islands in the Caribbean and digging for pirate gold. They would talk of adventures they would undertake together.

When Jacky grew older, he became Jack. Jack was quiet and earnest. He would still talk to Clemmy, at least more often than Abigail had, and at night, before turning out the lamp, he would read to Clemmy from a large book of tales. He would read stories of medieval knights who fought with honor and brave farm-boys who battled witches. He read fantastical stories of men who built machines that allowed them to fly to the stars. He told Clemmy stories of warriors and soldiers, of love and war, of boys and girls who became great.

All too soon, Jack left the house. The room became empty again. He came back on occasion and slept in his old bed for a night or two, but he seemed like a stranger. One day, after Jack had been gone for ages, he came home again. This time, his beautiful hair was shorn close to his scalp and he wore a crisp suit of drab green. He carried a large duffel. When he came to his room, he tossed the duffel on the bed and sat next to it. He rested his elbows on his knees and rested his chin on his fists. For a long, long time he did not move; he just stared. Clemmy hid in the closet and watched him. It didn’t seem like a time to play.

Jack’s mother came to his door and asked him if he wanted anything. He roused from his staring for a moment. He flashed a broad smile at his mother and told her that he was fine. His mother didn’t seem to believe him, but she left the doorway. The second she was gone, Jack went back to staring. His eyes filled with tears and he wiped them away with his finger. He took deep breaths and tried to keep from crying again.

Clemmy wanted to soothe him. She wanted him to go to sleep so that she could stroke his head and sing lullabies to him. He never did sleep. Long after the house went dark and quiet, he calmly stood and left the room. Out the window, Clemmy saw him leave the house, walking past the oak tree (which was now almost all skeleton and no leaves), and toward the barn.

For long, terrible, dreadful minutes, Clemmy only heard adverse silence. Then, she heard footsteps, heavy, hollow footsteps on the rickety wooden stairs.

“I wanted to see you again,” said a voice behind her. Clemmy spun from the window and saw Jack standing in the door, still in his green suit. He seemed to shimmer in the light from the window. He stared at her with eyes like pools of black tar. “I hadn’t seen you in so long. I missed you, you know.”

Clemmy couldn’t say anything. She stared at him in the shadows and moonlight. She saw a large, red burn around his neck, a burn that was patterned with the outlines of a coil of hemp rope.

“I couldn’t take it anymore,” said Jack. “I...couldn’t. I saw things in Europe--that’s where I was, you know: Europe. I was trying to make the world better, fighting for a good cause, I though...but it was horrible. The things I saw, I couldn’t stop seeing. I saw things whenever I closed my eyes. I wanted to stop seeing those things. Even now I still see them. Will it ever stop?”

Clemmy didn’t know how to answer him. She stepped toward him, but he held out a hand. “I can feel something happening. I did something real bad. Real bad. Something is going to happen to me because of it. Don’t get too close in case something goes wrong.”
They stood in the dark of the room and stared at each other. Jack’s face became more and more in shadow, a deep, liquid gloom that seemed to swirl like a wild river. “I wish I could stay with you,” he said. “We always had fun.”

The swirling shadows began to churn. Jack’s mouth opened as if he was screaming, but no sound came forth. His back arched like he was in agony. A terrible howl began to shriek in Clementine’s ears. It wasn’t coming from Jack. It seemed to come from the air around her. It was louder than anything she had ever heard before. She put her hands over her ears, but it didn’t help. The howls increased. It seemed like there were thousands of wild, screaming Indians in her room, or howler monkeys. Clemmy was scared. She closed her eyes and crouched in a tiny ball, unable to take her eyes off of Jack and the shadows that were enveloping him, fighting him. In moments, the swirls of shadow surrounded him completely, writhing like snakes, like dragons, and then he was simply gone.

Clemmy ran to the attic crawlspace and hid, hid for ages. She clutched her knees to her chest and wept for Jack. She wished and prayed that Jack, little Jacky, her friend, would come back to her, but he never did.

