Gossamer Threads: Gossamer, #1

By Robert J. McCarter

A story from an unusual apocalypse.

 

The aliens came in peace and we met them with violence. After we attacked them, we thought they left for good, but the day the alien's gossamer threads fall, everything changes. Now the dead become gossamer ghosts, haunting the living, intent on balancing the scales of their lives.

 

In "Gossamer Threads" eleven-year-old Ronny struggles to find a place in this new world. After his mother dies and turns into a gossamer ghost and his father leaves to protect him from the nightmares the dead visit on the living, Ronny sets out after them. But he finds a world full of lonely ghosts, dangerous people, and unimaginable challenges.

 

In this innovative novelette of a "karmic" apocalypse, Robert J. McCarter, the author of Woody and June versus the Apocalypse, shares an unforgettable vision of a future, one both terrifying and hopeful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Little Hummingbird Publishing
• Release date: Apr 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781941153765

Book preview

Gossamer Threads

A Story from an Unusual Apocalypse

Robert J. McCarter

image-placeholder

Little Hummingbird Publishing

Foreword

This story was originally published in 2018 as part of Anomalous Readings: Thirteen Curious and Confounding Tales and appears there with twelve of my other stories.

Gossamer Threads

A Story from an Unusual Apocalypse

Copyright ©2018 by Robert J. McCarter

This story was first published in Anomalous Readings: Thirteen Curious and Confounding Tales

Except as permitted under the Copyright Act of 1976, this book may not be reproduced in whole or in part in any manner. This book is a work of Fiction. Names, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used Fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover image ©Deposit Photo, jocker17

Version 1.0, April 2023

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-941153-76-5

Print ISBN: 978-1-941153-75-8

Visit Robert’s website at: RobertJMcCarter.com

Published by:

Little Hummingbird Publishing

P.O. Box 23518

Flagstaff, AZ 86002

Contents

Gossamer Threads

More Sci-fi?

About the Author

Books by Robert J. McCarter

Gossamer Threads

When the fifth ghost moved in, I moved out. I had to. The old hunting shack we all occupied wasn’t much, just one room. It had a bed with a musty mattress, a sink, a table with two broken chairs, and a smelly old outhouse outside.

I couldn’t sleep no more. The ghosts’ dreams of death, one on top of the other, was too much. I’d wake up, my heart thumping so hard I was sure it would tear itself apart, sweat prickly and hot, clinging to my body. The ghosts’ deaths were so real in my dreams, it felt like I had been the one to die. Usually Abigale would be there, an apologetic look on her round, moon-silver face, her kind eyes sad. She was the one that got me into this trouble in the first place.

image-placeholder

A few months back, I was out behind that shack next to the little lake. It wasn’t much either, reedy with a pale green layer of algae clinging to it, but the frogs loved it and I could catch them and eat them. I was tending a small cook fire as it popped and smoked, waiting for coals to form so I could roast the frog I had just caught.

It was early, frost still clinging to the ground as a tired sun got ready to climb above the horizon. I blew on my hands, covered in some ratty half-gloves, and shivered from the cold, my belly tight from being empty too long, and then she was there. A girl, my age, maybe twelve, stick thin and made out of moonlight. A ghost. She had a round face and big eyes, her lips moving slowly as she spoke one word over and over.

I looked down, poking my fire with a stick, and grumbled, Move on. I ain’t gonna take you in.

She was one of the wanderers. A ghost that had no purpose or perpetrator to balance the scales with. I still don’t understand it, but ghosts can’t go in a house unless their perpetrator is there or they’ve been invited.

I snuck a look at her, the sun’s thin yellow rays peaking up over the ridgeline washing her out—like all ghosts, she’d be impossible to see in full sunlight. She was looking at my shack with a longing in her eyes. I’d seen it many times, the hollow look of a soul without a place or a purpose. If I’d had a mirror, I’d probably see the same look on my own face.

Her eyes met mine, her lips still moving around that single word. I couldn’t hear her, of course; the dead could talk all they wanted but the living can’t hear them. Reading lips ain’t that hard, though. Not with so many mute ghosts around to practice on, so it didn’t take me long to figure it out. Her silver eyes drew me in and I wished I knew what color they had been and wondered if they were so sad when she was alive.

Lonely. That was the word her mouth formed over and over. The feeling her eyes conveyed. My fire popped and I looked away. "I ain’t takin’ no ghosts