Kennedy's Short Story: The Haunted House

Kennedy was no stranger to ghosts. They were a familiar part of her childhood, woven into all of her images of her old house. She had distant, dusty memories of the hushed voices in her attic that her mother brushed off as imagination. Their house was situated on the edge of the town’s oldest cemetery, and Kennedy’s view each morning was rows and rows of graves. She, her little brother, and the neighbor boys would even play in there before dark most nights – hide and seek mostly, but sometimes the games had more sinister twists that involved finding the youngest person buried in the graveyard. She was not afraid of those ghosts, the ones she heard each night as she tried to sleep. They were practically friends by the time she had left for college and her parents moved out. She knew one of them quite well. He used to leave her little toy cars in places only she would find them. They were just fixtures that she had …show more content…
In fact, she didn’t used to make her own dinners at all. She never drank on weeknights when she had work to do. She didn’t used to let Benny have the entire house to himself while she worked (he needed a strict schedule for proper growth!). She didn’t usually haphazardly feed him at any time of the day. She didn’t used to come home to the stale, cold, empty air of a house too big for one small woman and a puppy.
The house seemed to get bigger and colder each day. The faint smell of sugar and flour that had permeated the kitchen was fading as the stove got less use. Her bedroom smelled only of her, and the fruity, flowery mixture of two wildly different girls using one bathroom was almost gone.
She smelled her sometimes, but almost never at home. In the grocery store, she’d catch a whiff of her all-natural body spray. The kind that pretty much no one else used, of course. And she’d think, are you following me to make sure I’m buying healthy food?
And on purpose, she’d throw a bag of chips into her