Dead of Night

Early in the morning (3 a.m.) the house phone rang. Remember how late-night phone calls were on my list of things I would not miss? This freaked me out, of course. Corey was spending the night in town celebrating his BD. So of course my first thought was god, something has happened...Excy never hears anything - the man could sleep through a tornado -- so I am sorry say I prodded him awake (hey, if it's bad news I don't want to hear it alone), and checked it out only to see there was no message and a phone number we didn't recognize. (I love caller ID).

Excy immediately fell back asleep but it wired me up. My darkest thoughts began to fester in the darkness. A week before, a gang member came into the restaurant/bar C works in, and acted all squirrely, and high. He drank a beer for which he didn't pay. When C ordered him out, this man threatened him, saying he'd be back with some of his gang members. It's bothered me ever since he told me the story.

Several years ago, the son of friends of ours was killed by high school gang members. Not content to murder their youngest son, these paragons of society called the house and told our friends where they could find their missing son (falsely, as it turned out), and while they raced across town to the location, they burgled their house.

My monkey mind began racing...thinking about murder...home invasion...

Last weekend, a friend of a friend was murdered in his home...no leads yet...his three dogs taken to the pound...

It sounds like LR is a murder capitol, but it's really not...but I guess everyone knows someone affected by crime and tragedy. I wish I could say these were all the stories like this I know; unfortunately it's not.

After stewing an hour with these various scenarios in mind, I finally sat up and wrote a short story draft for a writing competition coming up. I had won second place for a 'Gimme the Creeps' story two years before, and now used my paranoid anxiety to come up with a suspenseful yarn I was fairly pleased with.

I got to sleep around 6 a.m. When I looked at the guidelines after getting up later that morning, I saw they were for submitting a ghost story. Oh well. I have several of those...