Free Out of the Mist by EvergreenWritersGroup

us gave him any thought as we started preparations
for dinner.
    “ How about the
Spanish noodle skillet dinner from the Mennonite cookbook?” Linda
suggested to our daughter and me from the living room doorway.
Amelia had her head buried in a text book and didn’t
respond.
    “ Fine with me,” I
replied. “What do you need me to do?”
    “ Cut up the onion and
green pepper, and brown the hamburger after I get the bacon cooked,
please.”
    Twenty minutes later
three crisp pieces of bacon were set aside on a paper towel, the
hamburger was browned, and the cut up vegetables, as well as the
spices and a can of stewed tomatoes, were all added to the fry pan.
We both left the room while the concoction simmered.
    “ Tim, you monster!”
Linda yelled from the kitchen, just minutes after I left. “Get down
off that counter immediately!”
    I heard the patio
door slide shut as I hurried into the kitchen. Linda was bent over
laughing, and pointing at Tim outside the door. He had a stunned
look on his face and a piece of bacon protruding from his mouth.
The wily old warrior had taken advantage of our absence, and proved
he still had some life in his old legs.
    “ Man, was he up on
the counter?” I exclaimed.
    “ Yes. He stole a
piece of bacon, and was calmly chomping it up as if there was
nothing wrong.”
    “ Wow, a few hours ago
he could barely climb up on one of the living room chairs and now
he has the strength to leap three feet onto the
counter.”
    “ I’m not the least
bit surprised,” Amelia said from the doorway. “If I was a cat, I’d
jump twice that high for some bacon. What are we going to do with
the other two pieces?”
    “ No way I’m eating
them after Tim’s been sniffing around,” Linda replied.
    “ That’s what I
thought you’d say,” Amelia said, biting into a rasher and offering
the other to me.
    “ Groossss!” Linda
dragged out the word as she headed to the fridge for more
bacon.
    From that day onward,
we called Spanish noodle skillet, “Tim’s dinner”.
     
    ***
     
    Many years have
passed and Tim is long gone. Amelia has a family of her own living
in another city, but Linda and I have remained in our family home.
Every month or so we have Tim’s dinner for our evening meal, and
whenever we do, I swear I hear a little scratching noise at the
patio door in the kitchen. When I go outside to see if a tree
branch is rubbing against the door or the adjacent window, there’s
nothing to be seen. But once the door is open, I always have the
impression that something passes me as I go out.
    I know it makes no
sense, and Tim’s ghost cannot have entered, but I always break one
or two pieces off the rashers of cooked bacon waiting on the paper
towel, and place them aside for Tim to find. Later, when it is time
to crumble the bacon and return it to the fry pan, those pieces
have always disappeared.
    “ Did you eat the bits
I left for Tim?” I invariably ask Linda.
    She always replies,
“Of course not. You and Amelia are the only ones crude enough to
eat bacon a cat’s been sniffing.”
    But they’re never
there. I know I haven’t eaten them and Amelia lives 4,000 miles
away, so where have they gone?
     
    ~~~***~~~
     

 
    Room 428
    Catherine A. MacKenzie
     
    Ocean’s End Hotel,
Cape Chignecto, Nova Scotia
     
    1890
     
    Alice gazed out the
window, watching the distant fog slowly advancing over the water
toward the hotel. Smudges and water stains distorted the glorious
view of the Atlantic Ocean and added to her foreboding. Mason, her
husband’s son, was riding, which he did every day. He'd come into
view soon; she could count on him like clockwork. Him and his
horse, Chamois. She thought Chamois a silly name for a
horse.
    The previous year
when he’d purchased the mare, he had said it was the perfect name
for her. "Just feel her. She's so soft, like a baby's breath,
gentle, beautiful....”
    She saw something
akin to lust in his eyes, and jealousy spread through her. "It'll
turn on