What do I mean when I write dark is when the fun starts?
I’ll be explaining with a story. However, I start with the standard introduction.
There are several D-words and I’ve chose “dark” as my prompt for my letter D, in the A to Z prompts series. This is a new series of A to Z prompts, created by Dr. Lee Zacharias.
She is a professor emeritus of English, at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. She has written five nonfiction and two fiction books. She has contributed one chapter for “NOW WRITE! NONFICTION” and it is titled “Riffing”. That means to brainstorm and explore ideas. In that chapter, Dr. Zacharias wrote up a list of word prompts for writing enthusiasts to riff on and spark pieces of writing. That list of words has almost every letter of word from B to W. It is missing words starting with A, N, V, X, Y, and Z.
Right now, I’m ignoring the missing words, and calling this list the A to Z list of prompts. I might include my own few words, to fill up the gaps A, N, V, X, Y, and Z in the alphabet list.
My story starts now.
When I was a young child, I stayed in a temporary rental, for 1 – 2 months, while waiting for our permanent house to be ready for moving in. This rental house faced a side road, with its left side facing a piece of vacant land, which was directly behind a major, main road.
The main road has existed for may years. It was built way before World War II. The houses along the main road are as old as the road. Back in those days, this road ran along the coast. The sea was a stone’s throw away. During WWII, many prisoners of war were fatally shot at the beach, and their bodies were left to the mercy of the elements, to be washed away by the tide.
After the war, way later in the 1970s, land reclamation added miles and miles of land and changed this coastline. Land and estate development added so much to the geography. The coastline was pushed farther out. Whatever happened during the war stayed at the same perimeter of the original occurrence. There might have been lingering presences.
We stayed in the rental home during the early 1980s.
During the day, my family and I would hear somebody banging on the outside metal gate. It was as if somebody was knocking, to get attention, to go to the gate. All of us would look towards the gate. We could not see anybody. We thought we were mistaken and the source of the sound may have come from somewhere else.
The same metallic banging sound could be heard on different days. Always during the day. We would be inside our rental home, looking out at the gate, but we never saw anybody. Nobody went outside to check. We thought it was logical to just look and there was no need to go outside when we couldn’t see anybody.
Another strange phenomena happened at night, especially after everyone had gone to bed, switched off all the lights, and the house was in complete darkness. There would be a noise; like a heavy stool being dragged across the floor. This time, this noise was inside the house, specifically heard to be coming from the kitchen. Again, none of us went to check. My elders said they assumed someone was in the kitchen dragging a heavy stool.
The metallic banging sounds happened in the day. This dragging noise occurred during the dark night.
The elders in my family dismissed the disturbances as they thought the stay was temporary and we would be moving away from this rental soon.
The end.
