Dear Katie

Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. One of my early stories, Dear Katie, is back, expanded and remastered because you requested it. Thank you so much for them. It's about a young girl with a wish and I hope you enjoy it. My name is Edwin and he's a scary Story. I still remember sitting at the cafeteria of Hamilton Elementary, a brown bag in front of me with the egg burrito I love so much, but was so different from the colorful boxes everyone else had. Some of them were split perfectly for two halves of a sandwich to fit in. Others had a section for grapes and carrots. I just had a handful of off brand potato chips and a ziploc bag. I would hide the burrito as I lifted it up to my face and took big bites. I tried not to look at everyone else, and I really did, instead, opting to look only at the table in front of me, hoping for the lunch bell to ring and that everyone would just have to get up and walk back to their classrooms, that I could just stay there forgotten, in the middle of the darkened cafeteria and scream. My parents couldn't settle on a place to live. This is what I told my therapist the last time we spoke. I suggested this to be the cause of my inability to make friends. It wasn't that I was bullied or anything. It's just that nobody ever wanted to talk to me. I blame my parents. I blame them for lots of things. As a kid, I remember watching a movie where this girl gets ignored by her parents all day and begins to visit a library, and I wanted to be like her so badly. If only I could change things like how my parents moved from place to place all the time. Why couldn't they just leave me here? I told my therapist that I also blamed them for my insecurity and lack of self esteem, although sure I needed to own up to a portion of the blame. I remember she looked at me and took more notes all throughout the session until I got up. I thanked her and paid the receptionist she needed people like me to be around. The whole drive back. I kept thinking about that conversation, though, something I could have pretty much told myself in the car, although I don't think I would have valued it as much had I not paid for it, but there was lots more for me to uncover with those childhood memories. All this time I had been afraid to dig into it. But it was also very tired. My thoughts would get all tangled up and wear me out. I think I was getting around that age people talked about when your knees start hurting and sleep on a Friday night becomes a luxury. My thoughts went back to my childhood homes. I remember waiting for my dad to finish eating his dinner, which she normally ate alone in front of the television because because right after he would sit there killing time for one of his favorite crime shows to begin. That's when I took the chance to ask him about a new commercial that I saw, or about how I was learning to play the guitar they got me for Christmas two years before that. It only had three strings left, and I had no clue that you could change them. I thought that guitars should have to be replaced as soon as the strings run out. I remember his look toward me, the look that showed me that he wished I could go away and that he didn't care. Mom was usually in the room talking on the phone. With her friends. My parents didn't love each other anymore, you could tell, so it didn't feel too bad thinking about leaving. They might get some relief from each other's pains as well. You see, when I was even younger, one of my cousins from out of state stayed with us. She was supposed to be moving into a new house with another set of parents, or distant relatives or something. For obvious reasons, I wasn't told the truth about what happened to Gabby's parents. I was too young to get it. She knew a lot of things and was from another place, so even hearing her talk about school or what her house looked like was a reason for me to sit on the floor cross legged and listen to her talk. We got along just fine, spending every minute of every day together, walking around the trees and talking, sharing our food, finding things around the house that my parents didn't care about, making birdhouses out of bottles and fishing lures we knew we would never use. One day, she asked me if I wanted to know a secret. I had several secrets too. For example, I knew where my dad had buried mister Bingle when he died. I just went along with the story that mister Bingo had been sent to a farm to not hurt his feelings. But it wasn't like. Dad tried very hard to sell me that story, but secret seemed better. She said that it would make me be able to do whatever I wished for, and that I could go wherever I wanted. The only thing I had to do was to ask Katie for it in a letter. Katie was Gabby's friend. I think she granted wishes, and Gabby said it worked for her. I wasn't very good at writing letters. My writing was not the best. Maybe that's why Santa used to misunderstand mine most of the time. So I wrote it, but I didn't burn it. According to Gabby, I was supposed to light it on fire in order for it to work. I want to say I forgot about that last part, but fire seemed so off limits, like cigarettes or the smell of cans of beer, like watching TV at night or talking to strangers. Plus, but I didn't know how to use a lighter. Gabby didn't care, though. She took Dad's matches and ran off to the backyard, tugging at my shirt for me to follow her. She grabbed her envelope and lit it up from the corner and then set it on the dirt. But Gabby would do other strange things too, now that I think about it, like she would make