Sunday Scribblings #75 -- "The End"

No, it's not the end of Sunday Scribblings. The prompt this week is "the end."

Well, I don't like this one. I wrote it, I posted it, but it is dumb (I think). LOL. Not quite sure why my recent writings of fiction for the net have headed into this sort of genre. Weird, if you ask me. Oh well. I told myself I would try to do these prompts and not self-edit (too much) ...


Her voice trailed off. Lucy shut the book quietly, blew out the candle and tiptoed toward the door. Anna had fallen asleep a long time ago, but Lucy had finished reading the bedtime book to the final page. "The end," it had said.

Lucy was almost out the door when the little voice said, "Mom, you know, I hate that."

Her daughter's comment startled her. "Hate what, honey?" she asked as she returned to her daughter.

"How all my favorite stories end. 'The End.' I don't think that is true, do you?"

Lucy waited for her six-year old to go on. After a short pause, Anna added, "I think the stories have to go on. You and daddy didn't end when you got married, did you?" Her child's eyes grew big as she studied at her mother in the darkness of the bedroom. "You're not a ghost mommy, are you?"

"No, honey," Lucy laughed, "I'm not a ghost. Good night dear. Sleep well."

"What was wrong with the little tyke?" Daniel asked as she returned to the sitting room.

"She asked if I was a ghost? She doesn't like how her favorite stories all finish off with 'The End'."

Daniel Gregg raised an eyebrow at that. Lucy continued, "I didn't tell her that her father is a ghost. And that my lover is a ghost, Captain." She reached up and tickled his chin, always amazed that she touched a warm solid beneath her finger tips and not a cold ethereal mist.

His arms around her were warm and strong. She raised her face to meet his lips. There was no breath upon her cheek, but there was a weight of flesh upon her own. She dared not try to analyze this, try to understand how a ghost could feel so solid, so real.

When her husband had died, Lucy Muir had begun to die in her heart too. Daily she had slipped further and further away into a cold, lonely place that seemed to be shrouded in mist. Her loneliness and despair, unrecognized, unseen by any around her, drove her to attempt suicide. But then a hand, unseen in the darkness, stopped her own. A kiss came from lips she could not see, but the taste was of sweet pipe tobacco and the feel of them was a passion, long in slumber, aroused.

This man, this sea captain long dead, came into her life. He brought sunshine that burned away the fog and mist of despair, warmth that melted the ice in her heart, and strength to face each day knowing he would be there in her arms each night -- if only in her fantasies.

In the end, it mattered not whether he was real or an figment. What mattered was he made her story go on when she had wanted to write "the end."