I wrote this piece for an assignment in my fiction class in 2021 where I could write anything I wanted as long as it met the word requirement. I focused on my love of mixing comedic elements with horror elements, and wanted to create a light and humorous story with dark elements intertwined.
I found directions on how to conduct a séance in an issue of Bop Magazine I’d purchased from a Piggly Wiggly in 2007, a floppy-haired Zac Efron on the cover. I’d since abandoned it in the back of my closet, only to find it while I was searching for a sweater I hadn’t seen in a year but suddenly desperately wanted to wear. The sweater, which wasn’t as cute as I remembered, was balled up in a bag with the magazine, a Lite Brite and a three pack of Lizzie McGuire scrunchies.
I called Amelia right after I found it, initially to tell her that I found a little note in her handwriting next to Efron’s winking face saying “my future husband.” It had a lopsided heart drawn around it in smudged pink ink.
“And? He’s still not married,” she said. “It could happen.”
“Nah,” I told her, “I’ve heard he’s dating a waitress he met.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Sometimes you tell me customers flirt with you, maybe you’ll fall in love with them.”
“Oh sure, I’ll fall in love with the guy who thinks dropping some pennies in the tip jar is flirting.”
Amelia sighed into the phone.
“I bet Zac Efron is a good tipper,” she said. “Yeah, I bet his girlfriend thinks he’s a great tipper.”
“Screw you.”
I flicked through the pages, each more brightly saturated than the last. One teen star laments her struggles with acne, another gives the inside scoop on his latest Disney Channel Original Movie. Then, right in the middle of the magazine, dark red.
“Since when did these teen magazines give instructions on how to contact the dead?” I asked.
“What?”
“There’s a page on how to conduct a séance, only five steps.”
“A séance like when you light a bunch of candles and talk to ghosts?”
“Yeah, that’s what it looks like.”
“Don’t you have a bunch of candles in your room?” “Yeah but—”
“I’ll be over in five.”
…
I had a whole shelf of candles in my room, most of them unlit and the rest hardly used. I loved to buy candles, I loved the idea of lighting them, but when I finally got around to it all I could think about was if I’d regret lighting it. I didn’t want to waste them, candles don’t last forever. At most I would light them for half an hour, watch them burn and then blow them out. Better safe than sorry.
Amelia swiped an orange candle in a glass container down from the shelf, evaluating the label. It had the word “Venus” printed in curly letters and surrounded by gold stars. I had a candle for each of the planets, even Pluto. Venus smelled like orange and bergamot, Pluto smelled a bit like laundry detergent.
“Let’s just go to the dollar store, get some little white ones, that’s always what they use for séances in the movies,” I said, taking Venus back from Amelia.
“What so you can designate a second shelf to your collection? No, we’re using your candles.” This time Amelia grabbed Mercury and Jupiter, cinnamon and cedar.
“We’ll scare the ghosts away if we make my dining room smell like a Bath and Body Works.”
Amelia shrugged, now reaching for the Neptune candle. “You don’t know that, maybe ghosts like the scent of…” She paused, squinting at the label, “Water? What does this one even smell like?”
“I don’t know, I never lit it.”
“Sammie, that’s ridiculous. I know you know that’s ridiculous.”
“Fine, you can light Neptune, but put Mercury back.”
Amela tucked another candle into her folded arms, ignoring me.
“Are your parents home?” She asked.
“No, they had to take Emma to a conference with her teacher because she lost the class toad.”
“What kind of class pet is a toad?”
“A pretty good one, I guess. She was really upset.”
Amelia finally looked satisfied with the armful of candles she’d taken from my shelf and turned to leave my room.
“C’mon,” she called, making her way down the hallway. I heard a thud as she dropped one of the candles.
…
My mom painted the dining room green last summer, lime green. She said it brightened up the room, which had little windows and was overcrowded with a table that was too long and a china cabinet that stuck out too far from the wall, meaning two of the dining room chairs couldn’t be pulled back very far and whoever sat in them had to be pinned against the table for the entirety of Thanksgiving dinner.
Amelia had organized the candles into a cluster on the table, and had the Zac Efron magazine open over her arm to the dark red pages.
“It says we should cleanse the space by burning something like cedar, which is perfect because this one is cedar-scented.” She set down the magazine to light a match over the Jupiter candle, the noise made me flinch.
“I don’t think that’s how that works.”
She leaned over the table to grab my chin, looking into my eyes,
“Are you in a negative headspace? Are you mourning anything?”
“I’m mourning my Jupiter candle,” I said. I glanced down, watching the khaki-colored wax turn to liquid and pool around the blackened wick. The cedar scent was weaker than I expected.
“I’m serious,” she whined. “If you have negative energy then you’ll invite negative energy into your home.”
“Why do we have to do this?”
“Because it’ll be fun!”
“Let’s do it at your house then.”
Amelia dropped my chin and swept the magazine back up into her arms.
“Too late,” she said. “We’ve already started.”
She looked down at the magazine, dragging a long black nail over the words to make sure she didn’t miss anything. Her skin was so pale the walls of my dining room tinted it green. Her bangs fell over just her right eye, she’d cut them into a crooked, downward slope across her forehead in my bathroom last weekend.
