Sensationalised - a short story
There is a woman, at the end of the road, named Castle; a long road that lay opposite the church. She was christened at birth with that name, in that church, and though time had swept her away like straggling fall leaves out the door, the journey from the beginning to the end of her life was only a few minutes’ walk across the street.
Castle sits on the porch of her house at the end of the road that lay opposite the church, watching the waves of the days wash through the weeks, and the months, and the years. A blanket rests atop her legs in the autumn, and a shawl across her shoulders in the waning fall, and she sheds it all again with the first signs of spring, sitting almost bare through summer.
Nobody knew Castle but everybody knew of her by name. By story. I suppose the idea of her was more exciting. The Tales of Castle – casting tall shadows over the town, oral stories etching into abstract with each time retold. They outgrew her, a woven narrative with the truth as mere reference.
They told her as a vibrant young girl. Spirited. Attended church every day. She is not a religious woman now, mind, ruled by no God aside herself, but as a child she grew up with the Father and the Sisters. They didn’t like her much, rebellious they’d say. Packing gum between her teeth like mortar in the cracks and running amuck with energy. So strange her stillness now.
The tales told the Father as her very own – though the gospel of this wavers – he, a wicked man who chewed and spat purity as if it were the act of swallowing that was the sin. His conscience clean so long as the sheets stayed white. And white they’d stain. As the stories are told, at night he would haunt her in bitter, restless sleep until one day, she stabbed him in the throat with a letter opener (or an athame, or a butchers knife…) and watched as the life drained out of him, spilling over the sheets. Red.
She’d buried him in the churchyard, but no body was recovered, and her memory flitters out now like a dwindling flame, so no body would ever be. I think somewhere in her bones she still knows what truly happened that night. In the way that she sits through the seasons, hail, shine, or rain. Because despite her failing memory obscured by piling dirt just like the image of her Father; our brains can forget, but our bodies cannot. And she feels it, she feels him, over, and over.
Castle died two weeks ago on that porch at that house at the end of the road that lay opposite the church; it took four days of people passing to notice the rot. It was when they dug her grave in the yard that they found him, all bones and gristle by now. And just like that, her lonely death was overcast by some morbid delight. Sensationalised.