STRANGE PERCEPTIONS
14 Fantastical Stories
by
Chuck Heintzelman
StoryChuck.com
Credits
Cover image © 2012 Emily C. Ramsey, Take Cover Designs
Freshly Ghost © 2011 Chuck Heintzelman
Memory Fades © 2011 Chuck Heintzelman
Image for Memory Fades © 2003 Wolverine Enterprises
Wizard Lottery © 2011 Chuck Heintzelman
Image for Wizard Lottery © Algol
Voice Mail © 2010 Chuck Heintzelman
Fantastic Goulash in the Streets © 2010 Chuck Heintzelman
The Death Gerbil © 2011 Chuck Heintzelman
The Train Bandits © 2010 Chuck Heintzelman
In the Closet © 2010 Chuck Heintzelman
Babysitter © 2011 Chuck Heintzelman
Image for Babysitter © Lucian Coman
The Sinister Smile © 2010 Chuck Heintzelman
Pact of the Banshee © 2011 Chuck Heintzelman
Mad Goldilocks © 2009 Chuck Heintzelman
Trunk of Caramel © 2011 Chuck Heintzelman
Three Wishes and a Bath © 2011 Chuck Heintzelman
Image for Three Wishes and a Bath © Dana Rothstein
About these Stories
Most of these stories were created during 2011. I struggled to categorize these tales. Some stories creep up to the edge of Weird Fiction and one even has a western flavor. Overall, I’m classifying the stories as Fantasy. They are not the type of fantasy filled with elves and dwarfs. No. Here you will read about the ordinary fantasy that occurs when an normal person encounters the extraordinary.
Here’s a short blurb about each story.
Freshly Ghost - Being dead was unlike anything Chance Phillips had expected. For one thing, his name changed to Reo. For another, he discovered ghosts could move through time. But when he learns a friend, a live friend, is in danger will he and his ghost friend Jeremy be able to save her in time?
Memory Fades - This is a short story about an elderly woman that sees something which causes her to doubt her senses.
Wizard Lottery - Every 100 years the kingdom has a lottery to determine who will be the new wizard. When a simple farm boy wins the lottery and becomes the kingdom’s new wizard, he tries to fix deceptions perpetrated by the previous wizard. But will he succeed when the previous, dark wizard is in his head, controlling all of his actions?
Voice Mail - A fun little story told entirely though voice mail.
Fantastic Goulash in the Streets - Favel only wanted to be left alone. She was content to push her shopping cart around, ignore the other homeless, and stay out of the way of the City’s upper class. But when her friend gets involved in a revolution against the City, she’s thrust into a conflict she wants no part of. Can she protect her friend, and herself, from the City, it’s Sentinels and atom blasters, or will she disappear as so many of the lower class do?
The Death Gerbil - When Dean Weathers uses his antique Brownie camera to take photographs he discovers something strange. A small black gerbil mysteriously appears in snapshots of animals about to die. But seeing the gerbil in his latest photo is both unexpected and unnerving.
The Train Bandits - This story takes place roughly in the time of Huckleberry Finn. It is a boyhood adventure with bank robbers and dynamite. It explores sacrifices true friends will make for each other.
In The Closet - A short story about a different type of “monster” in the closet.
Babysitter - When Emily Stillman babysits for a new family she discovers a horrific secret that causes her to doubt her sanity.
The Sinister Smile - A little snippet showing a man making a deal with a devil.
Pact of the Banshee - When the Banshee returns to the village woods and terrifies the villagers with its nightly screams, the cycle of murders start again. Young Sean Collins sets out to find and destroy the menace, but will he succeed when his friends and family turn against him?
Mad Goldilocks - A girl spins a wild tale to her psychologist about the time she spent camping in the woods with her family and became lost. She claims she’s the real Goldilocks … but is she?
Trunk of Caramel - Jeremy works as the night manager at a motel. An ideal job for a college student. But one evening when a creepy guest with strange trunk checks in, Jeremy’s life is changed forever.
Three Wishes and a Bath - Ellie Goldstein’s Sunday evenings usually consisted of dinner with the parents and ducking her mother’s attempts to play matchmaker. But last Sunday her mother gave her a present that would turn her life upside down, a strange little doll that forces her to make a wish. If she could have anything in the world, what would she wish for?
Freshly Ghost
A Ghost Boy Reo Story
Death ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
For one thing, death’s harder. When alive you don’t have to think about what you’re doing every moment. Sure, life has struggles, and they seem so important at the time, but those struggles lose significance when you die. When dead you have to concentrate, focusing on the world around you, or you’ll drift along your life.
Death is weird that way.
My name’s Reo and I’m a baby ghost. No, I’m not an infant, crawling around with a poopy diaper, looking for my binky. I look the same as I did when alive, a seventeen year old, gangly boy. I hate to say that, but being dead gives you a better perspective and, yeah, I was a gawky, dorky looking dude. I’m a baby ghost because I’ve been dead for a short time. Three days dead to be precise.
Reo’s my ghost name. In life my name was Chance Pertwith Phillips. Yeah, Pertwith is horrible. It was Dad’s middle name, too. He said he was starting a family tradition. Guess the tradition died with me.
