Fandango’s Story Starter #103
When Ida discovered that she could hear the voices of the dead speaking to her when she tuned into a certain radio station, she decided to live.
She had been planning on killing herself for the better part of a month and felt a sense of relief for the first time in years.
She’d been taking care of her mother most of her adult life and now she was gone. She’d lost all purpose.
She was going to lock herself in her bedroom, down a bottle of her mother’s painkillers, lay in bed and drift away.
She’d hung Christmas lights on the ceiling. She thought they’d make a beautiful kaleidoscope as she lost consciousness.
It was a perfect plan until Rosalyn, a woman who died 103 years ago told her to reconsider.
Rosalyn, who was 25 when she passed, had jumped off a bridge in upstate New York. She was sure she’d contracted the Spanish flu. All three of her children had died from it, and her husband was, in her words, “a brute“.
She told Ida that she couldn’t remember landing in the Hudson river and that she couldn’t shake the feeling of falling and falling and falling…
Rosalyn couldn’t say how long she’d felt that way and she’d sometimes go off on unintelligible tangents until it sounded like she was moving further and further away. Eventually Ida would only hear static. She thought that might’ve been water.
She decided that Rosalyn was in some level of suspense. Purgatory perhaps. Or, and this is what really made her change her mind, Hell.
Ida wasn’t religious but she didn’t want to take any chances.
She told herself she’d die of natural causes when it was time.
Her mother would be waiting for her.
Until then, she’d look into investing her inheritance and throw herself into research.
Ida decided it would be her life’s purpose to help Rosalyn move on or at least find some kind of relief. If not Rosalyn, someone else. There were a few others she’d spoken to briefly.
She closed her eyes and listened to a bird singing its sweet little heart out.
“It’s going to be okay.” She told herself. She’d have to do that every day.
Ida reached for the radio dial excited to tell Rosalyn the good news.