When Clemmy finally emerged from the crawlspace again, Jack’s room had changed. A garishly bright wallpaper was plastered to the the walls. A bed with a bright yellow bedspread was in the corner where Jack’s bed had been. A white desk, messy with notebooks and magazines, was against the wall. A girl sat at the desk, she had a long ponytail and wore a bright red shirt that seemed thicker and cozier than any shirt Clemmy had ever seen. The girl was older than Jack or Abigail had been when Clemmy had met them. She had an odd contraption on her head, a sort of pair of black metal earmuffs with a cord that came out of them. The cord was attached to a strange box that spun a waxy black disc in circles.

Clementine had never seen anything like that. There was also a strange contraption on the desk, a glass cone with strange globs of illuminated color that seemed to boil and stretch in the liquid. The blobs spun and elongated, separating into two blobs and each set swirling. Without thinking, Clemmy walked toward it. She wanted to touch it, to see if it was warm. She extended her hand, fingers trembling, and reached for the lighted cone.

The girl in the chair suddenly grabbed Clemmy’s wrist. Her touch crackled through Clemmy like lightning. Clemmy felt her very core prickle with energy.

“Who are you?” the girl said. She was wide-eyed and shaking. She removed the strange metal earmuffs from her ears. “What are you?”

“I’m Clementine.”

The girl dropped Clementine’s wrist and Clemmy backed away from her, angling toward the closet.

“Don’t go,” said the girl. “I’m Sarah.”

Clementine froze.

“Sarah Winkler. I live here.”

“I’m Clementine,” Clemmy repeated. She didn’t know what else to say.

Sarah swiveled around to face her. “Have you been here a long time?”

Clemmy nodded. It had been years and years.

“Why are you here?”

“I...I live here.”

“You poor thing,” Sarah’s face softened. “You poor, poor thing.”

Clemmy felt strange. The look on Sarah’s face made Clemmy want to cringe.

“How long have you lived here? When did you...you know?”

Clemmy felt like she was going to cry. Her lower lip trembled. She felt shaky.

“Oh, don’t cry.” Sarah slid off her chair and knelt in front of Clemmy. “It’s okay. It’s all okay. I was just curious.”

There were footsteps in the hallway. When Sarah turned her head to look into the hallway, Clemmy dashed into the closet.

“Who are you talking to, Sweety?”

“No one, Mom. Just...rehearsing for the play auditions.”

“Oh, you’re going to try out this year?” asked Sarah’s mother. She was a pleasant woman, thin and willowy. She wore her hair in a braid that looped around the back of her head.

“I think so.”

“That’ll be fun.”

“I hope so.”

“Well, come downstairs when you finish your homework. M*A*S*H is on in ten minutes.”

“I will.”

Sarah gave her mom a smile and her mom left. Clementine listened to the footsteps disappearing down the hall.

“Where did you go?” Sarah looked around the room. She looked under her bed and then checked the closet. Clemmy pressed herself against the wall. “It’s okay. Honest. Come out and talk to me.”

Clementine squatted down so that a rack of Sarah’s clothes covered her. “You want to be my friend?”

“I totally do. You’re amazing.”

“Older kids usually forget about me.”

“I’m not like most older kids. My mom says I’m special. She says that I have a touch of magic like my grandma did. She could see the future, my mom said. I guess I have some special abilities, too. Don’t be scared. Come tell me about yourself.”

“I don’t have anything to tell.”

“What’s your last name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who are your parents?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you scared?”

“No.”

Sarah smiled at Clementine, a wide, genuine smile that made Clemmy forget the years of loneliness and isolation.

“I like your house,” said Sarah. “We moved here not too long ago. It had been empty and nearly abandoned. My dad is trying to fix it up. The downstairs is a mess right now.”
Clemmy came out from under the rack of clothes and sat in front of Sarah. She hugged her knees to her chest.

“I like the history of this house, the isolation. It’s pretty out here in the country. My dad says after he fixes up the house he might even fix up the barn so we can raise sheep.” Sarah smiled and crossed her legs. “Can I ask you questions?”