Don’t ask me why you get a new name when you die. Seems a bit pointless to me. I don’t have the foggiest who picks the names.
First thing I remember after dying was being in a white space. Like in the clouds. No walls, no ceiling, but there was a floor. I couldn’t distinguish anything around me. This short, heavy man with a grizzled, gray-stubbled face floated over to me. He had bare feet and wore dingy, denim overalls, with no shirt underneath and one strap undone. He reminded me of one of those black and white photos of poor kids back in the depression. You almost expected to see a wheat stalk between his teeth. Instead, he chewed on a cigar.
He stuck out his hand to me. “Heya, I’m Marty.” He clenched the cigar stub in his teeth as he spoke.
I stuck out my hand to shake and my hand passed right through his, our hands occupying the same space. It took a half a second for me to realized what happened and I jumped backward, falling, then scrambling back several feet. “Ugghh,” I said, involuntarily.
Marty bent over laughing, loud guffaws sounding like some asthmatic donkey. He stood there, hands on knees, wheezing.
I got to my feet, watching this character, ready to bolt if needed.
He slapped a knee with one hand before straightening back up. “Ho boy. Works every time. I tell you. It’s the little things that make death so fun.”
I stared at him, not amused. He had said “death” and I recognized the truth. I was dead.
“Ah lighten up kid.” He produced a clipboard, brown with a large silver snap stretched tight over an inch of paper. Don’t ask me where the clipboard came from—maybe from down the front of his overalls? He flipped through the clipped pages. “Let’s see. Here you are. Chance Phillips?” He raised an eyebrow to me.
I nodded, still ready to run.
“Okay. Chance was your life name. Your name is now … Reo.” He paused dramatically before saying my new name with great flourish. “I’m your counselor. Your transition liaison.” He made air quotes
. “Here to help you adjust to death. Now, can I get you to sign here?”
He held his clipboard out and offered me a pen. A small silver chain snaked from pen to clipboard.
I reached for the pen. My hand went right through it.
Marty exploded with laughter again. He laughed so hard he spat out his cigar. It landed near my feet. “Oh God, kid. It never gets old. Only half you newbies fall for it twice in a row.”
What a jerk. Me just realizing I had died and this douche kept pranking me.
He cleared his throat. “Now, better stop fooling around and get to business. Can you hand me my stogie?”
I folded my arms over my chest. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me three times and I’d have to wear a tee-shirt saying “I’m with Stupid” and a giant arrow pointing up.
He nodded. “Good kid. So you do learn.” He reached down, grabbed the cigar, stuck it back between his teeth.
I had so many questions. What happened next? What do I do? Is there a God? Was this all there was, standing around in a cloudy room?
Marty must have noticed my confusion. He grabbed my shoulder. I mean really grabbed it; I felt his fingers squeezing. I didn’t flinch though. “How come …” my question trailed off.
“How come I can touch you now, but not when we shook hands?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“You’re a baby, kid. You don’t know how to touch. I’m 82 years dead now. It’s easy for me.”
Death isn’t just weird, it’s surreal.
“Don’t worry kid. You’ll learn. I’ll catch up with you later. For now why don’t you go play.”
He smacked me in the chest with an open palm—which I also felt—and I snapped back to my tenth birthday party.
The instant Marty smacked me I heard a loud roar in my ears but before I could cover them—not that my ghost hands over my ghost ears would have helped—the noise stopped and I was someplace new.
I’d have recognize the mottled olive-green linoleum floor anywhere. I stood in mom’s kitchen, our old place, the mobile home she got after dad died. Ten year old me sat at the kitchen table, the old rickety thing I stood on two years later and busted. Friends surrounded me at the table, watching me get ready to blow out the candles. Exactly as I remembered it.
That’s when I realized I could remember everything from my life. I mean every instant, every thought, every action. I could even remember the dreams I had while asleep.
Overwhelming, to say the least.
I thought about my death, the car accident, my best friend Jeremy Smith driving. We had picked up a six-pack from the Overland Station, the only place in Warner’s Crest that didn’t ask for ID. Half their beer business came from high-school kids. It was just after lunch and Jeremy and I decided to skip school, go hide out on state land and throw back a few cold ones and listen to some tunes. Jeremy reached into the back seat of his old Volkswagen bug, “The Beast” he called it. The car looked like a patchwork quilt with different color doors, fender panels, and hood. He reached back to grab a beer and came up on the corner too fast, the front passenger-side wheel went over the edge, the car rode along on its undercarriage and Jeremy jerked the wheel. Miraculously, the car popped back up on the road, almost as if God had been looking down, thinking these kids are stupid but I’ll cut them a break, and reaching down to pick us up and set us back on the road.
I looked at Jeremy. What a close call.
Then a Dodge Ram pickup, came around the corner and hit us head-on. Next came an ambulance ride, three operations, laying in a sterile hospital bed for two weeks in a coma. Finally, dying.
I didn’t know what happened to Jeremy.
“Reo?”
I turned. There stood dad, strong and healthy, no sign of the cancer.
