A Brochure For Three Days In The Lincoln Islands- Free Short Story Of The Month, Oct.

The year passed like most years, walking too far most days. Freddy Lincoln’s corduroy pants smelled like sugar pee after the machine broke. His tee shirt took on cat. Freddy was tidy and they had no pets. Sissy, who was cross eyed, took to their clothes with hair spray, but it backfired and made them sticky so they shampooed them in the bathtub once a month.

“Daddy call on the kitchen phone,” Sissy said. She was eating something black out of a bowl. Sissy had a fake fur coat that was getting small. “Tole me he ain’t comin’ home on the weekend.”

“He get the new CB?” They were small talking, like animals do. They were good at it.

Sissy nodded. “The big un. Says he pulls up to another rig real close it’ll turn their radio inta melted junk.”

Later that day at recess, Freddy kicked the red ball over the fence and the other kids watched it fly like bird for what seemed like forever. As Freddy slowly rounded the bases with his head down, watching his old flat shoes, everyone whispered about how his dog died that morning, and how he buried it himself in their pigsty of a yard, in a hole he dug with his hands.

Read the rest at http://www.greatpinkskeleton.com

There are, I am certain, ghostly memes that track through time along family lines, generation after generation. For example, take a man who was in many ways average but then fought in the Civil War and became a different man because of it. Not a good man, either. Violent, scarred, and broken in a way that made him capable of ‘evil’ great or small, in some way it can be said that he ‘caught’ something contagious. His sons will have it, as these aberrant behavioral characteristics will be taught to them at a formative age. Some of them break the cycle and some don’t. The unlucky ones treat themselves and the world around them as they were treated, and the ghost travels through them into the next generation. And so it walks, from a terrible birth on a battlefield into the present and the future. The strong offspring will be troubled, but if they sail into deeper waters, they can shear off the dark passenger in that stronger wind.

I have one of these in my family, rampaging through time on my father’s side. It was a sickly ghost as they go, diminished from its long trip through the ages, so it may have come into being before the example above. An old, old ghost. I won’t be passing it along, but scary enough, I appear to be the first of the line to be free. Happy Halloween!