Halloween Prompt: Nobody Is Home

Verity Hallowfield’s house used to be painted white, the windows were always  polished and hung with crisp clean curtains.  There used to be two rocking chairs on the front  porch  set side by side that creaked and rocked all on their own when the wind picked up.

Sometimes she put candles in the windows during the holidays and every Saturday, rain or shine you could smell freshly baked bread wafting from the side yard where the window over the kitchen sink is.

Around the back, near the edge of the property line are four small unmarked  graves where  four of Verity’s babies who all died shortly after they were born, were put to rest.

Standing over  the graves are the shriveled remains of  two apple trees  where Verity used to go for apples when she wanted to bake fresh apple pies.

Verity had a husband named Brody Hall and one day he woke up early, packed his clothes his books and his Mother’s silverware .  He packed  the framed pictures of himself that hung in the in the hallway that led upstairs to their bedroom.

Sometime just before sunrise,  Brody Hall drove off.

He left behind  all the tools in his workshop and his dog.

Verity wasn’t terribly upset to find him gone. She gave his dog to the postman and she took anything left of his in the house and his tools and she buried them in the front yard.

Sometimes she would sit on one of the rocking chairs and as she looked at the pit where she had buried her husband’s things and she would smile a prim, tight smile. That smile dared him to show his face anywhere near her again because  she had dug it herself and that hole was deep enough to toss just one more thing into.

She had  made sure of that.

If you were to drive by Verity’s house today, you would see the skeletal remains of her house perched atop a hill far off the main road.

The window frames are empty and all the doors are gone.

Her house isn’t white anymore, the rocking chairs are gone, but the cushions are still on the front porch covered in grit and mold and leaves. The only scent that wafts from the kitchen window frame is the smell that comes with the death of small animals and rotting yard waste.

There is a muddy patch of earth in the front yard that has been sinking for years and years that  sometimes fills up with water after the snow melts or there is a hard rain.

Sometimes whether you or me or anyone else with some time to kill wanders onto Verity’s front yard you might hear the sound of a rocking chair creaking on the front porch, you might even catch a whiff of freshly baked bread, and if you look down into that sink hole you might wonder if anything is down there because the dirt is either wet or stuck together in clumps and it does, for no one good reason looks like it’s been recently turned over.

Verity could clear the  question about the disturbed earth in her front yard, but nobody is home at Verity’s house- som of the bodies you see, are tucked away under apple trees and one is resting above the decayed and aged  possesions of man who in the end dared to come back to Verity’s house.

You could ask them.

Verity would dare you too.