by Jane Gwaltney

We end September with this spooky short story as we head into Halloween month next week. This story has never before been published.

Beneath Gwen’s feet was an undulating carpet of leaves. Above, a cowardly sun, setting earlier and earlier. She incited an explosion of sparrows as she sprinted down the path between two rows of towering Poplars dressed in flames of Autumn.

Her phone’s ring tone sounded. Breathless, she slowed and reached into her jacket pocket. “Hello? Wait–I’m cooling down.” She rubbed her ribs. The toes on her left foot began to cramp. “Yes, I’ve been running…what? No, I’m not running away. I’m running toward.

Her legs ached. How long had it been since she’d slept an entire night? “Of course, you don’t,” she said. “Of course, I know it’s been a year–exactly a year.” She halted and looked for a bench. “Of course, you didn’t. Don’t apologize.” She turned off her phone and slipped it back in her pocket.

“Okay,” she said to the sky. “No bench. No rest for the weary.” She groaned. “Now I’m quoting my grandmother.” She decided to give the voice in her head her full attention. Such a nag…

I’m in the right place…in this moment. It’s so very still. The sun is orange and still. Like the beginnings of a painting. All else is alive. Radiant. I yearn to capture that. See how the light filters through the trees? Colors balance on leaves and play among limbs. Until the wind comes.

A breeze blew her hair to one side. A mysterious aroma of taffy apples made her mouth water. Carnivals and Ferris wheels came to mind. Childhood. Simple joys.

Yes, the leaves; they ride the wind and throw colors in your face.

A brief blast of chilly wind yanked her hair backward and rocked her on her heels. She shivered and sidestepped behind a wall of overgrown shrubbery. “So much for the serenity of meditation.”

“Hi.”

Gwen’s head turned. At last, she’d found a bench. It embraced a lone occupant, a young boy, scissoring his legs as if powering a swing. “Hi,” he repeated.

“Hi…are you lost?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t know?”

He shrugged and his legs came to rest. His fingertips pitter pattered across the peeling bench, then leapt into the air, making grandiose gestures in currents of wind. “I feel the layers.”

“Layers?”

“The layers of colors.”

“Ah, I remember you. You were on the swings yesterday, weren’t you? Do you come here every day?”

He shook his head. “No, just lately. Why don’t you sit down? There’s plenty of room.”

With a cleansing sigh, she obliged. A crumbling straw hat was wedged between the bench slats, presumably abandoned. She turned her attention back to the boy. “Look there. you have a shoelace hanging loose.”

He eyed it, then commenced another round of leg-swinging.

“Your mother will worry if you’re not home before dark. Does she know you’re here?”

“I don’t know. She doesn’t talk to me much. I like to talk to you.”

Gwen chafed, hit by a bank of emotions. “This is the first–well, that makes me happy to hear. But…have we spoken before?”

Without replying, he smiled and tended to his wayward shoelace. When he finished, he gazed into the distance. “Do you like crows?”

“I, uh…they’re very intelligent. Very.” Her hands felt heavy and clumsy in her lap.

“But do you like them?”

“Yes, yes I do. My little boy loved birds. All birds. Crows, definitely. He drew charcoal pictures of them here for me. Pictures of birds and skies full of stars. Things like that.”

“Where is he?”

Words stuck behind the knot in her throat. She forced them past. “I was just visiting him, on the other side. Over there, on the other side of the park. I’m taking a shortcut home.” One word remained safe, where it belonged, wedged firmly in her thoughts. Cemetery.

The boy’s eyes were a brilliant blue. Intense. “I like pictures,” he said. “Do you have a picture of him?”

“Yes, here in my pocket.” She retrieved it from her wallet-size album of memories. Pets, smiles, melting snowmen…

The photograph was studied from every angle, even held up high to banish pesky shadows. “Is he lost?”

Something in this child’s eyes reflected knowledge beyond his years. Gwen’s thoughts raised their strangled voices. Loud. Bottled words formed sentences and tumbled out. “I wish I knew. I don’t see how my Bobby can be lost if he didn’t get a chance to live. One year ago, someone took his life. With a bullet. A bullet meant for somebody else. My little boy was just in the wrong place. He was walking down a public street. A stranger took his life. A stranger.”

“I’m a stranger. Do you trust me?”

Those eyes. Gwen’s fury subsided. “Of course,” she said.

“I might be a bad person. A coward…that’s what I am.”

She felt sad laughter well up, then skitter off, embarrassed and ashamed. “I don’t believe that.” She wanted to scoop him into her arms. But he was someone else’s child…

“I did something very wrong,” he insisted. “I took my own life.”

Gwen gasped. “You…what? Her face burned. Grief had mutated, from soft and malleable, to hardened steel inside a spinning chamber. This precious, confused little boy. The sky was growing darker with each passing minute. His mother had to be frantic.

“I can make up for that though,” he continued. “I can give it back.”

Gwen touched his hand and spoke gently, stifling her alarm. “Honey, what’s your name? I scared you, and I’m so sorry.”

Abruptly, the boy stood. “There’s a world most people don’t see, hidden beneath the layers. There’s life…and, take a deeper look. There’s me.”

Gwen blinked. One by one, the quaint wrought-iron streetlamps swallowed the dusk with automated precision. A calm washed over her. In the boy’s hand was a tapered brush dripping with paint. His freckled face paled and the shock of bright ginger hair darkened. Sable brown, just like his eyes…Bobby’s eyes.

“My name was Vincent,” he said. “I’m no longer lonely. I’m exactly in the right place.”

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Jane Gwaltney, inspired by Shirley Jackson, began writing in the early 1960s. Her poetry, fiction, and non-fiction have been published in magazines and journals. Her work has received Honorable Mention by Ellen Datlow in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and The Best Horror of the Year.
Look for her collection of short stories, titled Dark Hearts and Tattletales, coming in October from White City Press. There, she shares a dozen previously published stories and four never before seen tales to grab your imagination and run wild with it. She is a member of the Horror Writers Association, and a critique group called Writers Under The Arch (WUTA) in St. Louis, Missouri.