Strange Steaks: Chapter One

A girl was standing in the driveway. She might have been just another illusion brought on by the stress Anthony has been feeling over the past couple of weeks.

She was wearing an over-sized orange plaid flannel blouse, despite how it was still very hot out, the temperature being in the upper eighties and the humidity wasn't letting go either. Her long blonde hair shimmered beneath the twilit sky and the bright golden strands swayed from side to side in the summer breeze, but that was the only part of her that moved. For she stood there, much like a statue, frozen in stance with her hands clasped behind her back, and she didn't flinch or budge at all even when Anthony called out to her, "Hey, do you need something?"

No response. She was just staring intently at the two-car garage, deeply lost in thought. Thinking she just did not hear him, Anthony decided to approach her. He walked up from the sidewalk that connected the neighborhood and crossed the front lawn, which was growing into a jungle since his father has been too preoccupied to get the lawnmower out. He was about a few feet away from her when she suddenly said in a soft voice, almost too quiet to hear, "Someone is crying in there."

Anthony stopped moving. He froze and was baffled. What did she mean by that?

He then thought of how his father is a carpenter and lately he had been shacking himself up in the garage, working on long and hard projects that lasted from sunrise to midnight. It made the boy curious, but he ultimately saw no harm for it could just be his father's way of relieving himself from the grief from going through a lot these past few weeks. He might very well be in there right now, but how could this girl have known that?

It was then that she finally regained her other senses and noticed the boy's presence near her. She turned her head to face Anthony who was still staring at her with wide brown eyes. They both watched each other, waiting for which one of them would make the first move, until a huge grin spread across the girl's face and a small chuckle escaped her lips.

"Oh hey. Do you need something?" she asked.

Taken back by how she had repeated what he already asked her, Anthony weirdly felt tense. But he shook it off and stated with a strange sense of firmness, "Um, not really. But you can tell me what you're doing at my house."

"Right, well, I thought I felt a paranormal presence in this garage, so I just wanted to get closer to check it out."

"Paranormal?" Anthony questioned out loud, "What are you, a Ghost Buster?"

"I'm a Ghost Hunter," the girl spoke as if she was clarifying something important, "My club and I investigate all the ghostly activities that happen in and around this town. We record the data, and sometimes we get the unsettled spirits to move on and stop bothering the locals."

"You're joking, right?" Anthony said, refusing to believe the words of this naïve five-year-old in a preteen girl's body.

"I'm not! It's all true!"

"Whatever, Ghost Buster."

"Ghost Hunter!"

'Is this girl a lunatic?' Anthony thought inside his mind. Then he said, "Well, that still doesn't explain why you're just standing in my driveway like you're stalking."

"I told you. I felt a ghost's presence in there. And as the duty of a psychic medium, I must examine it."

"So you're not a Ghost Buster, then?"

"It's Ghost Hunter!" the girl yelled louder this time, getting agitated that Anthony was not respecting her, and her smile soon faded.

"Fine, fine. But you won't be getting in there anytime soon, I bet."

"Huh?! Why not?" she whined.

"Because my dad's been working almost nonstop in there for so many days now," he explained, "He locks himself in there doing whatever woodwork he can. He barely takes any break, and he always has the key with him. And I highly doubt he'll come out and stop for some nonsense reason like yours."

"You're so mean!" the girl pouted, putting her hands on her hips and leaning forward. She glared at Anthony with a frustrated look, but then the expression on her face changed suddenly to one of curiosity and concern once she had gotten a good look at his eyes, "Huh, what's up with your eyes? You look like you haven't slept in a while."

This was true. Anthony had spent some nights over the past couple of weeks laying in bed with so many thoughts on his mind that they often prevented him from falling asleep. It resulted in him being emotionally exhausted most days. He was well aware of this since he looked in the mirror one morning to find that his eyes were bloodshot with dark bags on his lower eyelids, and things only got worse from there.

