Kyllikki Rytov
writer. rhetorician. researcher.
impertinent curiosity.
Selected short fiction
A bittersweet ghost story of adolescence and the tenderness of being remembered.
The principal insisted on calling it the eighth-grade formal, but the kids all called it prom. And that Friday, the kids had spent the day decorating the gymnasium. As part of tradition, the current seventh graders had swept the floor and hung crêpe paper streamers during lunch, and the prom committee had finished taping up balloons and mixing punch after school.
The girl’s gaze fell on tall letters, cardboard wrapped in aluminum foil, affixed to the blue padding of the gym wall: A Night to Remember, they declared.
Around her, students held hands and rocked to the music, their shouts and laughter rising above the jeweled pop tones.
The student decorators had worked hard to execute the theme. Silver, white, and blue crêpe paper had been braided and looped from the rafters. Blue and white paper stars hung from the basketball hoops, and a giant crescent moon, also foil-wrapped cardboard, hung from a table where the deejay stood over a CD player and mixer. Most of the main fluorescent lights were off, while tealights in little cups of blue glass sputtered prettily.
A harrowing un-ghost story about girlhood, gun violence, and the terrible miracle of being alive.
Diamond was a ghost.
The realization came to her quietly, without fanfare or the call of her name: she opened her eyes underneath a table and knew that she had died.
For a moment—not a long, slow moment and not a short, stinging moment—this didn’t bother her.
She lay on her right side, her cheek pressed against the gritty gym floor—no insult to Mr. Jimmy, who kept the high school spic and span, as her momma said—and stared through chairs legs akimbo. Her right arm—well, what right arm? She couldn’t feel it, trapped as it was between her body and the hard rubber of the gym floor. The gym was fully lit, the fluorescent lights glaring.
Above all, Diamond was aware of the music. Mrs. Titelle had given Maia her phone for the decorating playlist, and the playlist continued without interference, now in the middle of the clean version of a rap song from the Aughts. Even though the gym speakers hadn’t been state of the art when installed, the volume and quality of the wireless speaker let the bass pound in the floor under her cheek and arm.
An Appalachian ghost story of memory, coming of age, and the mercy of forgiving yourself.
In Blackseam County, the mountains did not rise so much as gather. They crowded shoulder to shoulder under a green pelt of oak, poplar, beech, and hemlock, the ridges folding into one another until even the roads seemed unsure whether they meant to arrive anywhere. In summer, the trees closed over the hollers with the damp, intimate dark of cupped hands. The creeks ran brown after rain and silvered when the sun found them. Vines strangled old fence wire. Ferns grew from the mouths of drainage ditches. Every slope had its own hidden weather, its own trick of shadow, its own history of men coming in with saws and money and leaving behind stumps, debts, and names carved into courthouse paper.
The forest had grown back thickest around the old timber land above the town of Lehigh, where the mansion still stood on its shelf of hill as if stranded there by a vanished century. Once, the slopes below it had been shaved clean enough for the owner to look out and admire the damage. Now the trees pressed close again: tulip poplar at the back porch, maple at the drive, rhododendron massed along the creek banks, blackberry canes tangling the place where a carriage road used to run. The house endured, neither abandoned nor rescued, its Queen Anne roofline of odd angles and dark shingles like a fussy old woman’s hat at church.
At the front door, Cress turned the key twice because the lock only caught proper on the second turn.
A modern gothic thriller about memory, male entitlement, and power of being underestimated.
The glue stick had begun life purple.
That much was still evident in the rind clinging stubbornly to the rim of the tube, though the glue itself had aged into something grayish and waxy. Ellie twisted the plastic base as far as it would go and regarded the nub that emerged with little optimism.
“Well,” she said to her reflection. “We can’t always expect optimal conditions.”
The restroom had the sort of marble counter intended to assure customers that sixteen dollars for a cocktail was not only reasonable but practically civic-minded: burgundy stone veined with burnished gold, brass faucets, and premium cotton hand towels rolled in a wire basket in lieu of a paper dispenser. Between the sinks, a reed diffuser exhaled vanilla and fig into a room already faintly perfumed by women wearing rose, citrus, amber, an olfactory atmospheric record of a fancy evening for an even more impressive event.
She had managed nine fingers perfectly.
A bittersweet ghost story of adolescence and the tenderness of being remembered.
The principal insisted on calling it the eighth-grade formal, but the kids all called it prom. And that Friday, the kids had spent the day decorating the gymnasium. As part of tradition, the current seventh graders had swept the floor and hung crêpe paper streamers during lunch, and the prom committee had finished taping up balloons and mixing punch after school.
The girl’s gaze fell on tall letters, cardboard wrapped in aluminum foil, affixed to the blue padding of the gym wall: A Night to Remember, they declared.
Around her, students held hands and rocked to the music, their shouts and laughter rising above the jeweled pop tones.
The student decorators had worked hard to execute the theme. Silver, white, and blue crêpe paper had been braided and looped from the rafters. Blue and white paper stars hung from the basketball hoops, and a giant crescent moon, also foil-wrapped cardboard, hung from a table where the deejay stood over a CD player and mixer. Most of the main fluorescent lights were off, while tealights in little cups of blue glass sputtered prettily.
A bittersweet ghost story of adolescence and the tenderness of being remembered.
The principal insisted on calling it the eighth-grade formal, but the kids all called it prom. And that Friday, the kids had spent the day decorating the gymnasium. As part of tradition, the current seventh graders had swept the floor and hung crêpe paper streamers during lunch, and the prom committee had finished taping up balloons and mixing punch after school.
The girl’s gaze fell on tall letters, cardboard wrapped in aluminum foil, affixed to the blue padding of the gym wall: A Night to Remember, they declared.
Around her, students held hands and rocked to the music, their shouts and laughter rising above the jeweled pop tones.
The student decorators had worked hard to execute the theme. Silver, white, and blue crêpe paper had been braided and looped from the rafters. Blue and white paper stars hung from the basketball hoops, and a giant crescent moon, also foil-wrapped cardboard, hung from a table where the deejay stood over a CD player and mixer. Most of the main fluorescent lights were off, while tealights in little cups of blue glass sputtered prettily.