Augie Sisler lives in a little house in a field, all by herself.

She haunts her pumpkin fields alone, sometimes she sits by a lily choked pond half mile from her house  on a marble bench and watches the Sunset  alone.

Everynight she watches the stars wink on one by one

and she is always very much alone,

Sometimes just a few minutes after sunset,  Augie sees a figure of a lone man with his head bowed, his chin almost touching his chest, his unbuttoned long coat flapping open when the cool evening breeze leaves the tops of the acorn trees because, I suppose it wants to keep him company.

There are times when the man looks up and sees Augie under a tree or standing in her field. He raises his hand as if he is about to wave a greeting, but when he see’s her face he covers his eyes and he shakes his head from side to side.

You  would be safe to assume he was going to run away, but he doesn’t.

He turns and stumbles down the road, head bowed, dragging his feet and he disapears after a while at the bend in the road where the acorn trees give way to rows of weathered and gnarled crabapple trees.

The man at the road always has a different face, when he shouts out to Augie he always shouts in a different voice and sometimes he is wearing a long coat and sometimes he isn’t wearing one at all.

That doesn’t matter to Augie, she recognizes him and he recognizes her because Augie never changes.

One night  Augie sees the man wallking towards her Pumpkin field and she decides to walk towards him.

She glides across her field like a shadow, she leaves no tracks in the soft earth, her eyes are closed and she is taking slow deep breaths through her nose and her slightly parted lips.

” What do you want? ” he calls out to her.

” What do want! ” she shrieks at him, ” what do you want!”

She is moving faster towards him- the pumpkin vines and pumkin leaves move away from her, the trees pull back from the field, they are pulling back from Augie.  ” What do you want!”

He is standing- like all of the others in his family who have visited Augie’s field in every nightmare they have ever had- in the middle of Augie’s road and she waits for him at the edge of her field.

Her eyes are shut but he is sure she can see every inch of his his face, of his hands and like all the others before him he knows this one thing for sure- she can smell him and taste his fear.

It makes her smile, it always does.

” What do you want! ” she shrieks.

” I want this to end! ” he shouts. ” I want to never hear your voice again. I never want to dream about you again. ”

Augie opens her eyes and light pours from them faster and faster and miles away from her field the man is back in his car and he sees the other car racing towards him.

And his wish comes true.

He never sees Augie or her field again.

But  his son will, or his great grandson or maybe his nephew.

Eventually they will  end up by  Augie’s field near her house, at the family’s cemetery on Sisler Road with a lily choked pond and a marble bench where you can sit andwatch the Sunset or the shadows fall – like Augie does

and she always will

alone.

 

Word of The Day Challenge: Banshee