Just as she stated her observation, Anthony had had enough of this and said, "Look, I don't want to talk about it. I'm going inside now. Just go home, will you?"

That's when he turned away and made his way to the front door of his house. He didn't even care that the girl was calling out to him from behind, shouting things like, "But you don't look so good!" and "If your dad takes a break from being in your garage, let me know!"

She soon tried following him before he went inside because she didn't like how he was ignoring her. But as she got to the first step on the front porch, Anthony slammed the door shut, and thus her efforts were immediately cut off.

Just after that, Anthony leaned his back up against the door, closed his eyes and took a deep breath in and out. He was trying to relieve himself of everything that's been happening to him, but it didn't work.

"What a weird girl…" he said quietly to himself, having been annoyed to the extent that he couldn't hide it. Normally, he's fairly tolerant of others, but stress has fought it back to the back of his mind and eventually took control. He didn't like it.

Soon he pushed away from the door and started walking down the first hallway towards his room. He had to pass by the door that connected the house's interior to the garage, where something odd took place every few days at the minimum.

Then he heard it. A soft whimper.

He glanced over his shoulder in that direction on impulse once he reached the spot, and she was there. Anthony saw his mom again, hugging her knees and crying. She was sitting on the floor with her back leaning against the door that connected the house's interior to the garage.

He wanted to say something to her but couldn't even mutter a noise when he tried to open his mouth. So he just stared at the top of her head, her roots seemed to be getting grayer by the moment. Her hair was a knotted, tangled mess, and her clothes had been tattered and torn. Her shoulders shook slightly as she sobbed. And she kept sobbing, just how she always did, without lifting her head at all or acknowledging that her only son was there.

He was utterly dumbfounded as to what he was seeing. But somehow, through his mixing emotions of uneasiness, concern and confusion, somewhere deep down, Anthony stubbornly remained hopeful that his mother would return happy.

Then she began to mutter the same words under her breath. It was hard to comprehend at first, but as she kept repeating them, Anthony could soon make out what she was saying, "…I'm sorry…I'm sorry…I'm sorry…"

Eventually, as she said these words, her appearance began to fade into thin air until she completely disappeared. Anthony stared longer at the spot where she was even after her form had weakened and diminished. After coming back to reality, he turned tail and went upstairs to his room, closing the door behind him and plopped onto his bed facedown.

He eventually rolled over onto his side and said to himself, "Welp, it happened again. That's got to be like the fourth time this week."

It was never fun, watching his mother like that. It filled him with despair.

Now the light of dusk had turned into pitch-black darkness outside, with all the mosquitos and other insects coming out and buzzing around outside his window. He didn't even bother to turn the light on in his room. He just wanted to sleep and put another ugly day behind him, hoping that tomorrow would be better and, if at all possible, let her come back.

Then he realized, it was due to the conversation he had with that weirdo girl that it nearly made him miss out on dinner.

"Guess I should go get some food."

He got up from bed and left his room, went to the kitchen and into the cupboard where there were canned vegetables, soups, and cupped ramens. He pulled out a Styrofoam cup of noodles and filled it with piping hot water, let it sit for a few minutes until he pulled back the paper lid and began to dig in. He used a fork to fish out the noodles, stuffing each bite into his mouth. Staring into his food, he continued to eat in silence as he sat at the kitchen table.

You know how some people say: "You never know what you had until it's gone"? Well, Anthony didn't know how much he took for granted his mother's home cooking until she disappeared. Since then and because his father wouldn't stop working in the garage, he's had to fend for himself for days on end for his own meals. Feeding himself mostly buttered toast and cold cereal in the mornings and noodle soups at nighttime.

Once he took the last bite of noodles, Anthony felt he was on the verge of tears. But he held it back, wiping the blurriness from his tired eyes with the back of his hand, cleaned up the table, and went back to his bedroom to turn in for the night.

"Mom," he muttered to himself as he stopped to look back at the dark kitchen, "Wherever you are, I hope you come back home soon."