“I guess,” said Clementine. No one had asked her questions before; Abigail and Jacky had just just accepted her. They had been much younger than Sarah, though. Perhaps small children are just quicker to accept people, thought Clementine.

“How did you die?”

“What?” The word scared Clementine.

“Die. How did you die?”

Clemmy recoiled. She suddenly felt chilled and weak. “I don’t know.”

Sarah clutched a hand to her mouth. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you...I just thought...you already knew.”

Clemmy scooted backward until she bumped against the closet wall. She looked down at her hands. She didn’t think they looked dead. “Am I dead?”

Sarah’s face screwed up into a look of concern and sadness. Clemmy thought Sarah might cry. “Yes, Sweety. You are.”

“How do you know?”

“You’re not like me,” said Sarah. “I can just tell by how you look.”

“Maybe you’re wrong.”

“Look at your pajamas,” said Sarah. “They’re
old, very old. They don’t make pajamas like that. When was the last time you put on a pretty dress or something other than pajamas?”

Clementine couldn’t answer that. She had always just worn her nightdress.

Sarah asked, “Where are you parents?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“Do you even think of your parents anymore?”

“I...I don’t know.”

“Do you remember how you died?”

“I don’t know. I...didn’t think...” Clemmy felt like she was about to begin sobbing. She felt scared and out of place. Sarah was making her sad. Clemmy pushed back once more and she was suddenly in the crawl-space. It was dark and musty and it made her feel safe. She could hear Sarah calling out to her, wondering where she was, but Clemmy didn’t move. She stayed huddled in the crawl-space and tried not to think about being dead, but that was the only thought that she could hold in her head.

In the crawl-space, there seemed to be no passage of time, but Clemmy heard Sarah calling to her, begging her to come out and play. Clemmy was hesitant, but she eventually left the sub-attic and emerged in the closet. She saw Sarah on her hands and knees peering under the bed.

“I’m here,” said Clemmy.

Sarah spun around, clutching her chest. “You frightened me!”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. Come here, look! I went to the library after school and did some research. Look at this.”

Sarah spread some books and papers on the bed and Clemmy came and stood next to the bed. “This is the original land plot for this property,” said Sarah, pointing to a form that was replicated in a book. “It was purchased by a man called Davis Wheeler. He arranged to build this house and barn. Does that name sound familiar?”

“No.”

“Well, look at this,” said Sarah. She found a book with faded sepia-toned and black-and-white photographs. “Do you know what these are?”

Clemmy nodded. She had seen a few photos; she liked them. They seemed magical, like people frozen in time.

“This,” said Sarah, pointing at a photo, “is Davis Wheeler.”

The photo was of a handsome young man with a square jaw and deep-set, piercing eyes. His hair was a little wild and untamable, but he had a kind face. The picture triggered memories in Clementine’s head. She had flashes of that face, simple images: that face smiling at her, that face laughing as she was thrown high into the air and caught again. She remembered his pipe and the lush smell of the cherry tobacco he favored.

“I think that is my daddy.”

“I know,” said Sarah. She turned a page in the book and pointed to another picture. It showed Davis Wheeler standing with a pretty young woman in a white dress and a flower-sprigged apron. Between them stood a little girl, a girl who looked exactly like Clementine. “This is your family. And that little girl is you.”

Clementine stared at that picture for a long time. She remembered that picture. The man who took it was kind and let her see under the heavy velvet hood of what he called a magic box. Weeks later, when he came back to the farm, he had that picture. Clementine’s mother cried. Clementine had never seen it properly. Something happened. Something wasn’t right.

“I found this, too.” Sarah had a large book with old newspapers bound in it. One of the first newspapers had a small article with the headline, “Wagon Accident Kills Girl.”

“Can you read?” she asked. Clementine shook her head.

Sarah cleared her throat. “It says: A spooked horse ran off the road, overturning the buggy it was pulling. The daughter of Davis Wheeler was thrown from the wagon and died shortly thereafter. She was only six.”

