The Year Is Gone Beyond Recall

by Jeff Baker

AUTHOR’S NOTE: No Friday Flash Fiction story this week, but I have a story for New Year’s that I’m posting this week. The picture that inspired it I took right before Halloween and I wrote the story a week or so later. Enjoy! ——–jeff

Peregrine House was the name attached to the stylish old brick house, one of a neighborhood of stylish houses that had stood in that area near the river since just after World War One.

The house had originally been owned by a man named Peregrine and there had been a stone falcon set into the concrete of the low wall at one end of the spacious, welcoming front porch until it had been worn away by generations of young children and toppled by a falling tree branch during a storm. It had been part of the Rawley family since the late 1950s when it had been bought by the patriarch and then inherited by the younger son, Gus Rawley, along with a lot of money and Gus lived there, wrote articles for magazines there and was happily ensconced with “Bertie,” really Bertram, the man he had met at a party and they were the rare couple in that generation of the family who actually stayed together over the years. They were, in fact, together in the house for just over forty years before they both passed away.

“I don’t like ‘Passed Away,’” Gus had said at a family Christmas at the house. “It makes it sound like someone just farted.”

The house was vacant for a few months before a Rawley nephew took possession and moved in. But he didn’t stay. Little things moved when he wasn’t there. Strange noises in the night. Laughter. Voices. The nephew believed the house was haunted. And that was how Peregrine House’s reputation stayed until several years after when the nephew’s cousin and her husband took possession.

They heard no creaking, no noises, found the house warm and inviting and dismissed the stories and the stories were forgotten. They raised children who they didn’t tell about the house’s reputation and nobody saw anything unusual.

Almost nobody.

One bright, brisk New Year’s Day morning one of the neighbors, John by name, was walking home from spending the night on another neighbor’s couch after a New Year’s Eve party a few doors down from Peregrine House. As he passed buy, he glanced up at the porch.

There, sitting on the metal chairs that stayed out there in all kinds of weather were two full-sized human skeletons.

“Bout time to take those Halloween decorations down, isn’t it?” John said to nobody in particular, his head throbbing.

One of the skeletons sat up off the chair and waved.

“We’ll do that,” the skeleton said.

“Hi, John!” the other skeleton said, waving.

John stared for a second and ran, barely registering the laughing from the cozy porch as a ghostly couple celebrated the arrival of yet another year.

—end—