Margaret Leigh

She’s fading, her brain cells flaking like paint, her spine crumbling, joints fusing, the past seeking its reckoning. Well, high time. She never thought she’d live to see the date change from the 1900s to 2000, marking a whole new century, and now that is almost twenty years ago.

A single lightbulb hangs from a cord and throws her shadow against the stone walls. Her back is hunched. That is not her, cannot be her. She pulls her shoulders back and the shadow does the same.

The lemony smell of fever grass drifts across the counter. Pastor Edmond Slowly’s drink. Pauline’s stomach roils.

You are a vessel of god and I am his messenger, he said. She felt the weight of respect for authority, the burden of it, handed to her by her grandmother, mother, father and every elder in Mason Hall. It was at war with her wish to bite the pastor. Hit him. Hurt him.

The sky lightens and just as her spirits lift, a damp spiral of wind whispers against her face. Raas, she hisses. Over at the window there is no draught coming from outside. Are the stones themselves breathing out? She smells stagnant water. Something wet and rotten. Something dead.

The handle of the ’lass is smooth against her palm, but heavier than it used to be. Is not heavier, girl, you is weaker. Out loud she says, Weaker is not fuckin weak.

She smooths the sheet of paper torn from an old accounting ledger and begins to write. The words come slowly with many crossings out and she’s not sure of her spelling anymore. Should she write down what she’s heard? Felt? Remembered? Dreaded? She knows, though, that if she tells anyone that her house itself is moving and making noises, that the

She reaches out again, this time with her fingertips. The stones tremble, sending a jolt from her fingers to her chest. She sets her jaw, leaves her fingers where they are and closes her eyes, thinking of the men who helped to build this house arguing about whether cement was the right kind of mortar. The wall itself shivers like a living thing.

Not even when her dreams became the recurring nightmare of an underground cavern below an unreachable hole in the rock, arousing guilt that clung like mortar.