The Mountain that Slept Around and Other Stories

By Gregory Miles Thomas

In this collection of stories author Gregory Miles Thomas delves into our relationship with the unknown. "The Mountain that Slept Around" chronicles what happens when the citizens of a small Western town awaken to find a mountain next to them that wasn't there the night before before - and what happens when it leaves again. The remaining group of "Ghost Stories" captures the struggles of ghosts as they wean themselves from earthly attachments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gregory Miles Thomas
• Release date: Jun 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311433602

Gregory Miles Thomas

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The Mountain that Slept Around and Other Stories

Copyright 2015 Gregory Miles Thomas

Published by Gregory Miles Thomas

Smashwords Edition

Cover art A Fantasy Town by MikeinJapan [text added by author]

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The people and events depicted in these stories are fictional. Any resemblance to actual things, places, or people (living or dead) is purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

The Mountain that Slept Around

Ghost Stories

Just One or Two

The Banquet

Royalties

Up From Processing

About The Author

Connect with The Author

The Mountain That Slept Around

One sunny morning the citizens of Fairfield, Utah awoke to find a mountain where there had been no mountain before. It stood due north of the town, its first few pines indistinguishable from those of the city park. It was no hill, either, but a full-fledged mountain, white capped and glistening in the early morning sunlight. A cheerful torrent came bubbling down its side and, taking a sharp bend, wove through the town’s center and out into the plain where a slow, brown, meandering creek used to flow. They gathered in the streets and stared at it in amazement. None of them could recall ever having seen a mountain there before.

Where do you suppose it came from? asked one citizen.

Don’t be absurd. Things like that don’t just come and go, replied another. It must have been there all the time. We...we just didn’t notice it.

That became the official explanation: that the townspeople simply hadn’t noticed the presence of it for lo these many years, but now, being ready, they had discovered it.

Oddly, no one could remember what used to occupy the spot. Try as they might, they could think of nothing that belonged there in its place. That was further evidence that it had been there all the time.

However, two problems immediately presented themselves. First, no one could think of the name of the mountain.

That’s silly, said the Mayor. If it has been here all along, it must have a name. What’s it called?

But no one could answer.

Well, who was its discoverer?

They tried to determine who was the first person to see it that morning, but there were several claimants, and none could outdo the other, so they didn’t have a clear cut discoverer to name it after. They tried looking at it from several different angles to see if its shape suggested any likely names. No luck there, either, though Pointy was briefly considered and dismissed as undignified. They finally named it after the town and, as the fiction that it had always been there took firmer root, it came to be said that the town, in fact, was named after the mountain.

"Then why is it Fair field?" someone would ask.

The field is here at the bottom. The mountain led us to it... offered someone tentatively. They all looked at her, nodding their heads that she should go on. We steered toward the mountain and found our own little paradise.

Smiles broke out, and it was woven into local legend.

The second problem was that nobody dared to set foot on it at first. Anything that had appeared so suddenly might vanish just as quickly and nobody wanted to be on it when it did. At least nobody except those who wished for precisely that fate - you know, the kind who wait around for alien spaceships to scoop them from the face of the earth -