Season's End

The cigarette stained ceiling cast a yellow hue over the space below giving the room an air of jaundiced ill-health. Simone sat on the chair, its surface worn smooth by years of supporting tired, sorry asses. Through the grimy pane of the guest house bedroom window she watched the winter storm as it passed over outside, her knees pulled close to her chest and her toes curled over the edge of the seat like the talons of a perching bird. The young women’s face was still salty and wet from her own storm that had washed over her, the tumult depositing a dampness on her jeans where her sadness had pooled between her cheeks and bony knees. She had wondered which would pass first, nature’s greyness or the dark clouds that hung over herself..

Turning the handle, she lent the weight of her shoulder to the window frame and it popped reluctantly from its swollen sill shuddering into the morning. From her first floor refuge she looked out over the cemetery next door. God’s acre had long been left untended and vegetation now sprawled in a mat of leafy tendrils weaving themselves thick to blanket the dead from the cold. The old stone church stood in weary guard over the eternally hopeful from under the awning of a large oak tree, its crumbling façade left to ruin by a community more concerned with feeding their families than feeding their congregational appearance.


Prudence Henrietta Clutterbuck
1786- 1849

That’s all it said.

Standing at the graveside Simone read the inscription on the half buried square of stone and wondered who the woman was, how she died, how she lived and if anyone cared she was there. It often seemed a cure worth considering to her - death. She felt sure few would care if it were her name covered in moss instead of Henrietta’s.

The grating of metal contorted in the wind as a someone entered the funerary grounds through its dilapidated gate. The person walked methodically and with metronomic certainty , their torso bent forward into the gusting swirls, it bobbing in counter to their heavy steps. Although knowing it ridiculous Simone thought this intruder somehow new of her considerations of oblivion and she felt ashamed as might a small girl had she been caught exploring differences with one of the boys from her neighborhood. She stood rigid not daring to move, concentrating on the peripheries of her vision where the figure’s movement was barely discernable. She saw it stop, pause, and turn. “Shit!!”, she thought. “He’s coming straight toward me.”

To Be Continued