I’m Not Dead


Once, my grandmother told me a curious story about her aunt.
Her aunt was a strange and lonely woman. Nobody wanted to hear from her and she didn’t want to hear from anyone, not even her family. She lived in a very quiet village in Mexico, in a small wooden house, quite apart from the rest of the town. She only got out of her house to take pictures. Her name was Jessica, and not many people knew her.
Once they saw her running down the path that came to her house screaming that no one was going to take her house away from her, she said that she was never going to leave it and if they wanted to take her out they would have to force her. With this attitude the people of the town wanted to lock her up so she would never come back.
As Jessica was so lonely she started to take pictures of her own house, the inside and the outside. She took lots of pictures of the house and then she put them in a room where she had all her photos. When she was finishing the album, she remembered she had forgotten to take a picture of an old room where her husband had died. This room was empty except for a wardrobe, a very nice old one.
After she had taken that last picture, she went to the photo room and started to select the ones she liked but when she got to the last photograph she saw something strange. In the wardrobe a very creepy phrase was written with blood, “I´M NOT LEAVING MY HOME”.
For some time, Jessica continued yelling in the streets and no one understood her. She continued taking pictures and faces appeared in the photos. In most of them there was a familiar face to her… her husband.
For many days people in town were not worried, but amazed because they hadn’t seen her for a while. An old lady called Ann, who had been her friend, went to her house to see if she was okay. They hadn’t talked in months. When Ann entered the house, as usual the door was open; she saw a mess and all the pictures were on the floor. She looked for her in all the rooms but she couldn’t find Jessica.
When she was leaving she heard a rat running upstairs. She followed the rat and came into an old room with a big wardrobe. She saw a letter on the bed; she opened it and said “in the wardrobe”. There laid Jessica dead with a note that said I’m back home. Ann got out of the house and told the people of the town that everything was all right. She didn’t want to tell anyone what had happened. Everybody thought she was crazy, so she didn’t want to make a mess out of that.
Two months later Ann received a letter from Jessica telling her the story and asking her to tell the people of the town that she wasn’t crazy: she was saying the truth and no one had listened to her. Was it the ghost of Jessica still in town?



Pen-name: Sir Percival Glyde
Category C