Anna C. Jones is the Readers’ Choice in this week’s Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Challenge. The winning entry is decided by the popular vote and rewarded with a special feature here today. (In the case of a tie, the writer who submitted an entry first is the winner per our rules.) Without further ado, here’s the winning entry:
Abandoned
by Anna C. Jones
I’m alone now. Everyone that I loved is dead. My mother, my father, my sisters and brothers, my best friend, everyone. But no one knows that. I refuse to tell anyone in Wickersby that I’m living here alone because they’d make me go live in the orphanage.
People think that I, Alaina Verity, died alongside my family and friends. They’ve dismissed the noises coming from the woodland cottage, saying that there’s a ghost haunting it. “It was always a rather sketchy place,” Mayor Barry told the village. Now they’re afraid to come to the cottage.
But am I a ghost? No, I’m sure I’m still alive. Otherwise, how could I still feel the pang of loss, the loneliness of being trapped here with no human contact. Aren’t those signs that you’re still living, or can a spirit feel emotion?
In all the stories, people said that ghosts felt human emotions. But if that’s the case, how can you tell who’s a ghost and who’s alive?
I’m not sure who I am anymore. Am I a ghost, or am I a human? Alive or dead?
No one seems to notice me when I go into town a few days a year. And people speak of me as if I’m nothing more than a memory. “Remember Alaina Verity? She was a good soul. Shame she’s gone,” people say. I guess that I’m really a spirit after all.
They call me the Ghost of Wickersby Cottage. And I guess that’s what I am.