me cut pieces of my hair and put them on the floor, giving careful instructions to herself as she drew circles around the small bunch of them. She would get up real close to the floor and whisper. She would play around with dead animals. I mean, if you could call poking them with the stick playing. You would see them from across the street. The place we had lived for a couple of months had a bunch of trees and a dry wooded area nearby, so raccoons and other animals would come and go quite often crossing the street. Some of them would it make it, and I don't remember it clearly anymore, but she would hum this particular melody over and over. It sounded like the theme song of a television show. But then she would sing in a deep voice and then go back to her normal tone. But she was my only friend. It took me years of thinking about it to realize that on some level I looked up to her. She knew things that I didn't and would always be surprised when I would tell her that I wasn't allowed to go somewhere or to do a certain thing, that I had never bought anything, for example. So she taught me about allowance and on taking coins from the jars or from behind the couches. But eventually my parents got a knock at the front door from who I still describe as the woman with a fake smile. She came in and talked with my parents for a bit, and it was surprising for me to see them so polite and engaged. Dad was missing his TV show and the phone kept ringing asking for Mom from the other room. And then suddenly Dad grabbed Gabby's suit case from our room and took it to the front porch. We never got to say goodbye, although her smile upon leaving was something I would never forget. I never saw or heard from her again. Not long after Gabby left, strange things started happening around the house. There was an instant when my parents woke me up in the middle of the night and started searching through my closet and opened up my window. They tapped on the ceiling with a broomstick, checking out every single corner of the house. They couldn't find. The sores of a hum sounded like whiskers floating around the house. I used to hear them too. Several times I heard Mom yell my name, demanding that I stopped lying to her, although I was in my room, far enough away from the living room to make her realize that the child she was seeing there it was not me, And it seemed strange things with Gabby, so I didn't think they were as strange as my parents seemed to find them. But it was enough to get my mom to go hysterical and to force us to move to a different house in the same city, although I had to go to a different elementary school. That's when my parents lost it and became even worse. We weren't exactly normal before then, but after that first move, we just kept changing houses. I kept going to new schools, and my parents grew distant. I would heat up my own frozen food or make my own sandwiches for school. My dad got lost in his own work, and Mom started wasting money on perfumes and random things that salespeople would offer door to door. It wasn't until one of these times when we were moving once again, by the way. At this time I was in high school when I found the letter I had written back when I was seven years old. It had fallen off a box of school certificates I had gotten that my parents didn't care enough to put on the wall. I looked at the envelope and its markings with a pencil I had made many years ago. It was a letter that was supposed to make things all better. The Wongabi had asked me to write to her friend Katie. I'm not sure if it worked. I remember thinking that only time would tell. Things had all seemed the same for the longest time that I had become numb to everything. I could burn the whole box and not feel a thing, And so I grabbed a box of matches by my candle and went out to the yard of that house. I took out the letter. I read it smiled. It wasn't even a sentence long. I can remember it clearly. I put it back in the envelope and struck the match on the box. I lit it from the corner. Not long after that, as when things really took a sinister turn. The hams and whispers turned into random knocks on our windows and walls, and then came the disembodied grunts. Imagine being woken up by the haunting chan of a woman standing right beside her bed. Was terrified. My parents were planning another move when the fire happened. It was in the middle of the night when all the smoke filled the house. I remember the flashing lights, the plastic mask over my face, and the loud voices as my stretcher was rolled across the hospital hallways, lights flickering above me. I still see the sheets that covered up both my parents' bodies and the truck that took them away. I remember having to change houses for the last time. Now I believe it was that letter and this was my wish. Dear Katie, I want a better family, Sincerely, Sarah. I wanted Katie to understand that I wanted my family to get better. I wasn't very good at writing letters, but Gabby said it didn't matter. It had worked for her. Besig Scary Story podcast has written and produced by me Edwin Kowarrubias. The original version of the story is still available in one of our early seasons, and if you've listened for a while, is there a story you'd like to bring back to life. Let me know. You can find out what we're up to on our TikTok and Instagram at scary dot fm, and I'll leave my information in the description of the episode if you want to find me too. I'm at Edwin Cove. That's ed Wi n coo V on social media. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary every one, See y soon.