My House / In the Woods by Jan Darrow

My House

Beyond the grown hedge is a house in a meadow. A barn full of cows. A horse in the stable. This is my house. I am there with the stove and the dishes. My garden, my hen, the voices at the candlelit table.

See the moon’s reflection in the room in the night? We wrap arms and we sing. We praise the harvest king.

But then a passage of time. Not lost. Not really. Sometimes replays in the darkness.

Behind the closed curtains they whisper.

Never mind… time.

 

I dream of a house in a meadow. No one’s lived there for years. Empty barns, empty stable. Nobody sits at the dining room table.

Inside in silence is the dust and the gloom, metal doorknobs rust. Evening shadows repeat.

The house is nothing more than dry bones under sky. Look how the grass waves in the wind.

I stand at the end of the drive and look down from the rise. The two-lane track is overgrown. Then I sink like the sun into the grass. I become the lush meadow, the barns, and the sky.

I am the lone house at the end of the drive.

In the Woods

As we crossed the field and entered the woods the sky was silent. The day had been full of rain and the trees pulled the dampness close.

There wasn’t much to say. I mean, no one wanted to talk about Frances Howard’s murder, so we walked in silence. Up ahead just past the curve someone smashed a pumpkin against a tree.

They said there was nothing Frances could do when the murderer came to her house. I mean, she was old and could hardly get out of bed. But no one thought she would die like that. Her eyes carved into a permanent expression of fear. And we didn’t know why.

But we had the fear. Everyone did.

We were to the other side of the woods now and could see the road ahead when a slender man with a razor smile stepped out onto our path.

We trembled.

“Even the young can never escape,” he said, his black eyes biting our cheeks. Then he handed us a picture.

It was of Frances Howard. Dead.

We shoved our way past him and ran out to the road. We didn’t stop until we got to town. It was hard for us to catch our breath. 

Then we looked at the picture again.

And it was a picture of us. In the woods.

Jan Darrow is a product of the rural Midwest and loves the natural world. Her ghostly collection of flash fiction, The Blue Hour, as well as her haunting collection of poetry for Autumn, Autumn Poetry: A Collection for the Season, are both available on Amazon.