This is the fifth part in a series, so if you have not already done so, you might want to read Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV before continuing.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look so sad while being served pancakes,” Aunt Sabrina said as she slipped a plate stacked high with pancakes in front of Stacie.
“Sorry,” Stacie said as she tried to shake herself out of her funk. “Thanks for making pancakes.”
“Thanks for making coffee,” she raised her mug in a salute to her niece, and Stacie returned the gesture before taking a large swallow of coffee. “Seriously,” her aunt continued, “What has you so down?”
“I was just looking at all those boxes wondering how long it’s going to take us to get through them all.”
“Worry about the boxes later. Right now, pancakes.”
Stacie had to admit her aunt had a point. Why worry about the future when the present contained pancakes?
After they’d gotten about halfway through their pancakes, Aunt Sabrina said, “So, are you ever going to tell me what scared you so bad?”
“Oh, it was nothing. Just a trick of the light.” Stacie continued plowing through her stack of pancakes as she answered, not even bothering to look up to meet her aunt’s gaze.
“What was the trick of the light? What did you think you saw that had you so scared?”
“I thought I saw someone standing over my bed.”
“What did this someone look like?”
“I don’t know. It was dark. I just saw this person-shaped thing standing over me and freaked out.”
“So, it didn’t look like me?”
Stacie snorted, finally glancing up at her aunt. “No, of course not.”
“So, you didn’t see what it looked like, but you got a close enough look to know it didn’t look like me.”
Stacie paused for a long moment before saying, “It had really long hair.”
“What?”
“I could see enough of an outline to see that it had really long hair – or whatever I thought I saw looked like it had really long hair. You have short hair, so even in the dark I knew it couldn’t be you.”
This time Aunt Sabrina was the one to hesitate before asking, “What woke you up?”
“What?”
“You said you woke up and saw this figure. What was it that woke you up? Did you feel something touch you?”
“No, nothing touched me. I just had this feeling that something was standing over me. As crazy as it sounds, I think that’s what woke me up.”
“It doesn’t sound crazy.”
Stacie found herself oddly not comforted, so she changed the subject. “Well, as long as we’re both up, but too tired to really do anything, what do you say we watch a movie?”
“I’m always up for a movie. You pull up Netflix and I’ll pull out the TV dinner trays so we can finish these pancakes in the living room.”
To be continued…
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