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Author bio
Hannah Lynn is a multi-award-winning author of eight full-length novels. Publishing her first book, Amendments – a dark, dystopian speculative fiction novel, in 2015, she has since gone on to write The Afterlife of Walter Augustus – a contemporary fiction novel with a supernatural twist – which won the 2018 Kindle Storyteller Award and the delightfully funny and poignant Peas and Carrots series.
While she freely moves between genres, her novels are recognisable for their character driven stories and wonderfully vivid description.
hannahlynnauthor.com
Anna and the Dark Place
Russell Nohelty
Anna and the Dark Place© 2020 Russell Nohelty
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This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Chapter 1
Funerals suck.
That wasn’t some great revelation or anything, but just because it wasn’t profound didn’t make it any less true. I wasn’t trying to be Shakespeare. Every word out of my mouth or thought in my head didn’t need to be some pithy observation meant to entertain a billion people for a thousand years.
In my short sixteen years of life, I’d been to four funerals, though, so I knew something about the subject: all of them sucked, hard. I wasn’t a mob hitman. Why had I been to so many funerals at such a tender age? Some people chalked it up to bad luck, but I had the sneaking suspicion I was cursed.
The first funeral I attended was for my nana. She was old, and I was three. I couldn’t remember that one very well because…well, I was three. Who remembers anything from when they were three? Nobody, that’s who.
Next was my Aunt Pauline. She smoked a pack of cigarettes a day until the day she died. I wasn’t surprised she died young, but I was surprised she could afford the habit even after they raised the price to over seven dollars a pack. I guess it was lucky that she retired rich with the right stock options. Or maybe it wasn’t lucky, since those cigarettes killed her.
The third funeral was my father’s, and it sucked super hard. Kids are supposed to outlive their parents, but that didn’t make it suck any less. Parents were supposed to die after they’d gotten older, like when they were ninety, not when they were forty-five.
Although, maybe I need to shut my mouth, because it’s better to outlive your parent than to have your parent outlive you.
Katie was my best friend, and the owner of the body that was being lowered into the ground in front of me. We had known each other all of our lives. Our parents brought us home from the hospital within a month of each other, and our fathers left us at the same time, both through the same helicopter accident in Kabul which killed their whole unit.
Crap. I had been to five funerals. I forgot that Katie’s father had a funeral the day after my father’s, so they blended together.
Katie and I grew up across the street from each other, and our families did everything together, from having barbecues, to watching the Super Bowl, to going on vacations together. After our fathers died, Katie and Joanne became even closer to us. We didn’t have much family left. My father was an only child, and my mother only had Pauline. Once they were gone, and Nana too, our family became just my mother, me, Katie, and Joanne.
I hated death with a real passion, too. It wasn’t fair. All the other kids had brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, fathers, grandparents…they had a family. They had friends. They had support.
Death took all of that away from me. Every person I grew close to faded out of my life. After my father died, I stopped letting people in. I walled myself off from the outside world. I figured if everybody was going to die, and it hurt so bad every time they did, at least I could be hurt by as few people as possible.
I didn’t join any clubs, or play any sports, or go to any parties. All I did was come home after school and hang out with Katie, and whatever friends she bothered to bring around me. She never had the same fears I did, despite death taking her father away just like it had mine.
She was the opposite of me. After her father’s death, Katie decided to go out into the world and meet new people. She signed up for all the clubs and never met a person she didn’t like. She lived more in her few years on this planet than most people, and certainly had more of a life than I ever did.
Joanne stood from her seat next to mine in the cemetery and walked up to the podium beside Katie’s grave. Her hair was once blonde and vibrant, but she long ago let it return to its natural brown, which matched her eyes. Her skin was white and pale, and her eyes were red from crying.
“Thank you for coming,” Joanna said, as her daughter was lowered into the grave in front of her. “I know it’s not normal to give the eulogy at the cemetery instead of a church, but my Katie wasn’t normal,
