Note: every month I’ll be writing a short story based off a different horror trope/theme for fun. My goal is to write each story in one sitting.
January is GHOSTS. Yeah I know it’s February now but I just started the challenge last week bruh.
Enjoy!
Hot and Cold
Frank Delamont wasn’t a man for early mornings. They weren’t for him neither. The cold floor of his home at 5 a.m. was enough reason to say “Fuck it” to the whole affair.
But, he couldn’t sleep with her in bed next to him. It wasn’t that he didn’t love his wife. If you were to accuse him of that to his face he’d pop you one right in the jaw—back when he was a young lad that is. Now, pushing eighty and soon to be daisies as well, he’d more than likely pop his back if he tried.
Still. How could he be expected to sleep next to her?
Frank lowered himself to the floor beside his bed with an umph and the distinct sound of crackling joints. Like bubble tape, he thought and laughed. He loved that as a kid. Squishing the air pockets of the wrapping around his mother’s packages until they were all gone.
His feet touched the floor of his bedroom and the chilly sensation set his teeth on edge.
He groaned as he stood upright. Looking back at the bed, Julie was already gone.
She touched his hand last night. Wrapped her arm around him. The skin as cold as ice. The texture like refrigerated fish. It nearly sent him into cardiac arrest.
She had never touched him before. Not since she died two years ago that is.
Frank was a man with a problem. His beloved wife of fifty five years was dead. Yet that didn’t stop her from taking her share—and his—of the blankets.
Each. And every. Night.
At first it was subtle, hardly noticeable. He thought he may have left the window open and it was just the draft. Soon things escalated. The bed sagged as an invisible presence lay down in it. At times he would hear her exhale fitfully. Much like she did before her lungs gave out and the cancer took her.
Then it was her saddling up next to him through the barrier of the blankets to cuddle.
But she never touched him skin to skin before.
Frank left the bedroom. Made a pot of coffee in the kitchen. And sat down at the table by the window to look at the news on his new smartphone. The one Charlie had got him for his birthday last year.
Frank didn’t see his son and his grandkids much anymore. Aside from birthdays and Christmas, Frank was already a ghost to them. But still, the phone reminded him of them; if they never thought of him, well, that was okay.
Frank scrolled through the news app.
The price of eggs was soaring.
A sinkhole opened up downtown.
Some foreign country he didn’t care to try and pronounce was angry about U.S. tariffs.
Frank muttered to himself. “Whole world’s goin’ to hell in a handbasket.”
He sighed and put the phone down on the table. He shivered. A touch of cold air danced on the back of his neck.
He didn’t need to turn around to know what—who—it was. He forgot to close the bedroom door.
Damn it.
Julie didn’t just sleep next to him in the night. She would appear randomly throughout the day as well. And with her: the cold.
Frank picked up the box of tissues on the table and hurled it at the door. It struck the edge and the door closed most of the way. Not fully, but enough to keep out the cold, mostly.
Frank’s lips quivered and he suddenly regretted that the tissues were so far away now. Meaning he’d have to struggle to get up and go get them.
Here he was, self-professed lover of his wife. So terrified of her presence that he saw no comfort in it. Isn’t that what so many people wanted when their loved ones passed? Some evidence that they still were? Still mattered in some way?
As Frank sat there, tears stinging his eyes, messing up his horn-rimmed glasses, he noticed something in the corner of the kitchen. Over by the window, at the far side of the table he sat at, a wave of golden light poured in from the morning sun.
It was as if fireflies danced in that sunlight. Danced and sparkled in the vague outline of a person. One with shoulder-length hair, leaning over what looked like a cup of coffee. And was that a smile that flashed just then? Right before it all faded away?
Frank would have expected his heart to skip a beat or two, possible even three, if he saw his wife. Of all the nightly visits, he never did. He only heard her. And felt her. But just now, in the already dimming morning light, he actually saw his Julie. In the same spot she always drank her morning grounds at. Looking the same as she used to: happy. There were no cold drafts here. No spine tingling freezes. Frank felt—in what must have been the first time in a long time—warm.
That night, Frank almost slept out on the sofa. Despite the vision he saw that morning, one of hope and joy, he couldn’t bear another night. Not if she touched him with her cold and dead hands.
But his back was shit. So much so, that had he slept on anything other than his specially crafted orthopedic mattress, he wouldn’t be standing up the next day.
