Old Bones: A Collection of Short Stories
Read Old Bones: A Collection of Short Stories Online
Authors: Steven L. Campbell
Tags: #sorcery, #love and friendship, #magic spells, #dragons magic, #witches magic, #ghosts and spirits, #witches and magic, #spirits and ghosts, #telepathic powers, #monsters and magic
A Collection of Short Stories
Copyright 2013 Steven L. Campbell
Published by Steven L. Campbell at Smashwords
Cover design by S.L.Campbell Graphics and Books
Originally titled
Ridgewood Sparks
, this book
is a collection of stories centered on the fictional town,
Ridgewood, based on the author’s hometown in Pennsylvania.
All characters, organizations, places, and
events portrayed in this book either are products of the author’s
imagination or are fictitiously used. Any resemblance to actual
persons—living or dead, locales, organizations, or events is purely
coincidental.
Smashwords Edition License Notes
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Always.
Table of Contents
Tales for Young Adults
Oddities
In the
Wake of Annihilating Kings
Tales for Adults
Connect
with Steven L. Campbell
Tales for Young Adults
Are We
There Yet?
With all its blemishes, I wrote the strange and
creepy “Are We There Yet?” in 1999 and published it at my old
no-longer-in-service website. Since then, I have recycled parts of
it for an upcoming novel,
Margga’s Curse.
*
ON A PARTICULAR August day, not far from Ridgewood,
Pennsylvania, a black Grand Cherokee wound its way over a hilly
countryside. The closer the Coleman family got to Ridgewood, the
harder the rain fell. Fifteen-year-old Douglas Coleman pulled at
his sweaty T-shirt and wished that the air conditioner in his
parents’ Grand Cherokee worked. The “grand” had left the vehicle
several years ago. Same with their lives. Their fortune had been
yanked away over the summer by a cruel twist of fate, right before
the dog days of August had hit.
He didn’t care if they ever got there, but he
asked anyway: “Are we there yet?”
“Almost,” his mother said. “Another half-hour
is all.” She looked unhappy, as though she had done something
wrong. Douglas sighed and crossed his arms. It wasn’t she who had
made a mess of things.
Next to him in the back seat, Douglas’s
eleven-year-old sister, Keera, snored. Drool leaked from the corner
of her open mouth and formed a puddle along the front of her pink
T-shirt. Douglas wondered how she could sleep when it was so hot
and their lives had been ruined—thanks to him, of course, though
his mother and Dr. Jarvis insisted that it wasn’t his fault.
He clenched his jaw and deepened his frown,
if that were possible. No matter how many times his mother said
that things were going to get better, he knew they would never be
as good as when they had lived in Minneapolis.
Keera took a breath and snored louder.
Douglas jabbed her shoulder until she turned her head and quieted.
Then he tilted his own head and let the warm spray from his open
window douse his sweaty face.
The landscape of woods and occasional farm
and cornfield looked like home. But it wasn’t. Minneapolis and
everything that had been theirs were a long ways behind them now.
There would be no going back until he turned eighteen. Then he
could go to college at Minnesota State where many of his friends
planned to go, and be far away from a place where the state
depended on a captive groundhog to predict their springs.
We have no other choice, Dougie! His mother’s
words still resounded in his ears from the days they had spent
packing. They were SFC: strapped for cash, a term his father had
started using after lightning had struck him three months ago. It
was a term that Douglas hated hearing. It ranked up there with SOL,
which was how he felt most of the time.
In the front seat of the old truck, Adriana
Coleman banged an open palm against the dashboard. The engine was
overheating again.
“We there yet?” Douglas’s father asked as he
awoke from his nap.
“Almost,” Adriana said. She pointed to a
giant, white billboard sign ahead of them that read WELCOME TO
RIDGEWOOD in large, blue letters.
Maurice Coleman rubbed his right temple as he
turned in his seat to look at Douglas. “We’re muh-moving, son,” he
said. “Nuh-new home, new town, new people. New, new, new.”
Douglas’s face soured. “I don’t want to make
new friends,” he said. “It’s taken me all my life to make the best
of the ones I’ve left behind.”
Adriana said, “When we get settled, you can
e-mail your old friends, or call a couple next weekend. I know they
would love to hear from you.”
Douglas sighed. “Like they’re gonna care
about my new life. I saw their looks. They were glad it wasn’t any
of them heading to a new a place.” He sputtered as a realization
clawed at his mind. “I’ll be the new kid at school. The one
everybody’ll pick on.”
“It’s tenth grade. You won’t get picked
on.”
Before Douglas could argue, Adriana said, “I
know you’re going to like your new bedroom. You’ll have plenty of
space for your easel and desk and all your paints and canvas
and—”
“Whatever. I’m not painting anymore.”
“Anyway,” Adriana said and sighed, “it’s a
beautiful home in the country, just down the road from Uncle
Jason’s farm.”
“Great. I love the smell of cow manure.”
Adriana set her mouth firm. Her expression
was one of iron now. Douglas returned to gazing out at the lousy
rain. The move was his fault, after all. If he had put away the
lawn mower before going to Kenny’s house, then his father wouldn’t
have been struck by lightning while putting the mower into the
shed. But he had been in a hurry to see Kenny’s new computer, and
so the storm came and knocked Maurice Coleman from his shoes with a
lightning bolt that left him with impaired short-term memory.
