a spooky story for the books

I kid you not.

A gal named Rhyan responds to my craigslist ad selling my writing table/desk-bistro table.

On the phone I give her my address and directions.

“I know right where that is. My aunt used to live there.”

“The apartment with the red brick and white pillars?” I ask incredulously.

“Yes.”

Spooky 1!

Rhyan and galpal arrive. I greet them upstairs in the foyer.

We pad down the hallway toward the stairs.

“Which apartment did your aunt live in?”

“I don’t remember. It was downstairs.”

Soon we’re heading the stairs.

Spooky 2!

“I’d recognize it if I saw it,” she says.

We arrive at the basement landing.

For security, I’ve set the bistro table in the hallway.

“It was a studio,” she says, glancing around.

“There are only two studios on this floor.”

“That one,” I point in one direction.

Before I point to the second, she says, “It was this one.”

She’s pointing right at my door!

Spooky 3!

“I helped her move in.”

In all of Pierce County, the woman buying my writing table has an aunt who not only lived in my building but my very apartment!

What are the prodigious odds?!?

Tell me about your aunt, I say.

Her name’s Deborah. She lived in my apartment for a couple years in the late 1990’s. She was a temporary (substitute) teacher.

Then she got a full-time position at the community college. She moved up, literally, into one of the beautiful and spacious apartments upstairs.

She looooved the building. Might still live here had she not relocated long distance for a job.

The spook continues.

Denny’s the co-manager of my building. Unbeknownst to me prior, he and his wife also manage another property in this neighborhood.

The woman buying the table knows my manager. Because she lives in his building … less than two miles away!

Spooky 4!

What are the odds of all this, really?! Astronomical.

The girl with the bistro table linked through a bizarre lineage of time and connections …

{cue twilight zone music}

And comforting; the table where I wrote went to the right home …