He liked closing doors, the repetitive clang of chain-link boxes secured. The vibration satisfied him, made him feel safe. “You shouldn’t have come here, you know you brought this on yourself.” No matter their eyes, no matter the tears, he stood firm.

He’d just fallen asleep when he heard it. Same metal latch, but it slid, slowly. It opened.

Eyes wide in the dim light of his bedroom, he saw nothing. No one was there. That first night stretched into years.

The unwavering voice always whispered the same thing: “Come on, ese. We both know. You brought this on yourself.”

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This is an exactly 100-word flash fiction piece for a tradition of writing ghost stories on Christmas Eve. We acknowledge a sinful and hopeless world, and welcome the dawn in full awareness that Christmas day brings us light.

“It was well once a year, if not oftener, to remind men by parable of the old, simple truths; to teach them that forgiveness, and charity, and the endeavor for life better and purer than each has lived, are the principles upon which alone the world holds together and gets forward. It was well for the comfortable and the refined to be put in mind of the savagery and suffering all round them, and to be taught, as Dickens was always teaching, that certain feelings which grace human nature, as tenderness for the sick and helpless, self-sacrifice and generosity, self-respect and manliness and womanliness, are the common heritage of the race, the direct gift of Heaven, shared equally by the rich and poor.” — William Dean Howells

Advent Ghosts 100 Word Storytelling is put on by Loren Eaton at I Saw Lightning Fall. You can read this year’s entries there. Visit back here throughout the day for a growing crop of spooky stories from a range of writers! Loren posts them all day today, the darkest day of the year.