Happy Early Halloween

The following is my winning entry into the Writer's Weekly 24-hour short story contest. I wrote it during a fall weekend in Gettysburg about five years ago and I share it now to get you ready for Halloween.

The parameters of the contest were to write on a particular topic (woman brushing snow away from a grave in late autumn, and then running away from it), within a certain number of words (990) and within 24 hours. The parameters were emailed to us at 1 p.m. on a Saturday and the finished entries had to be emailed back by the next day at 1 p.m. I won an honorable mention, which put my story in the top 20 of the 500 entries.

This is my BONUS post for Thursday since I forgot Wednesday -- for cute kid pictures, see the post below this!

Find Me!





Margaret watched as the woman knelt at the grave, brushed the feathery snow from the granite lamb, taped a piece of pink paper to the headstone and then dashed away.



Through the smudged window Margaret saw her come every single day. Some days she bowed her head in prayer. Some days she appeared to weep. On days when it was dreary she’d bring a handful of daisies. Always though, she’d touch the shiny weathered head of the lamb and leave a pink slip of paper.



Margaret traced a finger in the dust of the windowpane found herself tapping it. Tap … tap … tap…



It was a game she and Connor used to play. She’d tap; he’d tap. She’d tap faster; he’d tap faster. They’d tap on the stairs, on the windows, on the doors and tables until they were dancing in circles around the house, laughing and falling into a happy snuggle on the overstuffed couch in front of the fireplace. It was heaven.



Now Connor lay beneath that lamb in the flash-frozen earth and Margaret knew what no one else knew – that she should have saved him.



Margaret moved her hand from the chill of the windowpane down to the sill and reached her long fingers towards the bottle of xanax. Two would make her to move away from the window. Four would make her forget. Eight would make her sleep. Sixteen would make her sleep forever.
Instead of grabbing the bottle she flicked it another inch away from her, marveling as it pitched to the side before righting itself.



It was better to feel the pain. Better to remember.



There was a time when her life was blissfully ordinary. Margaret lived with her husband, six-year-old Connor, and a baby girl who smiled from dawn until dusk. Margaret knew a boundless love. But then the police would knock at her door and hand her a stuffed animal, a blankie, a torn tee shirt and ask her what she felt. And she felt boundless pain.



“Can you find him?” They’d ask.



Once in a while they’d bring skittish parents with them who would grab Margaret’s hand and squeeze it until she said, yes, I can find him.



Newspapers wrote about her, clerics prayed for her, skeptics mocked her.



Yet, she always found them.



But then one day when winter had blown fall to pieces, there was a police officer at her door and he handed her a note.



She remembered seeing his breath in the space between them – crazy for October, she said, laughing. But there was no amusement in the officer’s bright blue eyes as he read the note aloud.





Connor was taken, hidden, dying and – if she was as talented as the papers said – able to be saved by her, and only her.



The words spat at her from the paper, challenging her or in a crazy zealot way supporting her, but it didn’t matter. In that moment, standing in the brisk breeze of an early winter she was just a mother with nails bitten to the quick in fear for her son’s life. In that moment she wasn’t intuitive. In that moment she was scared. She was hopeless. She was human.



So, Margaret went to the room at the top of the stairs where Connor had been just that morning, dawdling his way through his morning routine, and she sat on his bed and pulled his Barney comforter around her. Tighter. Like his arms in an embrace.



“Find me,” she heard it softly. “Find me, Mommy, I’m waiting.”



Margaret closed her eyes and strained to see where he was. But he was just a voice. Like so many voices with no bodies, no arms or legs or heads. Just spirits in space.



Every day a note came. Every day, every hour, every minute, Margaret sat in his room and heard the same thing over and over again. “Find me, Mommy, I’m waiting.”



She told them to search for a barn near a lake and they did. No Connor.



She told them to search for a woodshed in a thicket of evergreen trees and they did. No Connor.



Seven days into her agony, a hunter found him in a tree house in the woods, as cold as the lamb that two days later marked his grave. In his hands he held two pictures: One of a barn by a lake and the other of a woodshed in a circle of evergreens.



Margaret buried him and went into her house to wonder why she couldn’t save him. Wonder if she’d ever be able to forgive herself for letting him go.



Every day the voice still tortured her, “Find me, Mommy.”



And every day this woman with her strawberry blonde hair and her handful of daisies would come by the gravesite.



Margaret tapped on the window to see if the woman noticed, but she just left her note and turned away, not even glancing at the house.



But on this day, Margaret flew out the door in a rage. Connor was her son. She would brush the snow from his grave and lay daisies.



But by the time Margaret had gotten outside and over to the grave the woman was gone. She knelt and rested her head against the lamb, reading Connor’s name and his dates. Her eyes glanced over the pink piece of paper taped to the lamb’s back. It said “Find the Light, Mommy.”



Margaret heard Connor in that moment, louder and sweeter this time. “Find me Mommy. I’m waiting for you.”



There was light. And there was Connor. There was forgiveness and nothing to forgive.



And at the edge of the woods in the freezing cold of an early winter Margaret’s daughter watched her mother finally, 23 years after her grieving suicide, disappear into the thin air of the universe.