Clementine couldn’t say anything. She felt like the world was suddenly spinning.

“And look, I found this today before I came upstairs,” said pointed out the window. Clementine walked to the window and looked where Sarah’s finger was pointing. At the corner of the yard, just below a large tree, a small limestone rock was stuck in the ground. Clementine could barely see it from the window.

Sarah said, “I cleared the tall weeds away from it. The stone is pretty worn, but I think it said your name on it. I think that’s where you were buried.”

“I’m dead,” Clementine whispered.

“You are, Sweety.”

“That’s my mommy and daddy.”

“Yes, they are.”

“Why don’t I remember them?”

“I don’t know, Sweety. It seems...strange. I don’t know the rules for dying. Do you remember anything?”

Clementine closed her eyes. She tried to remember. She remembered Jack and Abigail. She remembered the house. She remembered...nothing else. It was like there were storms in her mind, wild, raging lightning storms that obscured passages of time and made her mind foggy. “I don’t remember anything.”

“Well, this article is dated 1888. That’s when you died. You were six, so you were born in 1882. Do you know what year it is now? It’s 1978. That’s almost a hundred years after you died.”

It was suddenly overwhelming. Where was her daddy? Where was her mommy? Why weren’t they here with her? Why couldn’t she see them? Why didn’t she miss them? Why didn’t Abigail ever come back to her? Where was Jacky? The world seemed began to crumble around her. She collapsed in a heap on the floor and cried. She could faintly feel Sarah’s hand on her back, stroking her hair, like she used to do to Jacky when he fussed.

When Clemmy stopped crying and looked around, Sarah was gone and it was daytime. The books and pictures were gone. Footsteps crept down the hallway. Clemmy tried to hide in the closet. Sarah’s mother came in and changed the sheets on Sarah’s bed. Clemmy watched her movements. It triggered memories of Clemmy’s own mother. She could see her own mother in this very room changing bed sheets. She could see her mother sitting on the edge of her little bed, singing to her. She could see her own self laying in the bed, thick cotton bandages wrapped around her head. The accident. The blood soaking through the bandages. Her parents crying. Then, there is a storm in her memory and the next thing she knew, Abigail was living in her room.

Clemmy stayed on the floor of the closet. She didn’t feel like playing anymore. She didn’t think she would ever feel like playing again. When Sarah came home from school, she called for Clemmy, but Clemmy stayed hidden. She didn’t want to bother Sarah anymore. Sarah was alive, Clementine was not. Clemmy had to accept this.

Sarah called for Clemmy every day, but Clemmy pushed herself back into the crawl-space and stayed curled in a ball. After a few days, Sarah stopped calling for her. Clemmy began to creep out at night to watch Sarah sleep. During the days, she would sneak onto the stairs and spy on Sarah’s father. He had made a large mess of the downstairs. It looked nothing like what Clemmy remembered. There were sawhorses and boards everywhere coupled with strange, loud tools that ran under their own power. When Sarah returned from school, Clemmy went back to her hiding space.

During the night, Clemmy wondered what would become of her. Was this what she was to do forever?

The downstairs kept changing as Sarah’s father changed the structure of the rooms, opening up the small rooms by removing walls and making them one big room. He fixed the kitchen, stripping out old wiring and installing new. It was a fascinating process to Clemmy. She began to watch the strange machine that Sarah’s dad would have on while he worked. It showed moving pictures of strange people who did things like play games and talk to each other. She began to become obsessed with a show he watched in the afternoons where very pretty people carried on about relationships and kissed a lot. It was called “All My Children,” although there weren’t a lot of children on the show.

One day, while Clementine was watching the strange moving-picture box, Sarah’s dad was running a strange sort of saw across some wood. It screamed while it cut, but it cut very fast. Halfway through the plank he was cutting, there was a loud pop and the moving picture box went dark and the saw fell silent. Sarah’s father swore. He found a strange sort of torch, a heavy metal tube that made light, in a drawer nearby and then disappeared into the basement. After a moment, the picture-box came back on and the saw that he had been using screamed back to life. There was another loud pop and Clemmy saw a fireworks explosion of sparks. The sparks fell into little piles of sawdust and immediately became flame. The flames greedily devoured more sawdust and bit deeply into the old, dry wood floor.

