Joe Harris didn’t always sleep straight through the night, so he wasn’t surprised when his eyes opened after a dream about ice cream sundaes. Ruing the fact that, in the dream, the delicious-looking sundae had remained forever out of his grasp, He turned his head to look at the clock on his nightstand, but now he did feel surprise when he saw what was standing next to his bed:
A lineup of ghostly apparitions wearing NBA jerseys.
Thinking that he must still be in some kind of semi-dream state, he rubbed his eyes, but the apparitions remained. When he turned to look at the other side of his bedroom, there were more of them standing there as well. All of their faces were looking right at him.
“Who are you?” Joe whispered, feeling the strong urge to hide under the covers like had often done as a child tormented by fears of scary nighttime creatures.
“We are the ghosts of three-point contests past,” said one of them in an ethereal voice that also sounded distorted, as if playing out of a faulty speaker.
Joe scrutinized them while going through the list of previous contest winners in his head. None of them looked like Larry Bird, or Klay Thompson, or Stephen Curry, or Ray Allen, or Jason Kapono, or Craig Hodges, or any of the other winners he could think of. Since Harris himself was the previous year’s winner, wouldn’t he be haunted by fellow winners?
“We sense your confusion, mortal one,” came another voice, slightly different in tone from the previous one but still sounding distorted in a strangely electronic way. “Allow me to issue a corrected statement. We are the ghosts of failed three-point contestants past.”
As Joe furrowed his brow at this, the ghosts began to state their names in succession: “Michael Jordan”, “Allen Iverson”, “Paul George”, “Vladimir Radmanovic”, “Khris Middleton”, “Kevin Durant”, “Antoine Walker”, “Rimas Kurtinaitis”.
“Wait, what?” Joe said.
“They invited me to the contest even though I was a free agent from Russia,” said the ghost of Rimas Kurtinaitis, who was wearing a ghost-jersey bearing no team insignia at all. “I wish they hadn’t.”
“Oh,” Joe said. “That sucks.” He felt uncomfortable, like he was being put on the spot by all these NBA legends who had shown up in his bedroom as phantom-spectres only loosely tied to the world of the living. “But I won the contest. Shouldn’t you be haunting somebody like, I don’t know, Kemba?” he asked, thinking of a fellow 2019 contestant who hadn’t fared well but might be invited to try again.
“We are a cautionary tale,” said one of them, although Joe couldn’t tell which. “We were all considered to be good three-point shooters.”
“Except for me,” Michael Jordan said.
“Yes, except for Michael, we were all confident in our abilities, but we failed. The same could happen to you, Joe Harris. Heed our words…”
With that final warning, the apparitions began to fade out one by one until Joe was alone in his bedroom again. After sitting there in stunned silence for at least a minute, he swung his legs out of bed and pulled his gym bag towards him. It was never too early to show up at the gym and get up some shots.