No Such Thing
By Sage Collins
My obnoxiously cheerful dead best friend has been staring out the cabin window—the triangle one at the top of the high-ceilinged room—for an hour. I’ve been trying not to care, but the longer he hangs there, glowing like he’s the bulb at the top of a lighthouse, the more it gets on my nerves. I give up on ignoring him with a sigh. “What are you doing?”
“Can’t you hear the howling?” He floats down so that he’s hovering over me as I lie on the couch. The light radiating off his skin is bright enough for me to know he’s having more fun playing the part of being scared than actually being scared.
All I hear is the wind blowing past the cabin with that annoying whine it has. The eaves seem to be perfectly positioned to help the wind sing as it whips around them. “It’s the wind.”
He shakes his head. “It’s werewolves!”
“There’s no such thing as werewolves.”
He opens his mouth, but I beat him to it. “You’re going to say ‘there’s no such things as ghosts, either,’ and then I’m going to smack you, and then you’re going to pout, so let’s skip all that. There’s no such things as werewolves, and you are not proof of that.”
He grows brighter as he grins at me, calling my bluff. “You wouldn’t smack me.”
I sit up, shielding my eyes. “God, dim a little.”
There’s a thump against the cabin, and he flies behind me, peeking over my shoulder as if I could hide him. My ghost is such a scaredy-cat.
“Just the wind?” he asks, his voice shaking.
“No,” I deadpan. “That was obviously a werewolf.”
By day, Sage Collins is an aquatic toxicologist, keeping water safe from polluters, viruses, and supervillains; by night, she’s a supermoderator on Absolute Write Water Cooler’s forums, where she runs the Flash Fiction Challenge. Along with haunting Rat Bag Lit, her stories appear in My Galvanized Friend, Novellum, and Starspun Lit.