Here, Clemmy had something like a memory storm. She remembered seeing flames. She remembered how quickly those flames spread. They weren’t hot. They couldn’t hurt her, but she saw nothing but fire.

When the fire was gone and the memory-storm subsided, Clementine stood in a charred, blackened house. She was in her old room, Sarah’s old room. The bed was gone, the desk was gone. The windows were smashed-out and empty. Sarah peered out into the yard. The oak tree had fallen at some point, the trunk a splintered mass of wreckage, the branches barren of leaves. The oak lay across the driveway, the driveway that no one had used in quite some time.
Clementine went down the charred stairs. Some of the stairs were missing and she could see into the empty basement. There were leaves all around the first floor. The windows on the first floor were mostly boarded up with large sheets of wood, but someone, at some point, had pulled down the sheet over the back door and had kicked in the door. Clementine felt like she should feel indignant about that; she should be angry that someone violated her home. But she couldn’t. She didn’t feel anything.

Clementine went back to the second story. All the windows were smashed up, but none were covered with wood. She could see the barn from some of the windows. The grass all around the barn and the house had grown to wild heights, all tangles and snares. There were thistles and arctium growing everywhere.

Clementine stared at the world so long that she had another memory storm. When she was cognizant again, the house had fallen further. The floor of the second story had mostly collapsed. The barn roof had caved in and only a messy skeleton remained in its place. There was water damage throughout the house from rain and snow. There was no one there anymore. Clementine called out over and over, for Abi, for Jacky, for Sarah--but no one ever answered. Only mournful crows would call back from the branches of the dead oak tree. Clemmy sank against the wall and buried her head in her hands.

Another memory storm led Clementine to awaken standing in the remnants of the house. The walls had all caved and the infrastructure of the house had collapsed. The house was merely a pile of rubble, a heap of old, lichen-covered boards and distant memories.

Eventually, Clementine came out of her memory storm long enough to realize that a large, scary machine--a bright yellow machine with a toothed bucket at the end of a long, mechanical arm--was biting deeply into the wreckage of the house, scooping some of the rubble up, and depositing it in the back of another machine--an equally monstrous thing with huge rubber wheels and a large, empty container on its back. Clementine fled into the basement and hid in a corner. Slowly the two machines took all the rubble of the house until there was only the empty cement of the basement left. When they finished the house, they took apart the old barn. Clementine watched them do the barn with particular interest, hoping that maybe she would see Jack.

When the machines left, Clementine could stand at the top of the carved-stone stairs of the basement and feel like she was outdoors for the first time in more than a hundred years. She couldn’t leave the basement, though; she didn’t know why. When she tried, it was as if a wall as still there, pushing her back. It frustrated her, but she eventually decided that it was enough to see nature all around her.

That first night, it rained. Water flooded the foundation, but Clemmy didn’t feel a single drop. She continued her vigil on the steps. She wondered what happened to Sarah. She hoped that Sarah would come back to see her again.

The memory-storms started to become more frequent. Clemmy would haze in and out of periods of foggy isolation back into the clear world. All around her, the landscape was changing. Eventually, rains broke down the masonry of the foundation and the walls collapsed. Mud and sand filled in the foundation until there was no visible stone, only a sunken recess in the landscape. After that, weeds began to grow. During a period of one the memory-storms, tall grass covered the depression, a few thistles populated the depression, and a tree began to grow.

Clemmy sat under the little tree and looked down the little lane that led back to the big road. She couldn’t see the road from where she was, but she could hear the occasional car, the sound of tires on pavement, the hum of engines. The lane was already becoming overgrown with weeds, the former ruts where car tires drove were hidden.

Melancholy filled Clemmy to the point where she felt like she would burst.

Then, the memory storms returned and Clementine simply sat and stared.

And stared.