Hunting For Ghosts, A Short By Damaria Senne

Last year I mentioned that I have a nameless jumble of words that I just keep spewing and I have no idea what form they will take.  Well, the  words are slowly taking shape into a rough  draft of a YA novel. It will probably take me years before I finish it, what with the work I am already committed to. Meanwhile, here's an excerpt (the intro of the first chapter)s my web story Friday contribution.

Six months after our family moved into our new home in Kensington, I found a gun buried in our vegetable garden.
“Ben? BEN? Where did you find that?” Mom asked when she saw me holding the rusty weapon instead of digging the garden soil to prepare it for planting.
I pointed to the hole on the ground. Mom's eyes tracked my hand from the gun to the hole. The same question that was running through my head was probably running through hers too: “What was old Mrs Bernstein, the previous owner of our house, doing with her gun in the garden?”
She was 150 when she moved out of the house. OK. Maybe I exaggerate. Mom said she was 85 years old when she sold us the house to move to an old age home. But old is old and I had trouble imagining her holding this gun or shooting someone with yet. And if it wasn't her, who could it be? Mom was proud of the fact that the house was an antigue ( built in 1932) and still in its oriiginal state. Apparently, Mrs Bernstein and her husband were the only people who ever lived in it. So if she didn't bury the gun in the garden, who did? Her husband, who they said was sick and couldn't even get out of bed for years? And if she did shoot someone with the gun, where was the body?
Suddenly, the ceramic tiles covering most of our backyard no longer looked like an “easy-maintenance” solution for busy home owners that I heard the estate agent lady tell Mom it was.
“Mom, do you think there’s a body buried in this yard, maybe even in this garden?”

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