#daniel kelley

We start with a little boy in a town near Salem, on Halloween. He goes up to a house, trick-or-treating with his guardian, and is stumped when the man, referred to as "the professor", asks for a trick. The man, despite not receiving his trick, gives the boy 2 full-size candy bars, which as any child knows is like winning the lottery twice.

The boy returns to the same house years later to ask the man about something he saw. They lived across the street from one another, and the night before the boy had seen the man dancing in his own home, with a beautiful transparent woman. Which, to the reader, is clearly a ghost, but of course one would look for other explanations first if such a thing happened in real life.

We get a brief, wordy tour of the town as the boy goes to get a DVD and a candy bar. He gets the flutters for the counter-girl, for reasons unknown. Perhaps just because he is 14. He goes to school, of which we see none at all, because I suppose it wasn't relevant enough to include it.

He finally manages to ask the professor about what he saw, but the professor is busy, and makes a plan to meet up with him that weekend instead. He goes back to the convenience store where he'd gotten the candy bar before, and the same girl is there, mysteriously cognizant of his candy preferences despite him never seeing her before the previous visit. He gets even more flutters. They go to the pastry shop together.

When he speaks to the professor that weekend, he learns the story of how the ghost slowly revealed herself to him. It seems to me he has fallen in love with the ghost, and she with him, despite him having a wife for the first decade of their unusual courtship of sorts.

Later on the boy asks his guardian about his mother. The "you're just like her" card gets played. Apparently the boy and the girl have been going out regularly now and he wants to take her to the school dance. The story ends just as they go pick her up.

I felt it was pretty weak, as a story. It felt more like a few bits and pieces skimmed off the top of a larger story. And perhaps it was, as authors are prone to do so, provide free little snippets to get people to buy the whole thing. It doesn't feel like it has enough legs to stand on its own, and perhaps the author should have taken a different path for their little morsels. This feels very sparse and hollow. I can see some amount of potential to the characters, but I don't get much out of them. It's weak.

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Page count: 19

Objective quality: 3/5

Personal enjoyment: 2/5