stonepicnicking_okapi

I am going to be trying to post some seasonal ficlets here. This is an original work I wrote for the Fandom Empire team challenge.

Title: (Ghost)writer
Fandom: Original
Characters/Pairings: Writer, Ghost
Prompt: (ghost)writer
Word Count: 550
Rating: Gen
Warning: None
Summary: An author with writer's block meets a lonely ghost.

If anyone asked why she was late to supper, she could simply say she got lost or got inspired or something like that. After all, at a writers’ retreat, punctuality wasn’t a huge priority.

Her phone silently dropped to the ground and promptly disappeared into the tall grass.
Ordinarily, the disappearance of her phone would’ve sent her into a panic, but these days it was actually a relief not to see it. The phone was a reminder of the emails and texts it held about what was her huge priority, her only priority.

Her book. Her second.

The first had been brilliant. Where was the second?

Deadlines had approached and passed, been extended and passed again.

She had nothing.

This retreat, isolated and mostly unknown, was supposed to provide a remedy.

And she’d run away.

No, she’d taken a ‘nature walk,’ and when the path had ended, she kept on going and now she was joining her phone and lying down in the tall grass of an overrun garden of an abandoned cottage.

She was lying down among the falling leaves and the mushrooms and the who-knew-what-else waiting for the earth to put her out of her misery and swallow her up.

---

She was brilliant. She’d been brilliant before, of course, but now she was even more so.

Anyone could haunt a house. Or a cottage. Or a castle.

Anyone could haunt a building. After all, there were walls and doors and so many things which could creak.

No, it took a special restless soul to haunt a garden.

That’s what she told herself, but the cold truth was she was a horrible ghost. There wasn’t one legend, myth, superstition, or jumping-rope song about her. She knew this because she’d listened so hard to anyone, everyone, who’d happened to pass.

There weren’t many. Not many at all.

And that was the problem.

Children didn’t dare each other to spend a night in her garden. They didn’t even try to vandalise it!

All Hallow’s Eve and Walpurgisnacht, solstices and anniversaries, they came and went.

The cottage sank further into disrepair, really it was ghastly now, but no, no, she was alone.
And she had so many stories to tell, so many tales was inside her; the moans which filled the garden were self-pitying ones, moans which no one heard.

She had the animals and the plants. She had the seasons.

But she was lonely…

…until she wasn’t.

---

“Who’s that?!”

You can hear me?

“Oh, God, am I going crazy?!”

You can hear me!

“Am I dead? Did I die?”

No, I am. I am dead. You are not.

“What?!”

Windfall apples.

“What about windfall apples?”

You can hear me!

“Who are you?”

I’m a ghost, and you’re in my garden. Who are you?

“I am an author.”

Do you write ghost stories?

“I do now!”

---

As endings went, she couldn’t have penned a better one. With the success of Windfall Apples, she was able to buy the cottage. The retreat became world famous for its treatment of chronic writers’ block and was booked for years in advance. All threats from her editors and publishers and all debts she’d accumulated were forgotten, forgiven, or paid.

And she and her (ghost)writer lived happily ever—meaning forever and ever and ever, well into eternity—after.