Free Ghost Brother (Spooky Short Stories by Kathryn Meyer Griffith) by Kathryn Meyer Griffith Page A

are …dead.
    I wove through and around the burial plots and when approaching
the street I checked for cars before I crossed. There were none. I hadn’t seen even
one, nor a truck, a motor scooter or a bicycle, since I’d woken up. No
airplanes in the ashen sky.
    I had to go home. Tessa must be worried sick. Tessa. My
wife of twenty-five years. Long blond hair that softly framed her sweet
understanding face. Those large amber eyes that’d laugh at me, so full of love
and tenderness. My beautiful Tessa. The mother of my son. The love of my life. My
angel. A flood of memories washed over me and I sighed in relief. Grateful I
remembered something. I had a family, a home and a wife.
    I needed to get back to them.
    The insight came to me that things hadn’t been very good
between us lately; hadn’t been for a long time. In fact, I recalled Tessa had
asked for a separation or something like it. That wasn’t good. I loved her and
would never be able to live without her.
    Hmmm. What else was I not remembering?
    My house, our house, Tessa’s and mine, was a few streets
over and I carefully made my way there. At first I was afraid I couldn’t leave
the cemetery grounds. As I stepped into the street something pulled at me,
trying to yank me back. I tore free and kept trekking. Everything I did and
everything I saw seemed to be moving in slow motion, like a bad dream. My feet
were heavy at the ends of my legs and I was shuffling through air as thick as
honey.
    If this was what being dead was like, I didn’t like it one
bit. I felt…lost. Unsettled. As if this was punishment for something.
    My Grandmother Celie, my mom’s mother, a hag of a woman who
never liked me but hated my poor brother, Gerald, even more, used to describe what
she thought the afterlife would be like.
    It’s nothing, sonny . An inky, bottomless, sideless, nothing where you’d
never feel anything…ever…again. In time, it’d drive you plum insane, she’d cackle like some old witch. That’s what a person gets when they aren’t
good people. Heck, she should talk. She was the most miserly woman I’d ever
known. Never helped no one. Never really cared about no one but herself. She
died alone after falling down her basement steps and breaking her neck. Her
body laid there for four days before anyone, a neighbor, upon seeing her
starving dog running around in endless circles outside in the back yard days
later, thought to check on her. When he couldn’t get an answer from ringing the
doorbell for ten minutes he called 911.
    Of course, she was very dead.
    Poor old lady, they said. But I never felt any pity for the
selfish woman. She should have had that First Alert thingie for around her neck
or at least carried a cell phone. Some people just aren’t real smart, I guess.
    I kept walking.
     
    ***
    My house, a two story brick on the end of the street guarded
by gnarled oak trees, was lightless. Not one window had a glow in it. I tried
to open the front, then the rear door, but they wouldn’t budge. I couldn’t get
in. I could put my fingers through the wood up to my arms but something was
keeping me from going inside. So frustrating. I peered through the windows like
some thief casing the joint but couldn’t see anything. Too dark.
    Maybe I’d turned into some sort of vampire and had to be
invited in? Nah, silly.
    “Open sesame! Abracadabra!” I was still on the outside.
“Damn it, let me in!” What was going on here anyway?
    Where was Tessa? Her car, a ten year old Chevy Cavalier,
was in the garage. I’d peeked in the window. There it was. Dented right fender
and all. I never should have taken it out that night in the rain. The roads had
been slick and the wind almost an F 1 tornado. Tessa had been so ticked. That
was just another time my brother had swayed me, and not to the good, either. That
was Gerald, though. Always making me do things I knew I shouldn’t be doing.
Always causing me to get into trouble. Good thing I’d never told Tessa