I had my first author reading today! I was super excited for the opportunity. The actual event was… a little underwhelming, but, again, it was a fantastic opportunity and I’m really grateful for it! And it ran late, which is great! Except Akilah and I still had to get something to eat, and I still had to get my steps in and write a story! Fortunately, this story literally came to me on my walk. It was me, Alli, and…

We started up the hill and Alli kept looking behind us. She usually only does that when there’s something back there – a dog, a person – that she wants to pay attention to. But there was no one behind us on the climb up cemetery hill…

Yes, at the top of the hill there’s a cemetery. But it’s still a bit off from the top of the hill – I’ve never actually been inside or close enough to see any graves. And we’ve done this hill hundreds of times now, and she never gets paranoid like this going up (there’s a spot on the other side of cemetery hill that I wrote about on October 1 that we try to avoid in the dark, but this wasn’t that side).

When we reached the top of cemetery hill and turned back on another road, I definitely started to hear things. A rustle in the bushes isn’t anything to write home about. But a rattle in consecutive bushes as you walk along… a little weird. It genuinely sounded like something was following us behind and to the side – where “to the side” would involve the impossible transit through bushes, fences, parked cars…

And then we hit the dark stretch. It’s about a quarter mile where there are no streetlights and the houses are spaced apart with very little lights outside. Alli was looking behind her still; so was I. At one point I stopped and turned my flashlight behind me, I was so certain there was someone or something back there. Cranking up the power of the flashlight beam, I scanned up the dark deserted street, into the bushes, into the trees. I almost hoped to see the mirror-like reflection of a pair of cat eyes in the bushes – at least a flesh-and-blood mountain lion would explain this feeling.

Nothing.

Alli looked at me and I looked at her. And then we booked it down the hill.

Back on the hill two ghosts emerged, one from the bushes, the other floated down from an overhead tree branch. They high-fived each other. “Man, this just gets so much easier when the veil between our world and the living is so thin!”

“It’s almost unfair,” the second ghost said. “We’ve been trying to scare that guy for months!”