I was with my two brothers in an
upstairs bedroom when it hit. The topic
of discussion? Christmas vacation. In Ohio
it begins on the twenty-first, every year.
Two weeks without school, and new toys to play with. It was still Matchbox for me back
then: the cars, the cities, the
racetracks. Oh and Milton Bradley had
this really cool spaceship called the Starbird. You wouldn’t believe the stories I could
dream up around those things. And come
the twenty-fifth, I would have more set-pieces to use. I wanted two weeks of that.
But when that clipper from Alberta came down,
everyone stopped talking. It hit the
window like a fist. Tony, the oldest
brother, went to the glass and peered out.
Todd and I did the same seconds later.
The street—West Main Street—was
empty, but shadows played everywhere over the blacktop as the trees shook and
the streetlights swayed. There was a
storm coming.
There was a storm coming… so the
three of us started doing something that lots of other people in the western
hemisphere do during snowy nights at Christmas-time: We started telling ghost stories.
