Story Spotlight: “To Everything There is a Season” by P. D. Cacek
In “To Everything There is a Season,” P. D. Cacek opens the door to a once-familiar writing room—where memory, fiction, and a writer’s legacy blend into one final, ghostly conversation.
When retired writer Rhea Wentworth sneaks back into her old office—now part of a museum—she discovers the past isn’t done with her. Her fictional characters speak, pages shimmer, and her long literary life echoes through the space she once filled with stories. A gently magical, emotionally rich ghost story about authorship, aging, and the immortal life of fiction.
They were there, too, her monsters, peeking out at her from the deeper shadows between the bookshelves. Jamie’s monster was smaller than the others, his horror never brought to public light.
Yet.
“I rewrote the novel after the last rejection,” she told the unpublished characters, then smiled at the small pulsating mass that had gone on to consume an entire mountain town after finishing its Jamie appetizer “and I gave you the soulless eyes of a shark.”
Two stationary black holes promptly appeared in the creature’s face. Rhea caught her breath; it was even more terrifying than she’d imagined.
About the Author
P. D. is the author of over 200 short stories, and has won both a World Fantasy Award and a Bram Stoker Award for her short fiction. She’s written seven novels: Night Prayers, Canyons, Night Players, The Wind Caller, The Selkie, Second Lives, the follow-up novel, Second Chances, and Sebastian.
“Horror is an emotion, something that reaches past all the barriers and finds the one dark corner of our self-image that has not grown up. Horror doesn’t have to include dismemberments or gushing wounds or ancient demons dredged up by a new housing development. Anything, even a simple evening’s walk, can be horrific if you look at it the right way…and I do.”
Find Trish at: P. D. Cacek
What Lingers After the Last Line
This story is a love letter to storytelling itself. Blending literary nostalgia with speculative magic, it invites readers to consider what we leave behind—and what, or who, lives on after us.
Read the Story
“To Everything There is a Season” appears in Haunted Places, available now from Blackbird Publishing.
📚 Buy the book from your favorite store
If you liked…
- If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino—for layered metafiction and reverence for reading
- The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow—for its doorways between fiction and life
…then you’ll enjoy “To Everything There is a Season”—a gently magical ghost story about legacy, memory, and the lives we write into being.
📘 Also featured in Haunted Places: “Haunting Chloe” by James Pyles, another reflective tale of memory and gentle hauntings—where what lingers may be exactly what we need to say goodbye.