The Widow's Breakfast
By Joe Hill
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
From the New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Horns comes this e-short story—from Joe Hill’s award-winning collection 20th Century Ghosts.
Imogene is young and beautiful. She kisses like a movie star and knows everything about every film ever made. She's also dead and waiting in the Rosebud Theater for Alec Sheldon one afternoon in 1945. . . .
Arthur Roth is a lonely kid with big ideas and a gift for attracting abuse. It isn't easy to make friends when you're the only inflatable boy in town. . . .
Francis is unhappy. Francis was human once, but that was then. Now he's an eight-foot-tall locust and everyone in Calliphora will tremble when they hear him sing. . . .
John Finney is locked in a basement that's stained with the blood of half a dozen other murdered children. In the cellar with him is an antique telephone, long since disconnected, but which rings at night with calls from the dead. . . .
Joe Hill
Joe Hill is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Fireman, NOS4A2, Horns, and Heart-Shaped Box; Strange Weather, a collection of novellas; and the acclaimed story collections Full Throttle and 20th Century Ghosts. He is also the Eisner Award–winning writer of a seven-volume comic book series, Locke & Key. Much of his work has been adapted for film and TV, including NOS4A2 (AMC), Locke & Key (Netflix), In the Tall Grass (Netflix), and The Black Phone (Blumhouse).
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Book preview
The Widow's Breakfast - Joe Hill
The Widow’s Breakfast
A Story from the Collection
20th Century Ghosts
Joe Hill
To Leanora:
WE ARE MY FAVORITE STORY
Contents
Begin Reading The Widow’s Breakfast
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Joe Hill
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
THE WIDOW’S BREAKFAST
Killian left the blanket on Gage—didn’t want it—and left Gage where he lay on a rise above a little creekbed somewhere in eastern Ohio. He didn’t stop moving for the better part of a month after that, spent most of the summer of 1935 riding the freights north and east, as if he was still headed to see Gage’s best cousin in New Hampshire. He wasn’t, though. Killian would never meet her now. He didn’t know where he was headed.
He was in New Haven for a while but didn’t stay. One morning, in the early dark, he went to a place he had heard about, where the tracks swept out in a wide arc, and the trains had to slow down almost to nothing going around it. There he waited. A boy in an ill-fitting and dirty suit jacket crouched beside him, at the base of the embankment. When the northeastern came, Killian jumped up and ran alongside the train, and hauled himself up into a loaded freight car. The boy pulled himself into the car right behind him.
They rode together for a while, in the dark, the cars jolting from side to side and the wheels banging and clattering on the tracks. Killian dozed, came awake with the boy tugging on his belt buckle. The kid said for a quarter, but Killian didn’t have a quarter and if he did, he wouldn’t have spent it that way.
He grabbed