By then I had returned to the northern city that was, by now, my home.

Two weeks after the dream, my phone rang at a strange hour. I wish I could tell you that, through my sister's pet, my father had imparted profound wisdom, the kind that could only be gleaned from having entered into the Great Beyond, but all he said was Don't answer the phone, don't answer the phone, don't answer the phone. Before then, I had never put much stock in notions like the transmigration of souls, but that moment, strange as it was, made me start wondering about all kinds of things. I dreamt that my father was speaking to me through my sister's dog, a brown-and-white shorthair mutt, and then I woke to the mutt sitting upright on my bed, staring down at me with my father's same wearied disdain, his jaws opening and closing as though controlled by a ventriloquist's strings. It happened the night after he died, in my sister's guest room in Florida. My father has been dead for a year and I have had exactly one dream about him. Could it be, or is she simply experiencing a cruel trick of bereavement? In 'The Upstairs People,' much as she did in 2018's The Third Hotel, van den Berg wonderfully renders the weirdness of grief.Ī writer whose father has just died begins to suspect the newly-vacated apartment above her might be haunted. Imagine a ménage à trois between Nikolai Gogol, Banana Yoshimoto, and Flannery O'Connor and you'll have some sense of her uncanny abilities. image Click here to read more short stories and original fiction. Over the course of four books-two story collections and two novels-Laura van den Berg has all but perfected the art of making outlandish occurrences appear as natural as air. Author Lorrie Moore once said, 'A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage.' With Sunday Shorts, invites you to join our own love affair with short fiction by reading original stories from some of our favorite writers.

The Third Hotel by Laura van den Berg