Announcing my flash fiction for the prompt on Wednesday, May 3, 2023!
I stood at the top of the decayed stairs as I watched the man below invade my home. Making him leave would be so, so easy.
The man’s flashlight passed over me, and I shuddered. The air shifted around me, and the man refocused his flashlight on me.
He couldn’t see me, but he knew I was there.
“Go away!” I hissed, but I knew he didn’t understand. I only sounded like wind.
The first stair creaked as the man lowered his foot on it, a fleck of paint breaking free.
“Leave me alone!” I shrieked. “Leave!”
The man kept coming, and I kept screaming. Wind lashed against him, but he didn’t stop.
At the last stair, the man paused.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Sorry? I screamed in his face. If he’s sorry, he’d leave.
But he didn’t blink against the wind. He just kept talking, his voice low.
“No one believed you, no one stopped him. And he hurt you until the end.”
I kept screaming at him, my eyes burning.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I have this…” He pulled a gravestone out of his backpack.
With my name on it.
“Can I place it here for you?”
I stopped yelling.
A memorial.
Something so someone knew I was here.
I didn’t answer, and the man retreated back down the stairs. In the center of the living room, he placed the gravestone and secured it to the floorboards.
Tingles spread throughout my ghost, then I was gone.
Finally remembered.
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