Spring 2023 Contest — Finalist
The Anomaly
I won’t start this tale by telling you it was a dark and stormy night, even though it was black as pitch when the lightning wasn’t bleaching the night sky and the torrential rain came down like a volley of arrows. But to begin a story like this one about the weather is too cliché and overdone, despite how eerily true it may be. Instead, I’ll begin with the loaf of bread that launched itself from the top of the refrigerator and pelted me in the back from more than six feet away as I was chewing out my boyfriend about his gaming addiction. I had a gaming addiction, too, and he had been hogging the controller for days! What an exaggeration, right? I’m talking about the 50mph bread, not the mutual obsession with RPG. Guess again. I measured it myself, twice. That loaf of honey wheat bread dove six feet, seven inches clear across the kitchen. Justin’s jaw nearly unhinged. We both stared in silence at the bread on the floor, maybe expecting it to get up and dance or leap onto my shoulders and strangle me with its twisty tie. Groaning and grunting, Justin’s level 28 warrior was taking the beating of his life, crying out, “Why?” as the level boss punched him through a wall. Why? I’ll let Justin answer that.
“Oh my God, we have a ghost.” To which I responded with a hard eyeroll and dramatic sigh. Returning the bread to its homebase, I explained that an inanimate object weighing 1.25 pounds flying at an estimated 62-degree acute angle without provocation of force was no reason to assume heebie-jeebie spooks and specters.
“Then explain what just happened,” Justin challenged. I didn’t rightly know off-hand how to rationally explain it. Science takes time! So, I reached into my proverbial bag of scientific explanations and pulled out a couple. “Weather balloons!” No, wait. That wouldn’t work. “Barometric pressure interfering with the ionic field, causing the plastic particles of the bag to atomically heat up, thus creating a chain reaction causing the bread to sail across the kitchen as though being pitched by a pee-wee softball player.”
Okay, for all my fact-checkers out there, my science peaked at a 9th-grade level. You don’t have to be smart to explain things. You just have to sound smarter than the person you’re trying to outsmart. I don’t mean to sound like Justin was stupid, but — oh dear, I’m digging myself a grave here, no pun intended. At any rate, my erratic but feigned confident word-salad was enough to satisfy my very confused (but impressed) boyfriend.
I should have left it at that, but here’s the thing: I don’t like things thrown at me, be it a piano from a 7th story window or a bag of bread. I was not going to let this go. Maybe it wasn’t so much to do with being hit by something as soft as a small pillow but more to do with the fact that I didn’t understand it.
Over the next three days, Justin randomly called me out when he caught me staring at the top of the fridge like a begging dog for a biscuit. He finally laughed under his breath one evening and said, “Stop watching for it. You’ll make yourself crazy. It was probably just a spirit moving through. They do that.”
“It wasn’t a damn ghost!” I snapped.
Immediately, I sighed an apology, and he held the game controller out to me as a peace offering. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. As I reached for the controller, the lower half of our long blue drapes rippled behind me as if a child had just run past. As the rippling fabric reached its end, the plastic springy keychain suspended from the front doorknob rebounded forcefully. For several long seconds, the keys jangled together as they bounced.
I don’t know for how long I stared in disbelief. My mind thumbed through a rolodex of rational explanations (and came up short). Slowly, I turned back around to Justin, whose eyebrows were arched over his wide eyes. “Suppose that was barometric pressure, too! Or maybe a comet flew over and caused a frequency disturbance in polyester curtains and car keys!”
Admitting that I was stumped, that I could not explain the occurrences we had witnessed that week, was as hard as admitting when I’m wrong. Nobody wants to be wrong. But ghosts? Come on! That’s as good an explanation as an imaginary elephant stomping through the apartment. I wish I could say that was the end of this ghost nonsense but, as the weeks progressed, so did the unexplained activity.
There were occasional disembodied whispers, too quiet to understand. Yes, we lived in an apartment complex, which would be the simplest explanation except we lived in a corner lot with only two connecting apartments, one below and one next door. They had both been empty since before we moved in. It wasn’t just the whispers, though. There were oddly-shaped shadows and darting figures we could never quite fix our eyes on. Lights were strangely being turned on and off. Despite multiple inspections of the latch, the bedroom door opened and closed at will. The match in the powder barrel came in the form of an off-duty policeman who lived three apartments down from us. For the sake of convenience, let’s call him Byron for his dreamy embodiment of the fiery 19th-century poet.
Byron passed us on the stairwell one day as he was coming up. “You’re the folks in G8!” he said with surprise. You can imagine our surprise that he was surprised!
“Yeah, that’s us!” Justin smiled and made introductions.
“You’re the longest tenants to stay in G8 and I’ve been here seven years. These three apartments,” he pointed to the corner lot. Our corner lot. “Nobody has stayed longer than six months.”
“Huh,” I thoughtfully digested his words. “I wonder why.” This would later become ghost story fuel for Justin, and I would never hear the end of it. I knew I would eventually figure out what was going on in our apartment, but I began to debate whether or not I would ever share my findings. He seemed excited to live in a haunted apartment. His tales of the unexplained were thrilling for him to tell others. Who was I to take that from him?
It was a Tuesday, and one week to the day since our share of information with Officer Dreamboat. Justin’s eyes were glued to the television when I dropped the Ouija board down on the table with a thump. He startled, then gasped when he saw what atrocity I had brought into our home. Faint-colored question marks popped like bubbles all around his head as he stared at me. Taking a seat on the floor, I pulled the board and planchette out. “Let’s do this,” I grinned.
This is the point in my story where I pause and give my audience the chance to shake their heads, point their fingers and rub my nose in the Bible like a puppy in its own mess, laying into me about the conjuring of demons the way my mother did the first time she heard me drop the F-bomb. My ass was raw for a week.
I took this piece of cardboard and plastic three-legged planchette for what it was worth, which was about $8.50 at the toy store. Let me tell you, it did not disappoint. While it took some time to “warm up”, as Justin put it, I will testify that the thing actually spelled out intelligent answers to every silly question asked. Everyone’s first theory would be to blame the boyfriend. There are two reasons I knew this was not the case: Justin took the paranormal very seriously, and secondly, analyzing the way the planchette moved, I could clearly feel that the piece was not being tugged by his fingers opposite of mine. The plastic piece had a force dragging it from the side as though a third person was involved in our so-called séance.
I was accused of being “freaked out” when I later stated that I was satisfied with the results of our Ouija session and there was no longer a reason to keep it around. In other words, I was deniably freaked out and disposed of the damn thing.
I won’t say that I became a believer with all the unexplained events that happened in that apartment, but I will admit, after much scrutiny and deliberation, adding up the facts that amount to a jumble of nonsensical occurrences, there was certainly an “anomaly” in that place. Call it a ghost. Call it a disturbance in the earth’s core. Call it what you will. Bottom line, there is much more going on in our world than we can explain. That doesn’t bother me in the least. It intrigues me.
It’s been over ten years since our experience in G8. Now and then, I’ll drive by just to see it again and wonder. I always wish I could get out and ask the residents if they’ve experienced any anomaly. But there’s never anyone to ask. The lights are always out and the driveway is always empty.
