STEPHEN DELANEY

HAUNTINGS (A SUTURED TALE)


Three Silences

The silence once you’ve said it.

The silence on the other end once it’s out.

The silence outside your room in the hallway: Mom’s fist for a word for a scream.


The Storm

He whispers John’s name and the bedroom absorbs it. Calls out and a wall snaps, electric—one measure of the might of the storm.


His House

As you drift off, feel you’re alone and hear a clang. Search every room, every closet—find no one. Hear no creaks, no rustles when even his ghosts won’t talk.


Head in the Clouds

After twelve years he’s counting toy houses from the plane—sees a ranch-style … a steely glare … a dot, Dad with gun, pointing up?


Failures

“I only painted him!” he tells Tim—a statement true in fact if not in spirit. But it isn’t guilt that makes him cover them, but that his failures look back at him, nude.


Still

“Phantom vision,” the doctor said. Yet still the toad in the bathtub, your back’s Orion, my face on this canvas—those sharp eyes follow.


Haunted

Mom mouthing curses, Dad in your chair. Breathe to the count of thirty: the den softly cleaned. That night they edge my vision, paled by the glow of our radiance, dimmed by what’s real but unseen.

STEPHEN DELANEYwrites fiction, craft articles, and book reviews. His short stories have been featured in, among other places, Bending Genres, Euphony, New World Writing, and Blink-Ink, and his writing has been nominated for The Best Small Fictions.