Jenni Button's Journey Home

By Ammon Smith

Little Jenni Button dreamed of fitting in at her new school. She dreamed of seeing her parents reunited, and being a family again. Most of all, it seemed Jenni dreamed of being noticed by her girlhood crush.
Some dreams have a way of coming unhappily true.
When the little girl in love meets tragedy at her private school, she discovers a place between life and death. Trapped in an endless realm of dream and song, she carries with her a little gray stone that keeps a secret all its own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ammon Smith
• Release date: Nov 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370282265

Ammon Smith

Ammon R. Smith was born on Halloween in the scenic state of Washington, where he currently lives on an island, and dreams of other places.

Book preview

Jenni Button’s Journey Home

A Short Story

Ammon R. Smith

Copyright © 2015 by Ammon R. Smith

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This story is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are products of the author’s imagination or are mentioned fictitiously. Any resemblance to locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Contents

I: Madison

II: Gray Stone

III: The Other Place

IV: Forces

V: The Man By The Path

VI: Going Home

Acknowledgements

Other Works By Ammon R. Smith

I

Madison

She turned her gaze outside, and there it lingered. The foliage flushed with orange and gold; a sea of flames that autumn afternoon, shimmering in breezes against an overcast of winter gray. It was November. She knew November because she’d been taught the months, and the seasons, and the days. It had been drilled into her like math and reading had been drilled into her, and the thought came without deliberation. A winter sky in November was not strange, even if it was not welcome.

In the brevity between her roaming thoughts she peered absently into the hollow of her own shadowed face. It was a vacuous dark oval leering in the glass, framed with a long spill of auburn hair. Her mother’s hair.

Into her thoughts she sank again, on mother, on father, on family. She’d wondered if she would hear from her mother this year. Thanksgiving, then Christmas, next spring her tenth birthday; each unspoken empty promises of family, of implied but unfulfilled reunion. She was with her father and she loved him as dearly as a child could love the only one that had stayed for her. She’d heard him sobbing softly when she suspected he’d thought she was asleep. Mother did this to him, she knew; my mother made my daddy cry. He had always loved his daughter, his little button, his ‘Jenni bean’. Never a day he didn’t remind her in at least some small way. Not always with words, more often in simply tending her needs. She was only a child, but she understood in ways grown people seem to forget children are