And if Julie’s spirit followed him, no matter where he slept? He’d be trapped. Stuck in the coffin of blankets.
So here he was, bracing himself for another night. Praying to a God he didn’t believe in to keep his dead wife at bay. He got under the covers. Left the lights on, knowing they did no good. Countless times he had done that, and with every visitation, they’d all be out anyway.
Anxiety and heart palpitations kept his eyes open. He almost wished he would just up and die already. Be done with it all. But then would he join Julie? As a cold corpse, doomed to haunt the marriage bed for eternity?
Despite his terror, he was not a young man. Sleep took hold of Frank Delamont by the collar and forced him to surrender.
Clammy. Cold and wet. The hand slid across Frank’s neck and moved down to his chest. He never wore a shirt to bed and the dead hand caressed his bare skin.
A moan, something between shock and anguish, something he never thought himself capable of, escaped his mouth.
He tried to roll out of bed. He knew the fall could break his hip. He didn’t care.
Frank struggled against the hand but it held him in place.
A slight breeze, a puff of air, colder than winter’s night, touched the back of his ears. An exhale. An inhale. A wheeze from scarred lung tissue. The breath was sucked in as if what was behind him was preparing to speak.
The touch was one thing. Hearing her was something that would surely kill him.
“Please, no.” He wasn’t even sure that he said these words. They slipped out of him through gasping breaths.
As soon as it had come, it left. The hand released him. The temperature in the room lifted. Sweating, Frank rolled onto his back. He dared to steal a glance at her side of the bed.
Frank whimpered.
A lump.
A mass.
The impression of a body under those covers.
He no longer felt the cold, but he did see the blankets rise and fall, timed with the grating and painful breathing of his dead wife.
Frank was done.
He did not see how could survive another night.
“I love you honey. But I can’t take this anymore.” He said as he looked down at her side of the bed the next morning. The blankets were ruffled. Kicked down to the foot of the bed as if she were having a fitful nightmare.
Or struggling to breathe.
Her last week at home flashed in his mind. The oxygen concentrator at the side of the bed—now thankfully stowed away in the attic. The fresh flowers he got for her every morning from that store owned by that Italian fella down on 5th Street. The smell of death lingering in the air like incense.
Frank made his way to the kitchen. Skipped his morning coffee. Skipped the news.
He waited. By the window.
Watching.
“Please, I can’t do this anymore. I miss you so much, but you have to stop.”
Frank sat down at the table, put his face into his hands, and wept.
The birds sang just outside the window. Cardinals he thought. He wasn’t much of an animal guy, that was more Julie’s thing. Sitting at that spot by the window each morning with her coffee, watching the birds, tuning to him and saying—
“That was a cardinal.”
Frank’s heart tried to burst through his chest. He shot up straight in his chair and its legs screeched across the hardwood floor.
“What…Jules?”
There was one there. Could he handle it if there were?
No, that wasn’t true. There was…something.
The light by the window may not have been as bright as yesterday’s—it was more of a dim gray sheen due to the thunderclouds massing out over by the river—but there she was. Hardly visible. Not so much outline by golden fireflies as she was stenciled in with diluted charcoal.
But it was her. No doubt about it.
It was his Julie. And with her came the warmth of her smile.
He felt a hand on his but saw none. Not clammy. Not dead. Warm with life. And love. And a lifetime of dedication.
And that was it. As quickly as she came, she left. Out the window it felt like. To fly with the cardinals.
In that moment a chest was unlocked in Frank Delamont’s mind.
Why was he able to see her here, when he had never been able to before? A version of Julie not racked with cancer. Not frozen in the clutches of the void.
It’s because she touched you in bed that night. So that she could touch you here by the light.
Frank knew now. He understood. If he wanted to see his wife’s smile and feel the gentle summer touch of her hand, he would have to endure the frigid winter embrace as well.
He looked down the hall at the closed bedroom door. Thought about leaving then and there. Sayonara and all that. He had enough pills to do it too.
A warm breeze from the closed window flowed into the kitchen. Lifted his head. He saw a red bird dancing on the window sill.
A fucking cardinal it is.
He smiled.
Got up against the strain of his muscles.
Went to his bedroom door.
Opened it.
Wow, that’s a winner. Love the push and pull of sadness and horror here.
A bittersweet tale of lost love. Well done weaving the opposites together in such a beautiful way.