Vulkayknow

From the window in her bedroom Miss Sinder could see the children pick up stones and roll them down from atop of Parker’s Hill laughing and jumping while the stones tumbled in twists and curvy-swervy bounces.  The hill had a small local cemetery that sat on the northern side gaining the least amount of sun.  Helen Sinder’s old mansion was still standing a hundred yards from Parker’s Hill and quite dirty and unkempt like an old doghouse that had seen too much of winter.  Its deadened yard had once been a garden.  A garden that had even made it into the newspapers, she thought alone.  It was filled with geraniums, pink primroses, partridge peas, glory of the snows, that were all planted at random, and mountain laurels, Madagascar jasmines, foxgloves, and every now and then a ghost flower.  These flowers covered the ground on all sides of the stepping-stones that cut straight through the budding beds to the white fence.  Another path cut to the east, about twenty feet from the gate, when walking out of the house, where a small fountain of a stone fox the color of bone used to help wash and quench all of the robins, finches, the black-chinned humming birds.  Here there was an opening where the plump barbera grapes swelled a large purple and grew tender and sweet on the green vines.  The vines clung to a white arch that stood six feet behind the fountains.  The fountain was encircled by yellow and loblolly pines and aspens.  When the aspens bronzed in autumn it gave the impression from the window that pines had freckled themselves gold.

            To her the fountain had become a sort of volcano.  Its heavy regurgitation of what it contained and had held many years weighed heavy on her cycle after cycle, and even made her take down her grandmother’s Irish silver cross that rested just above the mantle on the fireplace.  She threw it out into the garden and waited for the earth to swallow it, to see if it could bring itself back to life as jesus had done, or if it would wane endlessly until the cross had merely blown away in the heavy slow churning of the dirt. 

In Miss Sinder’s old age, the town forgot her, forgot she was there since Robert’s death because she stopped leaving the house, and stopped caring.  Her mind wandered most days, just as the myth of the mansion wandered about the children of the townsfolk.  They would whisper stories that an old spirit haunted its barren white walls and sometimes you could see an old man or woman floating with stormy hair and eyes.  The children would dare one another to go pick a grape, the last plant living in the yard and the closest to the house.  When those brave enough picked a grape or two and bit into them, the seeds pushed back like bones against their teeth.  They would always spit the seeds out, returning them to the ground before running away.  Those are Robert’s bones she thought.

The day she died she felt like a tomb.  The house had become what she thought of it, quite weary and dead.  She could feel things leave her, and fall away.  The earth opened up like a mouth and cried for her.  She became everything when she died.