The Reveal

A few weekends back, a fellow mom and I headed out to see the new movie The Orphanage, as giddy as prisoners let out for the evening on a work-release program.

The Husband would rather have ground glass shoved in his eyeballs than willingly sit through any scary movie, especially one that involves children of any shape or form (though he can sit on the sofa eating a bowl of ice cream during one of CSI's lovely autopsy scenes), so it was a win-win situation for us all: he was thrilled to be putting the girleens to bed rather than accompanying me, the Girleens were thrilled to get to watch TV at night and I was thrilled to sit back and settle into a ghost story.

After seeing it, I would submit that it's not necessarily the presence of children in such narratives that ratchets things up a notch, but the presence of a mother or a mother-figure, whether she's the haunted or the one who does the haunting.

It turns out that I've been writing stories that dance around that idea for a while.

One of them appears here starting tomorrow. An installment a day, Monday-Friday! You know reading it's really what you want to be doing when you should be working!

(A NYTimes take on fivechapters.com, the site where "The Artists' Colony" appears, can be found here.)