Ghost Light on the Land’s End Road
I was suddenly awash in pale blue phosphorescence and I briefly reckoned poor ventilated Private Quigley had his chilly arms around me! Right turn at Frogmore, south down a dozen miles of two-lane island blacktop, through woods and swamps and fields, to old Fort...
The Waterhole
At the muddy little pond, a 12-year-old boy would find his place in the world.
A Day on the Dolphin: An Unexpected Adventure
There was urgency in his voice. My grandfather and Ed Brower went below deck. The Dolphin’s bilge pump had stopped working. Water was coming in. It’s a bright Saturday afternoon in Fairfield, Connecticut, just after 5:00; mid-April 1960. Daffodils bloom along the...
The Last Of the Outlaw Gunners
Or they were going to be, until a gator got in the way.
Three Boys and a Cannon Barrel
It was a Federal Criminal Conspiracy: three boys, a cannon barrel and scaup to drive them crazy. The saltwater scaup are mostly gone now, but back when I was a boy they would raft offshore, a thousand, ten thousand at a time. It would take a booming gale to get them...
The Intruder
And then, one day, there he was — a guy was standing by MY lake, and what the…he had a fly rod in his hand! It wasn’t much as waters go — probably a couple acres at best. I’d passed by it many times always on the way to somewhere else. It lay a few hundred yards...
A Thousand Rebel Yells
It was black dark and there was the disarming gush of the swollen, little stream, and I could only sense the rise of the earth above me. But I had done battle here before. I could feel it in my bones, as in the ghostly lines of Mary Fahl’s “Going...
Mars the Pointer
He was all alone now, but the birds were still there. He was called Mars because new names can become scarce around a big kennel and someone had come up with Jupiter and with Mercury (shortened to “Mere” and “Jupe” for other pups). Later, he...
A Short Ghost Story
An eerie tale for Halloween.