Life After Death
Rosemary Cartwright stopped and stared at the patch of crushed and broken blades of grass. She remembered the glowing amber eyes that had pierced through the pitch-black night like two gemstones when she looked out from her bedroom’s balcony.
“What was it watching? Was it me?” she wondered.
Was it there because of her actions? She was walking through the pasture towards the bush at the side of the property where she had created the dead-stock pile. Rose trudged through the dying ferns and underbrush with the latest victim of the ravenous disease that was slowly killing her beloved goat herd.
The resident murder of ravens was perched like sentries in the canopy, while a kettle of vultures circled high above them. The birds were all waiting patiently and watching her every step, knowing that soon the hunger pangs in their bellies would be satiated as they spotted the bundle of hair, horns, and hooves in her arms.
A routine had developed on the farm. She woke each morning with the sky still black to start her daily routine. Each day was the same. She would wake up, get dressed, make breakfast, feed her son and herself, make breakfast for her husband, Bentley Pope, affectionately known as Ben, and then clean up after breakfast. All this was done before she started her long list of chores around the estate. She paused in the bitterly cold, crisp morning air, lost in thought.
Remembering that her chores were nowhere near completed, she quickly added the branch to the ever-growing pile beside the cords of firewood she had cut and split earlier that month from trees that had fallen during the last storm, before Ben became enraged by her laziness.
She heard a rustle in the small hedges that lined the garden and looked up to see a pair of black squirrels racing along the ground toward the tall oak tree where they lived throughout the winter months. She smiled as she recalled the babies they brought out each spring onto a large branch just outside the hollow they had created where the massive old trunk split into two. Memories of the family running and playing amongst the canopy that grew full and lush each year filled her thoughts.
Looking up, the canopy was more than 20 feet above her head, empty and bare, exposed to the cold winds and rain now that the fall storms had ripped the last remaining leaves away. She noticed in the dips and hollows of the ground that the white snow that had fallen the night before was starting to melt away with the sun’s warmth, creating shimmering pools of pure water.
“Oh good, the creeks will thaw before long, and I won’t have to haul buckets of water to the animals today,” she told the squirrels as they chittered in response to her words.
Rose bent down to pick up a large branch that had fallen from the trees overhanging the driveway and looked towards the house. She noticed a face between the dark curtains in the office windows.
“He is watching me again,” she thought. “What if he knows I don’t love him and never have?”
“What will he do if he knows my heart still belongs to someone else?”
“What if he has discovered my secret?”
After seeing Ben watching her from the window of his office, Rose slowly walked towards the main door of their home. She shook her head in disbelief and disappointment as she entered the house where she now lived with her husband.
A frown formed on Ben’s face as he watched her from his office window as she returned to the house.
“She is dreaming about him again; I can see it in her eyes, in her face.”
“She does not want to be here with you any longer; she never has.”
“She loves me; she told me so when we had your mating ceremony four years ago!”
“She is using you, waiting until she can be with him again.”
“But we have a son together; she has to love me!”
He squeezed his eyelids together to stop the swell of tears in his eyes, shook his head to clear the voices, and turned away from the window.
Walking down the hallway towards the office door, Rose stopped to look at the pictures on the sideboard table. Images of happier days looked back at her from behind the glass. There was one of her parents holding her as a youngling, one of her and her son, Percival, on the day he was born in a frame bearing his nickname Percy, the day he was born, and a larger one taken on the day of the mating ceremony between her and Ben in front of their clans. A tear threatened to fall from the corner of her eye as she grew angry, knowing those were not the people who should have shared those moments with her.
She had spent too much time lost in thought about the past and her future these last few days. It was coming back to her every night in her dreams with vivid colours and cool, crisp sounds, the life that could have been, the one she should have had. The one that her clan’s Elderwoman had prophesied for her. She wanted that other life.
Lost in thought, she mindlessly walked toward the office door and opened it, hoping not to find her husband hiding within, as he did most days since Ben’s mother, Charlotte Stainer, died a few years ago. She shuddered and gasped, remembering what had transpired that day and the ones in the weeks before that, which had created this life many years ago.
