So, I Won This Contest...

For coming up with a Halloween themed spooky story - go figure! I've never really done scary, on purpose, before. To be perfectly honest, it was one of those spur-of-the-moment-Jenni-encouraged-me-to-try moments. With these kind of results, maybe she should encourage me more often.

The contest was to write a story, the length was a paragraph (I kind of cheated there, but it's okay), and had to be spooky story. I honestly just threw it together and it won. Proving that whenever the muse takes a hold of you, it ain't all bad.

Anyway, I want to thank Erik Ekstrom for hosting the contest at his blog, and encourage you to go and read his books. That last one is the one I won, and I will be sure to add it to my reading list - heck, I'll probably even review it.

So I wrote all of that, to share this with you, enjoy:

Enjoying the spirit of All Hallows Eve, I took a stroll to the cemetery where my grandfather was buried. I have done this every year since for as long as I could remember, in fact, it was my grandfather that got me started, saying that “we needed to remember and pray for those that came before us.” Sound advice and being a kid, I never disagreed with anything grandpa would say. Needless to say, the tradition stuck. There were three grave sites that I visited every year one was my grandfathers, the other two were people that my grandfather would tell me about. The first visit for me was always grandpa, so that I could take him along with me while I visited the other two that he had introduced to me so many years ago. Next, was Marie Antoinette, no not the former queen of France, at least I don’t think it was because who ever heard of the queen of France being buried in a small graveyard in the middle of Ohio? The last stop was my namesake, Juniper Clark. I always hated my parents naming me Juniper, as it was a weird name for a boy and now a man. Alas, Juniper it was. This year would be special because my grandfather said that visiting Juniper on All Hallows Eve, the year I turned forty-seven would be extra special, prayer-wise, because Juniper died at the age of forty-seven on All Hallows Eve so many years ago. As I walked to the grave, I noticed something different about it, a large hole had been dug out and found that to be rather strange. “I told you this would be a special day.” I nearly jumped out of my skin when my grandfather walked from behind the tombstone, it was then I noticed the dates on the tombstone – the same tombstone I had been visiting for forty plus years. Juniper died tonight on this very date, October 31, 2010. Juniper was me, and I was Juniper, come home at last.




So, what did you think? Should I keep writing? Is there hope for me? Can I borrow a dollar?