“Dad.”
I think, had I been alive and had a body, tears would have blurred my vision. I felt as though I cried, but had no tears. Maybe ghosts can’t cry. I opened my arms to hug him, but stopped. I didn’t know if I could handle it if my hug went right through him.
Dad didn’t hesitate. He wrapped his arms around me, and I felt his hug. Gentle, like he was afraid to break me.
He broke our embrace. “Sorry, I’m two years up stream. Everything’s harder when you’re so far away.”
I didn’t have a clue what he meant.
“You’re new aren’t you?”
I nodded. Around us, at the birthday party, kids in party hats sang happy birthday to ten year old me, mom and several other parents hovered, Mr. Hancock’s hand lingered on mom’s. Wow. I had never noticed before. Mr. Hancock, my friend Peter’s dad, a single parent like mom, seemed to be at our house quite often then. A couple months later he stopped coming over.
The room faded and a distant roar sounded in my ears. Dad’s hand shot out, grabbed my arm, and the room snapped back into focus.
“Careful Chance. Sorry, Reo, you still seem like Chance to me.”
“What happened?”
“Being ghosts we’re attached to our life,” he said. “If you don’t concentrate on what’s around you, then you’ll pop to random points in your life. If you get lost in thought you get lost in your life. Don’t worry, it gets easier the longer you’re dead. If you find you’ve slipped away, just think about where you were and you’ll snap back. You move around by closing your eyes and thinking of a point in your life.”
He examined my face, worry lines grooved his forehead, and continued. “Moving away from your live body is hard. Try going across the street. The further away you get, the harder it is to concentrate. It’s the same way if you move after your death. Or before your birth.”
“You mean we can move through time?”
“Yes,” he said. “Sort of. Time and place are different when you’re dead. You always exist in the now, in world time. See, we’re at your birthday party, but we’re not part of this time, we exist in the now. You can go back anywhere in the past, even before you’re born, but the farther you get from your life, the harder it is. Make sense?”
I shrugged one shoulder.
“It’ll all get clear. The future is different. If you’re strong enough you can go up to the now. Since you’re a ghost, now is always after you died. It’s been what, nine years since I died? I don’t know if I’m strong enough to go to the current now, but I’m strong enough to see you here at your tenth birthday party. Here I’m two years away from my life.”
“So, could I go ahead in time, find the winning lottery numbers and then come back?”
Dad laughed. “No. You can’t go past the current now. The true future has infinite possibilities. And what good would lottery money do for you now?”
Death is strange.
“Listen, Reo. I can’t stay much longer. If you see your mom before I do, send her my love and tell her I forgive her.”
“Oh my God. Mom’s dead?”
“No, she’s alive. Just in case you see her before me.”
Dad’s form became faint. He faded away.
I stared at the spot he had been for a moment. What did he mean he forgave her?
Not knowing what to do. I decided to watch the party.
Ten year old me had already blew out the birthday candles, tiny, multi-color, wax pillars. Mom always made chocolate cake. It’s the best birthday cake she says. Ten year old me smiled, showing a missing front tooth.
The kids around the table came from the neighborhood, mostly. My birthday was July 8th, summer, so I didn’t get to invite kids from school. Except for Jeremy Smith, my best friend even all those years ago. He didn’t live in my neighborhood, but I still invited him. Jeremy had red hair and so many freckles he seemed to be more freckles than not. He hated being teased about his freckles. I never teased him, about the freckles anyway.
Mom had made me invite Ivy Romaine on account she was best friends with her mom. Ivy lived a few houses away. She was the only girl at the party. I’m sure she hated being there as much as I hated her being there. A
few years later I developed a massive crush on her, but I couldn’t stand her then. Ten year old me was so stupid.
Four other boys besides Jeremy attended the party. Bobby Marshall, Peter Hancock, Doug Rivera, and Shelley Perkins. We all were close in grade school but middle school throws you together with more kids and stirs everything up, resulting in different friends. I used to mock Shelley and tell him he had a girl’s name. Or I’d sing “Shelley, smelly, fatso belly.” I kept mocking him even when we got to high school. I think he hated me.
“You still here, kid? I thought you’d have blown this party by now.”
I turned. There stood Marty, chewing on his cigar.
“Listen kid. I only have a couple minutes. By now one of two things usually happens. Either you get all blubbery and go on about how you were too young to die, life’s unfair, and all that crap, or you’ve got a million questions.”
He raised an eyebrow at me. “You feeling all sad? Need a shoulder to cry on?”
I didn’t know how I felt. I shook my head no.
“Good. That happens I have one piece of advice. Get over yourself! You’re dead. You’re a ghost. Nobody cares. Especially me. Capiche?”
I nodded my head.
“Good. Okay, let’s go through a couple questions real quick. First the big one. The grand poo-bah of questions. What’s the meaning of life? Now, I could give you some metaphysical bullshit like it’s to achieve enlightenment or to become one with all things. Phhttt!” Marty blew a raspberry. “Who knows the meaning of life? More important, who cares? I had this kid a couple years back who told me with great certainty he knew the meaning of life. Want to know what he said?”
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