The Ghost Trap by K. Stephens

Author:K. Stephens [3test]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Leapfrog Press
Published: 2019-03-11T07:00:00+00:00

Maynard Eugley: You have two ways to go about it. Confront the guy, or take your time, cool yourself. Talk reasonable.

Jamie: Which is the best way?

Maynard: Depends who the asshole is.

Jamie gunned Delores all the way back to the dock, black smoke chugging from the exhaust pipe. Everett McAdoo was there waiting at the dock. “Watch my boat,” Jamie told him, throwing fenders over the side. He tied up to a cleat. “I’ll be right back.”

His parents’ house was empty, with cold overcast light darkening the old caramel colored floors. The grandfather clock in the living room clicked away, the only sound in the house. He took the carpeted steps to the second floor and headed straight for Amanda’s room.

The whole room had been decorated in buttercup yellow when Amanda was a teenager, from the frilly canopied bed (“Ma—I just have to have a canopy bed”) to the lacy country curtains. Posters of faggy-looking musicians in makeup with guitars still adorned her walls even though she was 25 and long past adolescence, long past even living here. (“Ma—don’t take down my posters, it’s like taking down a part of me!”) Her dressing table mirror with vanity lights still remained plastered with concert ticket stubs, dried prom corsages, wallet-sized school pictures of every moronic girlfriend she ever had and every guy she ever banged. Amanda’s room remained exactly the same as it was in high school because of a teary fight she’d had with Donna years ago not to turn it into a guest bedroom. With tears and an ability to always get her way, Amanda was allowed to let her room remain a shrine, while Jamie’s old room across the hall became the guest bedroom and workout room. If he ever wanted to find one of his old yearbooks or baseball trophies, all he had to do was spend forty minutes pawing through a water-stained box in the attic marked Jamie’s Crap.

He gripped a net bag firmly in his hand. Lined neatly across Amanda’s bed and all along the bench seat under the bay window lay every doll she had ever owned from the day she could pop the thumb out of her mouth and scream “Mine!”

Jamie started with the ones on the bed. Betsy Wetsy, Baby Long Hair, and the obscene Cabbage Patch collection. He proceeded down to the army of Barbie dolls she had in every size, shape, era, outfit, and color. He plucked each doll’s head off its body like a ripe raspberry off a bush, until he had a heavy net sack of decapitated smiling faces. Before Jamie strode out of Amanda’s yellow shrine, he took one last look at the denuded forest of beheaded dolls, all sitting upright on her bed.

By 10:30, Jamie’s collarbone gave out a steady signal of pain and the sky had finally turned. Darts of rain began to hit his windshield on his way back to Petit Point. A good froth of his earlier anger worked up as he drove back under the slap of rain and the drone of whiny windshield wipers.

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