Old Bones: A Collection of Short Stories by Steven L. Campbell

discovered by the state police.
Nowhere on the highway looked safe, so I drove the back roads
toward New Cambridge and home.
    Night came early as stormy clouds quickened
the darkness. When I returned to the highway for the final three
miles home, I could tell by the large round and yellow headlights
that passed me that I was not getting closer to where I wanted to
be. The strangeness had reached New Cambridge and I saw that the BP
filling station where I fueled up every weekend had changed its
square green and yellow signs to red and blue oval ones with AMOCO
AMERICAN GAS in white letters across their blue centers. Amoco’s
gas was 47.9 cents for a gallon of regular, and I laughed like a
loon as I turned on the road to home and drove toward the house I
knew would not be there. It wasn’t.
    The road I was on came to a dead end next to
the creek that wound its way behind where my home would someday
stand surrounded by walnut and maple trees with a dog house and two
swing sets and three tire swings below. Someday, three children
would grow up at this undeveloped property. Andrew would go to
college and become a sculptor and teach college art classes at San
Diego, California. The twins, Haley and Becca would become geology
and nursing students respectively at New Cambridge University, and
Becca would fall in love with a guy that her old man would think
wore too many tattoos on his arms.
    After I stopped laughing at the absurdity, I
cried. After I cried, I sat alone trying to figure out what to do
next. For sanity’s sake, I knew I had to find someone and some
place familiar. The once beautiful woods that I loved had now
become ominous tree shapes silhouetted by a large spooky looking
moon drifting in and out of view by dissipating storm clouds.
    I turned around and drove toward downtown New
Cambridge not sure of where I was going but wanting to see a
familiar place. I started over the railroad tracks on Dearborn
Avenue when I realized that the signal lights were flashing
red.
    When had they started using the abandoned
railroad again?
    That was my only thought when the train
struck my car and shattered my world and me.
    Now, I’m broken, alone, a prisoner to cruel
and sinister circumstances that have left me in a vegetative state,
making me unable to communicate to the medical people around me. I
am Patient John Doe, nobody; no one knows who I am. I left my
wallet on the dresser where Carrie has no idea that I’m here,
trapped in the past.
    A feeding tube and ventilator keep me
alive.
    God, take away my misery.
    #

Ghost Lights
    CHARLES DONOHUE FELL. He was on his back and for a
moment he thought he was floating. Raindrops hung in the silver air
all around him, which seemed weird because rocky cliff sides were
rushing past him and upwards. He closed his eyes.
    His sudden plummet into wet and bristly
boughs of pine and spruce trees jarred his senses and caused him to
open his eyes to his green attackers.
    He tumbled from limb to limb, snapping small
branches with his grabbing hands as he searched dizzyingly for one
that would stop his fall. But the rain on every branch was like
oil. He slipped through them quickly, too heavy to be cradled like
the goldfinches that had been there seconds ago, roosting from the
rain. As the birds flew noisily off, his left hip made contact with
solid ground before his forehead did.
    His landing was bristly, yet softer than he
expected. Still, he saw stars and the air had been knocked from his
lungs. He rolled over on his back, lying on an almost dry mattress
of pine needles, and gasped for air until his lungs and stomach
hurt. When his breathing became normal, he closed his eyes and
rested. When he opened them, his head, lungs and stomach ached
less, and the storm had lessened, though cold rain dripped on him
through the towering canopy of pine and spruce branches stretched
over him.
    It was the rain that had caused him to slip
on the smooth marble stone atop Myers Ridge and fall off the edge.
If