Dead Things

By Lawrence Van Hoof

A ten-year-old girl who hears the whispers of the dead must deal with the ghost of a schoolmate's mother after she starts manifesting in class.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lawrence Van Hoof
• Release date: Mar 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370805440

Lawrence Van Hoof

Lawrence Van Hoof was born in Helmond, The Netherlands, and grew up in southwestern Ontario, Canada.He holds a B.Sc. in biochemistry from the University of Guelph.Currently he lives in Toronto, Canada, after teaching English for three years in South Korea.

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Dead Things

by

Lawrence Van Hoof

This publication is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

Copyright © Lawrence Van Hoof, 2016

Originally published in Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, edited by Fran Eisemann

Reprinted by permission of the author

Smashwords Edition, 2018

Cover design copyright © Lawrence Van Hoof

Cover art copyright © Sarah Marchant / Shutterstock.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any form without written permission of the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Dead Things

MY GRANDMOTHER PICKS UP dead things. She brings them home. Sometimes she scares people because they don’t understand. Nobody does. Except me. And that’s the scariest thing of all.

~

Coming back from the drugstore, we walk past the park mostly used for soccer, and my grandmother spots a dead bird in the brown leaves beside one of the benches. The little bird is brown too, a sparrow, with blood on the side of its beak.

She lifts the dead sparrow to her left ear. I glance around and hope no one is watching. She’s mostly deaf in that ear, at least to the real world, but everything else comes in loud and clear.

This one’s sad, she says. "Crying out for Todd. A