The WWWC might be taking a short breather over the holiday period, but we certainly haven’t lost our appetite for interesting writing! We’ve decided to share some runner-ups to previous editions of the WWWC challenge, beginning first with Pam Makin, whose response to November’s prompt ‘rolling back the years’ was such a close second that it would be unfair to deprive our readers.
Read Pam’s deceptively simple ‘Ghost of a Chance’ below.
Ghost of a Chance
I
Chris
I feel like I’ve stepped into a 1930s speakeasy – cigar smoke haze, a gaslight dimness, and someone singing in a slow, gentle croon. Her voice is like a dream. She sings softly, but clearly; each note pitched directly to the heart, not the ear. ‘I don’t stand a ghost of chance with you,’ her song tells me, ‘I thought at last I’d found you…’
I know there is little point looking for her. I have heard her sing before; I have had these visions before. Each time they are slightly different, but the smell of the cigars, the creamy light, and the song are always the same. I never find her, no matter how hard I concentrate, or how long I hold the image.
I listen carefully to the song. I had googled it, of course, and discovered it is one of Frank Sinatra’s classics. That means anyone could be singing it. I had found YouTube clips of both Etta James and Billie Holiday singing their versions, but this voice was something else; more … oh, I don’t know … inviting? Enticing? Damn it. It was sexy! It was so damn sexy it was driving me to distraction. If I find this woman, she surely stands much more than a ghost of a chance with me.
A noise outside startles me. As my eyes snap open, the bright morning sunlight dazzles them shut again. I have lost the vision. I have lost the voice. I lay here in my otherwise empty marriage bed, seeking her voice, somewhere in the fading drift of cigar smoke.
Oh well, it’s still early. But I guess I should get up. Glen’s day has obviously already begun.
II
Glen
The box was in the back of the shed, under some other old things, covered with a tarp – a box we had neglected to unpack when we moved some fifteen years ago. It was marked ‘Glen’s Stuff’, so I opened it. I found a wonder of things I thought I had lost. Honestly, I thought Chris had thrown them out. Among them, a record – vinyl – in a plastic sleeve to protect it from dust.
There she is on the cover, still looking as young and beautiful as I remember, dressed in a cocktail dress and white gloves, lounging with her shoes kicked off, and looking up at me with her big brown eyes. I had so loved this record, and her.
I hadn’t told Chris that I found the record, or the turntable. The vinyl disc is a bit scratched up and the only track that plays properly all the way through is the first track of side two. But sometimes, early in the morning while Chris is still asleep, I like to sit alone, smoke a cigarillo, and listen to that one track, rolling back the years.
And as Linda Ronstadt sings ‘I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You’, I think to myself, You might have done, Linda. You surely might have done once.