“All right,” she said. She traded the magazine for the box of matches and motioned for me to take a seat across from her. “I’ll light the rest of the candles while you say a prayer inviting the spirits to communicate with us.”
“What? What do I say?”
She lit a match over Neptune, lowering the flame and destroying the perfectly white and untouched wick. “Whatever your heart tells you to say.”
“Dear spirits—”
“You’re not writing a letter!”
“You said to say what was in my heart!”
“Well make your heart sound smarter.”
I wanted to argue back, but Amelia had moved onto Mercury. The sooner I get this over with, the sooner I can blow out my candles.
“Hey, spirits,” I started, getting an eye roll from Amelia, “I’m Samantha, it’s lovely to meet you. Please feel free to communicate with my associate Amelia and I, we’d love to hear how you died.”
Amelia lit the last candle, a lavender one that was about as long as my forearm, and looked up at me.
“That was lame,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter, I have this to help us communicate.” She reached for her backpack, which she’d thrown on the floor next to one of the chairs that couldn’t scoot back, and pulled out something flat and bright purple.
“Is that?”
“A Ouija board? Yes, it is,” Amelia said, laying it down so I could see that all of the letters were silver and coated in glitter. There was a smiling cartoon ghost painted in the top left corner that was giving a thumbs up. “I brought it just in case, and the magazine says we need a vessel for the spirits to communicate through so it’s perfect.”
“Aren’t they supposed to look… Not like that?”
“I got it on eBay, the seller said they’d spruced it up a bit.”
“Right.”
She reached into the bag again, pulling out the planchette and placing it on top of the board. It too was covered in silver glitter that stuck to Amelia’s fingers and spread across the table. It had a red eye painted in the center.
Amelia touched both hands to one side of the planchette and looked up at me.
“You have to put your hands on the other side.”
“No thanks.”
“What? Come on, just do it. You don’t even believe in ghosts.”
I glanced over at my candles, little puddles of wax forming. The air in the room was nauseating, every candle mixing together to the point where the individual scents were no longer detectable. Maybe they’d be salvageable after this, still whole enough. I touched my fingers to the planchette.
“Close your eyes,” Amelia told me.
I did, the collective flickering of the candles created shifting patterns on the insides of my eyelids.
“Spirits,” Amelia said, “we welcome you to communicate with us, to use this vessel to— what’s touching my hands?”
“Huh?”
I opened my eyes in time for Amelia to scream and flick something towards me.
“Percival?”
“Who?”
“Emma’s class toad,” I said, watching as the toad in question hopped over and nestled on the “Yes” on the board. I went to scoop him up, causing him to emit a surprisingly loud croaking noise that made Amelia squeal.
“Please just move it.”
“I’m trying!”
I reached for him again, but he evaded my hands and hopped to the other side of the board, now sitting on top of the “No.”
“Aw look it’s like he’s talking to us.” I nudged Amela, but she made a face, unimpressed.
Percival began hopping around the board again, touching the “I” and the “A” before settling on the “M.” Amelia sat up in her chair.
“I think he might be.”
“What?”
“He’s talking to us, he said ‘I am’.”
I crossed my arms and looked at the toad, who blinked his little green eyes at me.
“Percival, is a ghost using you to communicate with us?” I asked.
He hopped to the “Yes.”
“Huh. That’s unideal.”
I looked at the candles, but Amelia grabbed my arm.
“Don’t blow them out,” she said. “If he’s possessed by an evil spirit blowing out the candles invites it to stay.”
“You think my sister’s class toad is possessed by an evil spirit?”
“Maybe,” she glanced at the magazine, “It didn’t give very much information, especially not about this.” “Well, we shouldn’t have taken spiritual advice from a magazine with a headline about High School Musical.”
I glanced down at Percival, who was sitting patiently on the board. His stubby brown legs had silver glitter stuck to them.
“How about you,” I asked him, “do you know how to fix this?” He hopped to the “No.”
“Yeah, that figures.”
Amelia leaned over Percival, narrowing her eyes at him.
“Did you die in this house?” She asked.
He hopped to the “Yes.”
“Don’t do that!”
“What,” she said. “We should at least talk to the ghost while we have him, or maybe it’s a her. Are you a lady ghost?”
Percival moved back to the yes, prompting Amelia to nod approvingly.
“I knew it,” she said“I sensed a feminine energy.”
“This is ridiculous.”
The candles had become half liquid at this point, and I was shocked their combined scents hadn’t created some sort of visible smog.
“Can we say goodbye now?” I asked, hoping Percival would hop down to the sparkly “Goodbye” at the bottom of the board. Instead, he went back to the “No.”
I couldn’t stop myself from looking back to the candles. The wicks were crumbling and curled, standing in a pool of wax that was lowering by the minute. Why bother with keeping them if they were going to look destroyed? Why bother wasting them all?
I blew them out. All at once, with one big breath. Jupiter’s wick fell into the pool of wax beneath it.
I looked back at Percival.
“He looks fine to me. Does he look fine to you?” I asked Amelia.
“You’re really ridiculous about those candles, Sammie.”
“Yeah, but it worked out. The toad isn’t evil. We can put my candles back, everything can just go back to normal. Right Percival?”
I held out my hand and tried to nudge him into my palm, but he stayed planted firmly on the “No.”
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