Dear Readers,
I just started a new series of ghost
stories on Amazon's Kindle Vella. The second one, "Tearing At
Holes" is being published today for the Hunter's Moon that is this
month's full moon.
God willing, I will publish a new story every full moon with some of these being multi-part installments. Then, the plan is combine them all into a short story collection to be published on Halloween 2025.
After enduring several family losses, Tina's new marraige seems to
promise a restoration and new blessings. When trying to join
the belongings of two households for the new blended family, her
husband discovers an old picture of Tina's deceased brother who
liked to wear a strange braided amulet.
This takes on the haunted picture trope such as Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait" or Fritz Lieber's "The Ghost Light". The idea is based off a real picture of one of my wife's deceased family members. My wife was too well acquainted with death in her small family at a young age. Each loss was a hole in the family that brought loss, grief, and shock. No matter how hard we can cling to our faith, it never gets easy to face a loss. "Jesus wept."
I was lost for a title for this tale. Often the title comes first and suggests the story or it arrives soon after the story has begun to take root. If it doesn’t come fast then it takes a while.
The best title that I could come up with was “Tearing At Holes” suggesting the intense grief a family suffers from their loss and the “holes” it can make. But that title still seemed a tad cliché or too revealing. So, I flipped the verb and noun to “Holes At Tearing.” More enigmatic, in my estimation.