Meet Beverly

The good niece expects her pretty aunt from twenty years’ past. What will she find instead?

Beverly gazed at the cab as it pulled out of her driveway. It had deposited someone there. A pudgy, awkward creature was staring straight up at her through the window upstairs. It wore giant sunglasses and a daisy on its head. The creature fumed and spat, or that’s what it seemed—like a teakettle on the boil.

The young mother of three wrung her hands, sweating even indoors from the Lake Charles heat. What to do next? Behind her, Cassie napped at last, the four-year-old’s cheek rosy in the sunlight that drifted through her bedroom window. Beverly turned and kissed the child’s forehead, brushing a little wisp of brown hair from her eyes. Then, remembering what was in her driveway, she glanced anxiously across the hall toward her other children’s rooms.

The doorbell broke her from her reverie with a start. Beverly charged down the stairs, hitting the bottom a little faster than she wanted. She calmed herself first, then threw open the door. She almost knocked down the person on her porch. In front of her, or actually about a foot below her, there was a giant pair of sunglasses, a yellow daisy, and a salacious grin. Beverly took a step backward, genuinely frightened. Then, the figure opened its arms wide and said, “Who’s my favorite niece?”

Beverly cocked her head and squinted. Deep red hair tumbled down the shoulders of the visitor, glinting like cut garnets in the afternoon sun. Catching her breath, Beverly exclaimed, “Aunt Betty!”

Read more of The Poltergeist and Aunt Betty in “Beyond the Wail: 12 Grave Tales of Love and Loss,” a new paranormal anthology by Xchyler Publishing.

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