Roses, Pistols & Lace

*I died when I was twenty-three, pushing up daisies died. Heaven hadn't wanted me quite yet, evidently, and I guess neither had Hell. Either way, I found myself back in the world of the living and in so much pain, I'd wished one of them would have taken mercy on me...but it wasn't to be.*

Dallas, Texas

2015

As I peered through the evening’s gloom at the cabin I’d been working on in my spare time, I climbed the steps and onto the cabin’s porch. After crossing its wooden width, I entered through the doorway, then pausing several feet inside, I shone my light around the living room.

I’d been remodeling the exterior of the cabin for several months now, but the interior had remained pretty much the same. Every item within it contained so much of my grandmother, it was hard for me to get rid of any of it.

With slow steps, I moved further into the house, walking from room to room, the beam of my flashlight landing on memory after memory.

I continued to wander, losing myself within the past and as my mind recalled my youth, my feet—on autopilot—took me the rest of the way into my old bedroom. The weakening beam of my flashlight greeted the shadows looming within, and I shook my head at my procrastination. I hated making decisions, and as such, I hadn’t removed the quilt hanging across the window. I just… I don’t know…the quilt had always been there.

With only a few more steps into the room, the flashlight blinked on and off, stuttering out its dying breath before, with one last weak effort, it went out altogether. Lowering my arm, I allowed the now useless light to hang at my side—I hadn’t planned to do much anyway, I’d just needed to come inside to…remember. With a sigh, I turned toward the doorway. Before I’d even taken ten steps, however, the natural harmonic balance of the surrounding air shifted; the peculiar sensation I was no longer alone, as if someone or some…thing…had slipped into the room, washed through me. The sensation of disturbed air skated across the back of my neck and sent a chill across my flesh.

I hadn’t been expecting company, so the sense of another presence was far from welcome. With bumps scuttling along my skin, I swung the arm holding the flashlight in an arch, but I punished nothing but the air around me—I’d hit nothing. I felt like Luther Heggs in the 1966 film The Ghost and Mr. Chicken and shook my head, a slight apprehensive giggle escaping my lips. Yet, the nervous laugh cut short when a lower, deeper echo of a returned laugh came from within feet of where I stood.

At the sound, the earlier rise of bumps started to chase one another across my flesh, and I found myself wishing like hell the flashlight in my hand was still working.

“Why in the hell,” my inner voice chided, “didn’t you uncover the damn window?”

Too late to bitch at me about it now, I silently griped back. Though the room wasn’t a complete black-out, the shadows within the darkness blocked me from seeing whom or what occupied the room with me.

Breath exiting my mouth in tiny puffs of uneasiness, I began inching my way toward the doorway again, trying to reassure myself with each step the laugh had been nothing more than my imagination.

When the laughter began filling the surrounding air once more, my heart burst into a fast-paced stuttering tattoo of—oh, hell to the fuck no—against my chest, and turning, I began running, heading in the opposite direction of a few seconds earlier.