The Fourth Floor

The Fourth Floor

It was the fourth floor hallway

at the Stanley Hotel.

I didn’t want to believe,

but I did.

There are spectral kids in that hallway,

or so they say.

They said that if you are lucky

one of them will hold your hand.

A skeptic as always, I held out my hand

in the middle of the fourth floor,

all alone,

feeling rather moronic.

And what was it like,

you might ask,

to feel the sudden warm pressure

and the meek fingers grasping my hand?

I can’t say for sure what it was like,

because I don’t know what it was that held my hand

or what it was that seemed to smile

at my expression of incredulous disbelief.

If I couldn’t see the child then

how do I know it was there?

Maybe it was something that I felt

but can’t describe.

Because I was

all alone in the hallway,

holding the hand of some long-deceased child.

Perhaps I wasn’t alone.

Maybe there was a small person standing beside me all along,

urging me to believe.