Who Rocks the House: My submission for NPR's Three-Minute Fiction Round Five

For the fifth round of NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction, they asked writers to submit very short stories that begin with the line “Some people swore that the house was haunted” and end with “Nothing was ever the same after that.”

Go browse through the stories that were posted. There are some amazing bits of fiction over there.  Some focus in on a particular moment in rich detail.  At least one manages to be epic in less than six-hundred words. Let me know your favorite.  

Here’s the story I submitted. Questions, comments, remarks, observations, and miscellaneous personal abuse are welcome below.  Okay, no personal abuse, but I have to deliver that line* in its full glory. 

Who Rocks the House by Dani Smith

Some people swore that the house was haunted. The groundskeepers standing in the lush grass heard only the jingle of the wind through the chain-link fence. Some people could feel a cold presence as they approached the gate and read the name of a man on the wall. His aura reached out from the house, tingling spines in the local halls of government. His ideas buzzed in the ears of civic leaders, inspiring some and disgusting others.

Born and raised in that small-but-changing town, he knew everyone important. If you didn’t know him, you must have lacked influence.

Once upon a time he inspired respect with his enthusiasm for tradition and his can’t-give-up attitude. Those who remembered that positive attitude were long gone. The respect eroded to trepidation and the enthusiasm to bitter stubbornness.

The folk that still knew him didn’t know why he was important. His cause was not always their cause.  Sometimes they shared his goals, but eventually they outgrew him. Most only cared while their sons and daughters worked in the house.  While they ran plays, shouted cheers, marched out drills and notes.

When their lives moved on, when their kids grew up, their interest in the house faded.

But not this man. The quintessential football booster. Honorary President for Life of the football booster club.

“Did he play football here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did his kids play?”

“You got me.”

“Why do we care that he doesn’t like this coach or that turf or his seat at the banquet? Does he give a lot of money?”

“He gives what he can, but it’s not much anymore.”

They cared what he thought because that unrepentant football-Marley wailed out his laments. He rattled the down-markers and clanked the trophy case, bemoaning his nostalgia for a lost time when football was bigger. The hits harder. The blood thicker. The taunts louder. The coach meaner.

He longed for the days when the fans shook the house, packing and creaking the bleachers, pouring their souls onto the field in a ritual letting of spirit. He hung onto football in his teeth. He lived and breathed and ate the memory of his days in that house.

He wanted it back. The glory and the fury. The testosterone-rich, drug-fueled, slobber-knocker football glory of legend.

“So the stadium IS haunted? We got a ghost in here?”

“Him?  He ain’t no ghost. He’s just a mean old bastard.”

Keys to the house and the trophy case fell out of his hands when the EMTs lifted his body from his reserved seat in the bleachers. The groundskeepers took off their hats as the gurney passed, then the older one spat on the ground below the stands.

The superintendent gave the man’s keys to the president of the band boosters.

Nothing was ever the same after that.

*That line was frequently used to conclude a discussion by one of my favorite and most influential professors.