You’re ten or fifteen pages into your new short story. Your main character is based on a woman you saw standing motionless in the side yard of a weathered house in a bad neighborhood. She wore a peacock-print cape over a frayed nightgown. You drove around the block. When you circled back, the woman was still there. Motionless.
Three months later, you wrote: The alarm went off at 5. Ed Logan rolled away from his sleeping wife. She murmured, “Honey.” Ed slapped the snooze button and slowly pulled himself upright. His lower spine tightened. “Goddamnit,” he muttered. Ellie threw her arm around his waist. “Don’t go.”
You haven’t been able to get Ellie into that side yard. The peacock print cape is lying in a second-hand store somewhere. And, you’ve stopped caring what happens to Ellie or Ed or the dying town itself. And still, as you are drifting off to sleep some nights, you see that silent figure, hear the train on a hillside a few hundred feet above the house, you smell the heavy August air.
I could tell you how I resurrect the temporarily dead. I’d rather see how you bring this shadow woman back to life. Please send me your writing, and I’ll work on a promise I made to an unknown woman standing in silence in the sideyard of a house in a bad neighborhood at least two years ago.
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