Blame and guilt weighed Douglas’s shoulders.
If not for his carelessness, his father would still be employed as
a lawyer. And not just any lawyer. Maurice Coleman, the man about
Minneapolis, had been successful as a private practice lawyer,
earning as much as six figures last year. But now, he wasn’t well
enough to be an ambulance chaser.
“Nobody’s fault,” Maurice said from the front
seat.
Douglas clenched his jaw, turned away from
his father, and glared out his window at downtown Ridgewood. The
streets appeared barren and so did the stores—a steady
conglomeration of brick and cement shops that shoved against each
other. Their windows looked dark and lifeless, though all were open
for business. Even the tiny McDonalds and Burger King—cramped
between more brick buildings—looked dingy and deserted. At a street
corner, Douglas looked at a discolored tavern on the left, its only
visible window sporting a black sign with white letters that
announced fifty-cent wings on Friday nights. Below it, neon signs
advertised a selection of beer inside. On the uneven sidewalk in
front, three young girls around the ages of ten or eleven came
around the corner and passed by on Rollerblades, each of them
teasing each other with obscenities. An old, sickly looking man in
a tattered Army jacket stepped out of the tavern, turned up his
collar to the rain, and then looked at Douglas and grinned. Douglas
shuddered at the rotting teeth he saw and looked away. Icy pain
sliced through his stomach.
“I spy … muh-my right eye,” Maurice Coleman
said, “suh-something blue.” His stutter caused Douglas to clench
his jaw tighter as another icy feeling jolted through his
stomach.
“C’mon Duh-Douglas,” Maurice said cheerily,
“play along.”
Douglas crossed his arms and held in his
anger. “Later, Dad. Okay?”
The light changed and Adriana drove them
deeper into an increasing murkiness of more constricted stores that
looked empty of any life. They crossed over a cement bridge and a
wide gray fording called Myers Creek. On the other side, a gothic
stone church called St. John’s Cathedral sat large and tall. Its
tower bell was in mid-procession of peeling four o’clock.
Past the church, St. John’s Cemetery rolled
wide and far with many tombstones marking the dead there. Keera
awoke and screamed.
Douglas jumped and nearly screamed as well.
Alarmed, Adriana turned to Keera, and then returned her attention
to her driving when a car horn sounded at the stop sign she almost
ran. Maurice made hushing sounds, but Keera sobbed louder.
“The cemetery … it scares me,” she said. “I
saw myself buried beneath the ground.”
“It’s okay,” Adriana said. “It was just a
dream.”
Keera turned to Douglas. Her tears dropped to
her chin. “I saw you in a coffin,” she said between sobs. “I saw
Mommy and Daddy, too.”
Pain knifed through Douglas’s stomach. He
shuddered.
“Bad dream,” Maurice said. “Bad dream
tap-tap-tapping.”
Douglas’s stomach lurched. “Mom,” he cried
and hiccupped. “I don’t feel good.”
“We’re almost there. Just two more
miles.”
Maurice made more hushing sounds as he turned
and looked out his rain-covered window. “Almost home,” he said. “No
more tap-tap-tapping.”
Douglas pressed his hands against his stomach
as his mother drove south and into the murky countryside, past
woods and occasional clearings of soggy cornfields and pastures
with waterlogged fences and muddy cows, and farms with rusted
trailers and car skeletons in the yards.
They stopped at an intersection and Adrianna
waited for a semi decorated in yellow running lights to speed by
before she eased the steaming, chugging vehicle into the
intersection.
Douglas saw the other semi come at them from
the corner of an eye.
Instantly, a thousand screams filled his
head. His world exploded, which deafened the screams. Then all
sound and sight went dark. He flew in darkness a long time before
he awoke.
He stared out his window. The closer he and
his family got to Ridgewood, Pennsylvania, the harder the rain
fell.
The move was his fault. He pulled at his
sweaty T-shirt and asked, “Are we there yet?”
“Almost,” his mother said. “Another half-hour
is all.”
She looked unhappy, as though she had done
something wrong.
#
The Thing in the Mirror
INSIDE A SINGLE yellow eye of a two-story brick
house, fifteen-year-old Randy White sits at his bedroom desk and
stares into a rectangular wall-type mirror propped in front of him.
He draws a few lines to his portrait, trying to capture a
convincing likeness of himself to show Mr. Evans, his art teacher,
on Monday.
A crowd roars from outside his bedroom
window; he wonders for a moment if the Fighting Eagles have scored.
A half-block away, Ridgewood High School’s football team is
battling a well-matched contest with their tough-to-beat rivals,
New Cambridge. His parents and sisters are there amidst the
fervor.
Randy glances at the radio on the stand by
the side of his bed and considers turning on the game. Then,
annoyed, he realizes the noise of the game has become a
distraction; the skinny boy stamps to his window to close it.
Football season has ascended upon Ridgewood’s
Friday nights and tonight the air is heavy in the third quarter,
the game tied. Randy knows that sweat and adrenaline and coffee and
soft drinks are flowing fast. He had been part of that life
once.
Before he closes the window, a loud cheer
follows the spinning ball kicked over the heads of the visiting
blue and white team. The ball passes between white jutting poles
rising toward the night sky, and then falls and bounces into a wire
backstop, rattling the fence where on the other side, a few bees
buzz atop the uncut field of brush and scrub in the waning
September twilight.