Sacred Chickens Classic

Winter Ghosts 

by Julie Carpenter 

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​​I drove through the dark last night and the fog was on the move, like an army of ghosts.  It wasn’t a sit down, settling fog, moving in with a steady purpose. It was one of those fogs that swirled itself into a solid cloud that totally obscured the moon soaked farms on either side one minute and broke into solitary wraiths the next, each with a different mournful aspiration, uncertain as to the path down which its hopes might hide. Amusing antics, but I was in no hurry to join their ranks so it was a bit of a harrowing drive.  Here’s the road; now it’s gone, a funny joke for the specters of the fog, not so funny for me.

​But this morning the joke was on them.  It seems last night that the circus of ghostly fog finally exhausted itself and settled in the trees for a bit of a rest after the performance.  It was caught napping by the cold and when the sun woke it up this morning it found it had been transformed from a shifting, dancing troupe of performing ghosts into a mere embellishment for the trees, solid, stiff and fixed in place, an embarrassing position for a group of specters. Trees that yesterday were mere skeletons of themselves, that were nothing the eye could settle on, were suddenly bursting like clouds behind the small tacky buildings on the main drag, glittering, white, filled out almost as big as summer with leaves of ice.  Tops of houses and even the little strip malls were coated with white.  Dead grass as sharp and crystalline as icicles. From behind the concrete walls of the bridge, frosty branches hung over the Elk River as it splashed over the rocks like liquid ice. Everything glittered like Fairyland, iced with  frozen ghosts. For a few minutes, it looked as though Walmart and Sonic and that ugly building covered with blue tarp at the end of the street might have wandered into some land of enchantment by mistake, as if they might be the ephemeral, endangered species instead of the trees.  I thought maybe the plain and dirty buildings might feel they'd wandered into the wrong realm and disappear in a cloud of confusion.  But the sun kept rising and getting stronger and the ghostly cloud began to wake up and pull itself together, ashamed of being caught earthbound. As I write this the cloud of ghosts is lifting itself again and leaving,  Walmart and Sonic and Marvin’s and Krystal are sighing with relief to be back in the “real” world, and the ghosts, I assume are going back home or still searching for whatever it is that a flock of ghosts might be searching for. 

Bio:
Julie Carpenter is the creator of the Sacred Chickens website.  She is dedicated to telling stories and making sure that indie writers and publishers have a way to be heard.  She uses narrative, her own and others’, to help interpret the world. She has a Master of Professional Writing from the University of Memphis, with an emphasis in Composition Theory. She wants to bend reality one story at a time.  Julie’s work has appeared in Fiction on the Web and will be included The New Guard. She is currently working on a novel.

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