Im starting project Shakespeare again! This play is Christmas carol. We have done this one for years! The first day was sunday. It was really boring. All we did was read through the script. The first day is always boring. But….before we say goodbye to Halloween this year……i entered a writing contest. It was a scary short story. Only 400 words!!! (Grrrr) anyway. I got second place, and its in the newspaper. The Monadnock Ledger Transcript. But now its here too!!! Enjoy!!! 👻👻🎃🎃🎃🩷
Boo!” my little sister Claire screams, jumping from behind the couch.
“Hey! I’m reading!” I shout. “And anyway, you can’t scare me.”
“But it’s almost Halloween! It’s a scary time!” Claire persists.
“There is nothing frightening about October 31st. It’s just another day in the year.”
“Fine,” Claire says. “Come for a walk?”
Outside, the chilly air feels like it blows into my bones. I zip up my jacket, but it doesn’t help. “Whatcha thinking?” Claire asks.
“Just wondering why people think ghosts are real,” I laugh.
“But they are,” Claire says. She looks very serious. She’s only ten, so I drop it. We walk on, to the ruins of an old farmhouse. We’re pretty high up on a hill, so it’s even colder now. It’s starting to get dark, but it’s only four. It seems like an artificial darkness: foggy, kind of.
Claire whirls through the fog, then bumps into a crumbling stone wall and falls. I dash to her. When I reach her, she’s sitting against the wall, looking straight ahead, breathing hard.
“Are you okay? What is it?” I look in the direction she points and freeze.
A woman, dressed in all black, with hair like the sunset, stands with her back to the road. She looks at us and smiles with perfectly white teeth and eyes full of fire. Then she sings in an eerie, high, ringing voice:
Come and live with me on the top of a hill
Where the birds don’t sing and the bells never ring
Come and live with me where our best sport is kill
Where the chair rocks alone, and you never want to roam
Come and live with me on the top of this hill
I’ll make it clear: you’ll never leave here
For once, I’m actually scared. I look for Claire, but I can’t move. Then I see her. As stone. And I realize that, too, is my fate. I just study her scared face, staring into mine. I wonder what my expression is. This is it. This is my life, if you can call it that. Frozen, staring straight ahead at my unmoving sister for eternity, becoming part of the wall that I now see is made of other statues.
The worst part is, I can still hear the last note of the woman’s song. And it’s not getting quieter. If anything, it’s louder than it was.
Xoxo, clover 🍀
Ps. I cant respond to comments BTW 😛
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