Silk Dress

I’m sure I’m on the right path, this map says it should be here somewhere, I rode my bike a couple of feet forwards and then as I looked up I see it, the Sleeping Beauty of the Wood’s Castle. Now, of course, I don’t believe in all this crazy nonsense of a castle in the middle of nowhere, and a beautiful woman lives alone.

All I have to do is get up this incline, and we can find out if this is true. I have to get off this bicycle and push up this incline; I wish I had a car! Ugh!

I’ll leave this bike here’s beside. I’m the only one with a map, and no one believes the crazy stories anyways. Up the hill and down the hill through a field of grass, and finally at the base of the mountain. I look around, and I’m in complete awe of how beautiful this place is — flowers of all types, rivers flowing from the top of the mountainside. Fall is gone, and spring is in full bloom. The sun is shining through the trees and on to the flowers, the raindrops dripping from the trees nurturing the flowers below them, a cadence of raindrops as if it were a parade. The ever so lonely breeze felt every once in a while.

Saturday a day like no other one I’ll never forget. As I walked through this Forrest, I come up to what looks like to be an abandoned city. This city had a couple of shops, a church, a gas station, a hairstylist, a barber, and a bar. Looking around, the closer to the city I get, the stronger the smell gets the smell of a good old urban legend. Ah! As I inhaled, it’s deliciousness. Walking into the city, I realize how deserted this place is, every building had been abandoned. But I wasn’t going to give up; I need to find someone any forms of life at this point, someone to tell me what happened here. As I continue to walk in this city, the more confusing this tale became.

I came upon the end of the city, and it was protected by a gate. This gate had spikes all around it and at the main gate on each side a creepy decor of spiderwebs and two huge marble spiders on each side of the gate on their own pillar. Looking through the gate, you see the grass high as the house and looks like no one has lived here for a long time. From what I can see from here, the house looks like an abandoned mansion.

I wanted to get closer and wanted to go in, I tugged the gate, and it opens without any force the locking mechanism looks like it has been broken for a long time and prevents the gate from locking. Walking through the grass making a path to the towards the house, I hear on my right side sounds like someone is raking, but what I asked as I parted the tall high grass it appeared to just be the walkway into the mansion was covered with tall high grass the rest of the field had been mowed, and you see beautiful trees and a couple of trees looked like there were fruits and some were nut trees. The raking sound was made by a bum as he raked the nuts. I’m not a nut connoisseur, but those nuts didn’t look like they were meant for eating. As I approached him, he looks at me and says, “I want them for my squirrels,” he explained. He seemed friendly and harmless, so I started asking him questions

“This Mansion, who does it belong to?”

“This Mansion belongs to the Sleeping Beauty of the Sleeping woods.”

Inside me, I was jumping like a six-year-old child that was told he can have ice-cream for dinner. This means I’m getting closer to solving this mystery.

“So, what is the history of this house?”

“My grandmother told me to always stay away from here, it was some sort of convent for runaway women.”

“Do you know how long it was a convent?”

“According to my grandmother, it was like that for a very long time. Even way before the American Revolution.”

“That insane!”

“Yea, well that’s not even the insane part, this house used to belong to a Slaveowner.”

“Really?”

“Yes, and my grandmother knew the grandson of the owner, and he was the one who sold this place to its current owners.”

“And how would that be exactly, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“No, you are fine. The house, I think, belongs to the Buste family.”

You didn’t need to be from around these parts to know who the Buste family were, That’s what you would call American Royals. Money in that family was made based on railroads they created. They perfected the train from coal to steam; it was an obsession with the men of this family. One of the grandsons of the Buste family I knew him; personally, Raymond Buste we met back at a couple of parties in college a couple of years ago. He’s a party animal and just a great guy, and when you talk to him, you see how well educated he is and how great his mind really is and his ideas just all over the place. Sometimes I wonder how he does solve any problem. This dude would start one thing, leave it, start something else, moves on, and does something else, never really completing anything. Everyone knew him and all the things he wanted to do, save the world, save the whales, save the whatever. Traveling everywhere and then one day he just disappeared from the face of the earth. Some say he found a Buddhist temple in Nepal, and he now devotes his life to serving the Buddha.

I then struck a Buddhist meditation pose and said the Buste, the meditating monk.

“The monk who paid for enlightenment, with money or his life.”

The bum looked at me as if I was crazy, he didn’t understand what the hell I was doing, nor what I was talking about. So I pointed to the mansion and said, do you know if there any other Buste that live around here?

“Do any of them live here?”

“Nah, not since his wife died.”

“No way she died? When?”

“A few years ago. In fact, I was the one that found her dead and the one that carried her to her final resting place. She wasn’t happy for the last few years, she was such a wonderful person. It took everything out of me when I found her, and as I carried her to her final resting place, word had spread quickly, and the entire town came to see her be buried.”

Which explains the reason why Raymond disappeared by the dates he describes coincide with Raymond’s disappearance. As I try to envision Mrs. Buste, my mind can only show me what appears to be a colorless image, faded and ghost looking. But as I concentrated harder, I began to remember her beautiful smile, gorgeous long blond hair, amazing eyes that lit up the room. I remember he quietly sitting alone at a table, this was a function to raise money for children with cancer. I never knew her to have friends or to be chatty, in fact, I don’t ever remember her talking with anyone. Except for this precise function when I bumped into her, and I apologized, and she smiled at me and instantly her face strong back to being serious. I stood next to her and watched the stage this performer was performing amazing stunts, he was a former Chinese opera something, and she was amazed but wouldn’t show it on her face, and I said wouldn’t it be funny if he had to fart and didn’t know what to do it. She looked at me in disgust and began to insult me.

“Listen here! She says

“I am enjoying this, the beautiful dancing and the acrobatics marvelous.”

“Sometimes, I wish I could perform such feats.”

“The entire thing the way they move, the way they fly, free as birds, completely carefree but cautions, like every line on of a poem.”

“Of a poem?”

“Yes, of a great poem, their bodies tell a tale. You just have to see it.”

I began to realize that she was not what everyone talked about, she was actually very interesting. Yet simple. Simple in the way that she never made herself to be better than anyone else, she didn’t care about power or the fact that her wealth came with extreme power, and she never cared to use. She didn’t care about culture or the arts. She kept all of her opinions to herself, she would never flaunt her money, nor would she show off or pretended that she was better than anyone else like most people do.