PHOTO PROMPT © Dale Rogerson

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Halloween, the Day of the Dead all blurred together for Eddie. It stretched from last Tuesday to early Monday morning. The deal he made was better than he expected. Sure, he died. Cancer was a relentless enemy and the reaper was always at his shoulder. But every year for a week he returned to life, free of haunting the house with the green door.

He didn’t realize how depressing life would become. Eddie died on V-J day, September 2, 1945. Right before he passed, they told him we’d won. They didn’t say how much they’d lose almost eighty years later.

It’s Wednesday and once again time to participate in Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ November 3rd edition of Friday Fictioneers. The idea is to use the image at the top as the prompt for crafting a poem or short story no more than 100 words long. My word count is exactly 100.

Given that last night was Halloween and it’s still dark outside this morning as I write this, I had already decided I wanted to write something spooky. Fortunately Dale’s photo cooperated.

I mentioned Halloween, but there’s also the Day of the Dead to consider. It is primarily celebrated on November 1st and 2nd, but depending on locality, it can be observed as early as October 31st and as late as November 6th. I decided to mash all of that together for a full week, from last Tuesday to next Monday this year.

Myth and literature are replete with tales of mortals making a deal with the Devil for various possessions in exchange for their soul. Eddie just wanted to return to the living for a week every year while spending the rest of the time haunting the house with the green door (presumably his original home).

So, for a week every year, he wanders the world among the living. What he didn’t count on was the passage of time and how much everything would change. A person accustomed to the viewpoints, morals, and practices of 1945 might not enjoy how life would change as the decades rolled past.

In part, I took the date and the perspective of Eddie’s life and death from a movie quote. The film is The Avengers (2012). In the movie, Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans) struggles with how much everything has changed since he woke up from suspended animation after about seventy years. He says to Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson):

When I went under, the world was at war. I wake up, they say we won. They didn’t say what we lost.

The movie’s producers probably didn’t mean for it to say what it says to me. Depending on your perspective on things, no matter how much “progress” we seem to have made since 1945, we have also thrown away much of the good we used to have as a nation and as human beings.

That’s Eddie’s dilemma.

To read other tales based on the prompt, visit inlinkz.

The science fiction/Christian-based anthology Shoot the Devil 2: Dark Matter is now available from Amazon. It features my short story “The Heavens Declare His Glory.” Have a look, and if you buy and read it, don’t forget to leave a review.