I've never posted anything I've written on here before, so please be gentle with me. This is just the beginning of a short story I had the idea for a long time ago. I find it a little morbid, so i thought Halloween would be a good time to start on it. Hope you enjoy ...
The day the postcard came in the mail, I hardly looked at it. On the front was a photograph of a pleasant-looking young woman and an older, fatherly man. He had his arm around her shoulders and was smiling at her affectionately. Another piece of junk mail. I glanced at it and tossed it on top of the rest of my mail on the kitchen counter. I finally read what it said a few days later when I picked it up to throw it away. In bold letters across the bottom of their picture “Would you give your right arm to have him back?”
I felt my hands trembling a little as I flipped the card over. “What the hell?” I thought. I was overly sensitive, I knew. My father’s death was still a little too recent, the wound it had left in me still a little too raw. The picture of a father and daughter, alone, was enough to cause a twinge of pain in me. The words, and the implication I drew from them, were like salt on the wound. I often had thought of what I would give up in order to have another week, another day, even another moment with my father. My grief was making me delirious, I thought. I was sure the words did not mean what I at first glance had interpreted them to mean.
I flipped the card over and read the back. By the time I finished reading the short paragraph, my breath was coming in short gasps. I blinked my eyes hard, and gripped the edge of the countertop with numb fingers. “I have to be dreaming,” I thought. “This is impossible.” In a few brief sentences, the postcard explained that Resurrection Incorporated, the company that had sent out the card, could bring back my deceased father, Christopher S. Miller, in exchange for $1,000,000 and my right arm.
This had to be some sort of cruel joke. Who would do this? My mind raced through conversations I had had with friends, coworkers, and strangers over the past four months. I couldn’t remember telling anyone about the “bargaining” I was doing in my own mind. No one, not even my closest friends, would understand my desperate, grief-stricken fantasies about what I would sacrifice in order to bring him back. All the money I had in exchange for one more day with him. A year of my own life in exchange for a week of his. And yes, I had thought, I would give up my right arm in order to bring him back for good.
What in the hell was going on???
