The Next World Is Always Better

By Cameron Kennedy

Three short stories regarding the "other side."

To Witch a Woman—It's easy to find your past.  It's much harder to forget it.

The Hourglass Runs—Is she a modern woman or an 18th century pirate?  In either case her time is running out.

Wanted:  The Lusca, Dead or Alive!  $10,000 Reward—Things are always more interesting at closing time.  There might really be treasure in that box.

• Language: English
• Publisher: D. M. Kreg Publishing
• Release date: Nov 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781540169808

Book preview

The Next World

Is Always Better

Three Short Stories

By

Cameron Kennedy

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Electronic edition published by D. M. Kreg Publishing.

Copyright © 2014 by D. M. Kreg Publishing and Cameron Kennedy.

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All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part in any form. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover Art:  Tish Marti and Dreamstime

Table of Contents

To Witch a Woman—It's easy to find your past.  It's much harder to forget it.

The Hourglass Runs—Is she a modern woman or an 18th century pirate?  In either case her time is running out.

Wanted:  The Lusca, Dead or Alive!  $10,000 Reward—Things are always more interesting at closing time.  There might really be treasure in that box.

The Jigsaw Window—Chapter One of Cameron Kennedy's latest book.

To Witch a Woman

Originally published in E-scape

"Señora!" 

The woman’s whisper sliced through the suffocating noise of the airport like a machete through papaya.  We were approaching the exit tax window, which remained mysteriously uncrowded in this crunch of tourists, and I paused to catch my breath. 

Quentin strode to the window, glanced at the sign that read we don’t take traveler’s checks and thumbed through a wad of colones.  Carefully, he selected his grubbier bills to unload for the tax.  Only when he was certain of his count did he glance back at me.  Feel okay, honey? 

Mmmm, I murmured, leaning against the cool cement of the wall, resting a hand on my belly’s five-month swell.  I scanned the flocks of tourists, who clutched their papers and elbowed from one mob to another.  Where was she?  The woman with the penetrating whisper? 

Quentin organized his change by denomination, clipped it all together and tucked it into his fanny pack.  Okay, we’re out of here.  He shouldered his carry-on and headed for the throng at migración. 

"Señora!"  It came again, this time more urgent, carried on a whiff of garlic.  I pulled away from the wall and searched to my left, opposite of the direction Quentin was heading. 

I saw the nurse’s cap first.  It was one of those pointed things perched firm by some miracle on the crown of her head.  White, trimmed in pink, its style came straight out of the early nineteen fifties.  Grandmother had worn one like that.  I’d seen her picture taken at the San José orphanage where she’d worked after the rebellion of 1948 left behind too many orphans in her care. 

Odd, I thought.  Here we were in San José, some sixty years later, combining pleasure with a hunt for my heritage that not even Quentin’s money had been able to find.  And this woman of the voice would have come from Grandmother’s time, judging from the amount of gray hair springing out from under the cap and the wrinkles that withered her away next to nothing.  However, the white apron over the pink frock was fresh, as if it had been store-bought yesterday, slapped through a wringer washer and crisply ironed by a hand who still knew her art, leaving no wrinkles.  A pity she couldn’t do the same for her skin. 

My own hand shot up to the sunburn that ringed my neck.  Yes, the skin was still firm, but what would happen to it as my baby grew, my own Sara, pushing onward through time?  How much was the price of carelessness like that blissful nap yesterday at the pool? 

"Come on, honey," Quentin said over his shoulder. 

His voice stirred me to movement, but as I prepared to lean that way, I couldn’t push against the weight of the air.  It was too hot and sultry, even here on the meseta central.  I glanced back at the nurse.  Even though her eyelids sagged under a burden of life, the faded brown look that she fixed on me, stuck on me, tangled me up.  The spider’s web, I thought. 

In fact, there was a web.  I could see it now as the morning light glinted off a single silvery strand looping gently between the nurse and me.  Strange, what with all the traffic through here.  Strange that it could persist, but then I remembered one of the guides telling Quentin and me about the