Mrs. Thomas

Arc Digital presents short fiction

The small, gabled Victorian had always belonged to Mrs. Thomas, but the hungry young woman lingering by the fence did not know this. She had followed a man to California from the Midwest three years ago, before the war, but when she lost the baby, she gave up looking and began to wander place-to-place. She liked the look of this place — two stories of gray wood in need of paint, a leaf-strewn porch, a garden gone to seed and a bed of thriving roses, three rows deep. She was admiring the roses when she noticed a gnarled old hand, palm up on the ground beyond the third row, where Mrs. Thomas had fallen dead.

The old woman lay on her back, one hand over her chest. She might have been sleeping. She might have been anyone’s grandmother, and, as the young woman knelt over the gray face, her heart seized with the weight of all she had lost. She glanced around, but the street was still, the day new. Fog draped like a shroud over the town and there was no sky at all and no one else about, no one to see her untangle the old woman’s skirts from the thorns, to lift the brittle little body and tug her down the stone path into the house where she arranged her, comfortably as she could, on a chintz divan in the sitting room.

The young woman shivered. The fire had died but the coals lived and soon she coaxed heat back into the…