Candle in the Attic Window(32)

When she grew tired and sore, she opened her mouth to tell him, to ask him to take a break, but he covered her in kisses, her traitorous body responding. She was unable to speak, her throat too dry. Her stomach sent sharp, shooting pains through her body in rhythm with his thrusts. He would not stop.

She gave up and lay under him, limp as a rag doll. Arms and legs too weak to move, stomach clenching and unclenching. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out, just the exhalation of old, stale breath. She prayed in her mind for help, for an end. For it to stop for good. She fought to keep her eyes closed, from looking into his eyes. They were pits of darkness, ready to swallow her up.

She fell asleep or passed out, and woke as he dressed and left the room. She crawled into bed, shivering, and pulled the blankets up over her. She felt skeletal, as if her flesh was just a thin cover for brittle bone. A glimpse in the mirror showed her a husk of her former self. Lorena rolled over on her side and looked out the window, trying to remember how she had gotten here. Her breath was shallow, coming in gasps as if she had run a long race. She looked out the window at the people walking by, some well-dressed, others casual, everyone with some apparent place to go. But not her. Lorena lay and stared out the window knowing he was gone, had left her to rot, but too tired, and oddly satisfied, to care.

She noticed, as she looked for one last glimpse of him, hoping that he would do her the honour of looking into her window one last time, that he had left a white rose on the windowsill.






Gina Flores lives on a beach in Texas with her husband, a 90-pound lapdog, and a cat. She writes stories to stay sane and teaches at a university to pay the bills.





Victorians





By James S. Dorr





The first thing I remembered of my early childhood was the fog. I must have been only five years old when I left the house that I had been born in – beyond that, my mind was still pretty much blank – and I would not have returned even now, more than thirty years later, except that I had finally married. Her name was “Amelia” and I had met her in Chicago, but now I traveled home alone. I had determined to open the house first and, only after it had been restored to a liveable condition, to send for my bride.

I crested a hill. Just as the road hooked down toward the river, and to the town I would find across it, I caught my first glimpse of the house my father had been born into – the house he had died in and that my mother had fled from just after, never to come back. That, at least, was what they had told me after I had been taken away, to another state, to be raised by a cousin on my mother’s side.

The fog, a persistent feature of autumn during those first years of my life, had always been thickest nearest the river. Above it, however, under a pale late-afternoon sun, I could just make out the eight-sided top of the great central tower – the Queen Anne tower that dominated so many Victorian homes of its age – as well as the tips of three of the highest pinnacled chimneys.

Memory came back in driblets and pieces. I knew that, when I approached the next day to take possession, I would recognize below them the sharply peaked hip roof, broken at angles by the main gables that clutched the tower within the ell they formed at their crossing. The tower itself, with its latticed, oval, stained glass windows, would soar a full story over even the tallest of these, a clear rise of nearly seventy feet from its base to the scale-shingled dome that crowned it.

Memories continued to come back unbidden. I followed the road down a series of switchbacks, until the top of the double lane iron bridge I knew I would find loomed out from an ever increasing fog. By now, I had lost sight of my parents’ home altogether, but in my mind, I could hear the voice of a young attorney reading a will.

The will specified that the house would be mine, but only after I had gotten married. The young attorney, a Stephen Larabie – really no more than a clerk at the time – explained to me what my older cousin protested seemed an unusual provision. “Your father,” the lawyer said, “fully expects you not to marry until you’ve tasted somewhat of the world, just as he did. But, at the same time, you must eventually take on the obligations of manhood, as well as its pleasures, and settle down. The house, that you will not obtain until you do so, is intended to be a reminder.”

My cousin who, in that I was a minor, had been court-appointed to speak for my interests, had laughed at that. “You mean young Joseph” – he gestured toward me – “is being told that he has permission to sow his wild oats when he gets a bit older, but, until he’s grown out of such urges, to stay out of town. In other words, not to keep out of trouble, but just out of scandal.”

The lawyer cleared his throat. “Something like that, yes. I doubt you knew Joseph’s father well – as you do know, he was always reclusive and rarely visited even immediate family members after his own marriage – but he, like his house, was quite Victorian in his nature.”

“You mean that he was a hypocrite, don’t you?” my cousin asked.

I remember now that the lawyer had glanced in my direction to see if I had understood anything of what he and my cousin were saying, but I had already begun to play with his pens and inkwell.

“Some people claimed that of him, yes. At least, that he might, at times, have followed a double standard.” He cleared his throat a second time. “In any event,” he said as he stood up, having come to the end of his papers and seemingly anxious to usher us out, “the will specifies that this firm will keep the house in trust until Joseph is ready.”