Category: Nonfiction Stories

Sixteen each, we met at the YMCA dance and I trembled when I got the courage to ask you for a dance. I remember the band played Sixteen Candles. You honest to God felt like an angel in my arms, your beautiful blonde hair heavenly, your sky blue eyes, divine. I think I fell in love with you the moment you were In my arms; it all felt so natural, so true, so incredibly real, like nothing I’d ever experienced.

It was so many years, so many summers ago, I can’t remember who said I love you first. I only remember I meant it forever. I remember I loved you so much I would have died for you without hesitation, without reservation.

And oh my God those kisses on the banks of the pond, the pond waters caressing the shore, my head in you lap looking up at your sunlit angelic face, captivated by your smile and how beautiful you looked, how intoxicatingly sweet your perfume was when I inhaled it with my every breath, and the soft summer green grass like a love nest enveloping us in romantic bliss and how when summer was over it was so hard, so painful to be apart from you, sweet you.

I remembered how we planned to get married when we graduated from high school, and how your heart was so true. And how even though you lived faraway in New Jersey and I lived in Massachusetts you spent your summers in Woburn the city I lived In, and how I went to your prom in Montclair, New Jersey before the summer love faded into a dark frozen winter when all the summer flowers and our love wilted and died. And how I cried and cried and cried.

And you broke what I thought was our forever vow when you cheated on me with some guy going to Rutgers U., and I remember how I never knew I had a heart that could be shattered into a million pieces that would take years to put back together, misspent years of dissipation and dissolution
not caring if I lived or died, such was the agony of the fairy tale evermore love lost.

It was even more painful because I stayed true to you beyond the distance, beyond the seasons, and I would have stayed true to you eternally. Even now decades hence and me like a monk in the world, sometimes I still think of what might have been, what could have been.

But alas we’re not sixteen anymore and Sixteen Candles was so long ago, and you might be dead and I almost was, and if we were to meet again, maybe I’d wake up and see it was only like a dream, and that teenage summer love was never meant to be, and I’d dry my older, wiser eyes.

Bob Boyd

I was six or seven years old and taking swimming lessons at a community pool and when I was out of the pool standing in front of the swings, I felt a soft tap on my back. I turned around and saw a cute, red-haired girl my age smiling at me.

I was too young for boy girl romantic feelings and the power of flirtations back then, but something in me besides my back was touched. I think it was a budding romantic heart. Before any words were spoken, the red-haired girl’s mother took her hand and walked away with her while she was looking back at me smiling.

I never saw that red-haired girl again, but, curiously, I think about her now and then even as an old man. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I’d met her again when she and I were old enough to fall in love, and I feel that would have happened.

I wonder how her life turned out. Did she have a full and happy life? Is she still alive? What was her name? But, alas, I’ll never find out any of those things. Sometimes in overly imaginative moments, I’ve wondered if I’ll see her again in the afterlife.

Maybe she’ll be there as a beautiful, red-haired woman and tap me softly on my back, and I’ll turn around and fall in love with her. And for reasons unclear to me, I got a little teary-eyed writing this story.

Bob Boyd

In Springfield Vermont, stands the Hartness House Inn an elegant, looming gables mansion built in 1904.

Once the home of James Hartness, an inventor extraordinaire a governor of Vermont, an aviator, an industrialist and more in want of a quieter environment, he a built a network of tunnels under his mansion, a subterranean sanctuary with a library, a workshop, a study and an apartment.

Twenty years after Hartness died in 1934, the mansion was converted into an inn, and the ghost of Hartness is believed to be haunting it: strange sensations, lights flickering, rocking chairs rocking by themselves, objects fly off shelves, sounds of someone murmuring.

But smart as Hartness was, if he is haunting the mansion, why couldn’t he find his way to the Light?
Or is he locked into doing what he still thinks is his material world work in his subterranean, tunneled haunts?

Bob Boyd