This is what I sent to I Saw Lightning Fall for this year's sharing of stories.
World of Spirits
By Dale Nelson
The first spirit showed him himself as a boy absorbed by Pac-Man. He didn’t want to go outside and play. The second spirit showed him his present-day self, hunched over in his cubicle. Olivia walked sadly past him. The third spirit showed mourners glancing at their smartphones as a coffin was lowered.
“
Must these things be?” he cried to the mute and terrible form.
He woke. Snow-light shone up into his bedroom. He leaped out of bed and flung up his window.
“Merry Christmas!” he cried to the street where no one passed. They were all inside with their devices.
Three earlier ones:
She Sells Sea Shells by the Sea Shore
by Dale Nelson
“How much?” said Mrs. Lowrie.
“These are a quarter each,” said the little girl on the lonely beach, with a folding chair and shells arranged on a card table. “But
this one is a dollar.”
“It must be special. May I try it?”
She held it to her ear.
Slowly her face changed. She looked around, then down at the girl.
“How did you do that? Who told you?”
“Don’t be angry! I’m sorry!”
Mrs. Lowrie threw a bill on the table and walked to the parking lot. She crunched the shell underfoot; but she would always listen to shells.
At Evening’s End
by Dale Nelson
The vampire takes different forms – male, female, adult, child – but I can always tell. And it can’t come in unless I would invite it into the apartment or this house or that house where I have lived here in this haunted town. Moving around in town didn’t change things. It comes, when it comes, just when evening has ebbed into true night. I open the door, it stands there, and I close the door, never hearing, or saying, a word. This is all I have to do. But if, on some bad evening, I invite it in, it will stay.
A Trip from the Supermarket
by Dale Nelson
In 1967, at the grocery-store checkout, a boy named Brad saw a tabloid front-page faked photograph of a baby born old, white-haired, dreadfully wrinkled, sad-eyed. Brad flinched away. His mother paid for the groceries; he had already forgotten the picture.
Brad grew, listened to the radio, played sports, dated girls, went to college for two years, worked in offices, married, fathered children, drank responsibly, earned promotions, made his parents proud.
One lazy Sunday morning he glanced up and noticed a shrunken tuber on a kitchen counter – wrinkled. Something inside awoke and his skin shriveled, his breath shortened, and he collapsed.
The three earlier stories appeared eventually in Pierre Comtois's semiprozine
Fungi.
isawlightningfall.blogspot.com
