The Silhouette of Abigail Jones
When Ellie moved back in, it was on a cold autumn evening.
“This house,” her mother always said, “it stays with us and us with it.”
Her mother loved the house like her soul had been stapled to the foundation. Leaving wasn’t an option. Through the divorce and single parenthood and all that came after, she stayed.
Ellie felt no such bond with the old Victorian, even now as she stood in front of the porch and waited like she was going to be welcomed inside, suitcases in hand. The house didn’t call out to her. Her soul wasn’t stitched into the framework.
*
Even as a girl, perched on the window seat in the parlor, sheltered by purple pastels and pristine wallpaper and swollen with puff pastries, Elle loathed the fog and how it made the world outside look so small and muted and impassable. She wasn’t allowed to go outside on such days. She peered out the parlor window as she drew back the cream lace curtains, her mother’s favorite autumn-colored quilt wrapped around her shoulders, and dreamed of growing up and out.
Her mother watched on from the fireplace, its spotless marble mantle gleaming green in the soft glow of the lights. She rose from her seat at the table, barefoot. No shoes were allowed because they’d damage the hardwood, and socks were too slippery. She carefully brewed more tea and plucked sugar cubes from a serving bowl with her antique sugar tongs, and asked if Ellie would join her for another cup.
*
From beyond the porch, Ellie took in the exterior state of the house. The paint was immaculate, all gray siding and white trimming, as it had always been. The bay window jutting out from the parlor looked exactly as she remembered it too. It was the only window with purple trimming, Elle’s favorite color.
Her mother always took pride in how she maintained her house, every repair a patchwork of her own doing, first done poorly and then with mastery but never with help.
Ellie didn’t know who had upkept the outside of the house after her mother broke her hip. After her shattered, arthritic bones had been sawed down and put back together with screws and titanium and nursed to full strength in rehab, her mother’s days of teetering on ladders in flip flops with overflowing paint pans and an arsenal of brushes were over.
Maybe one of the neighbors had done it; maybe her mother had used a stepping stool and maintained what she could reach and paid for someone else to take care of the rest.
*
When Elle packed her car and left her childhood home for college, fog had blanketed the world for days. She knew better than to expect a send off from the front porch. Her mother didn’t want her to leave; she’d be all alone in that great big house. But Elle had to. Her new life was waiting for her, one without her mother’s influence.
Instead, they watched each other disappear through glass, Ellie from the rear windshield as she spun the steering wheel and struggled to reverse in the gravel driveway and her mother from the parlor with her autumn quilt draped over her shoulders.
Both clutched their cups of tea and squinted and lost their view to the fog and forest and its bloated trees as they bent low, weighed down from wet leaves.
*
Elle stood on her toes and peered through the parlor window. It was the only window she could look through without stepping up on the porch. The curtains were drawn closed, all loose-knit lace, but she still couldn’t see inside. The world behind her was dark and alive as night struggled to swallow. Patchwork skies and a skeletal forest veiled in purple stared back at her from the glass.
Elle retreated back to the porch steps. Leaves covered them, stiff and curled and brown, and the stench of their decay lingered in the air. Elle thought of the ticks nestled in the pile. They’d gladly latch onto her and feed on her blood, sweet as pastries, if she stepped inside their home.
At least they were waiting for her.
At least they wanted her to come in.
*
Every time Elle visited after her mother’s once-twice-broken hip gave out again, her mother insisted they sit out on the porch and watch the birds hop about in woods lining the driveway. The fog never swirled up to hide the world, and her mother always wore a nightgown and an ill-fitted bra and donned her favorite quilt like a body bag.
The woods grew thinner over the years, evermore hunched and tired. Pine trees withered from the bottom up, their trunks buckling. Their bark peeled. The driveway deteriorated, firm gravel giving way to sagging slate. The fog stayed away.
Elle always came when she was called, but she never pressed her mother to let her in. She never asked if they could enjoy tea in the parlor the way they used to. She knew her mother would say no, as she had since Elle ‘abandoned’ her at the rehabilitation center.
The parlor, her mother would say, wasn’t prepared for guests.
*
Elle set her suitcases in the leaves and watched the ticks scurry up the sides and towards her hands, ravenous. She knew what to expect once she went up the porch and through the front door and into the parlor. When the police called her, they told her nothing except that her mother was gone. When the neighbors called that same day, they warned her it would be ugly.
Peeling wallpaper and dulled purple pastels. Dust so thick it mattified the green gleam of the fireplace’s marble mantel. Nightgowns and bras and underwear in garbage bags. The autumn quilt thrown unfolded on the window seat. The table set with two tea cups and serving bowls and antique sugar tongs. A crooked stain left by her mother’s corpse on the hardwood floor.
Raven Boyne holds an MFA in Fiction from the esteemed NEOMFA consortium in Ohio. She specializes in the dark and macabre, the horrors of the human psyche, and the realities of suffering - all of which dominate her fiction. When she’s not writing, she’s either reading, practicing guitar, or cuddling her cat Hex.
