We’re a somber bunch, aren’t we? All these flowers and food will end up in the trash anyway. They have no idea that this runny nose is not caused by the sadness of losing my aunt, but because I’m allergic to flowers. All of them, in fact. And the food… What’s with that anyway? So, besides the sorrow of loss, I should also mourn my figure, too?
It’s still weird being consoled by people I don’t even know. Why are you offering me all your prayers and hugs, and giving me pitiful looks for an aunt I hardly knew? How am I deserving of such warmth? I last saw her three years ago at my mother’s funeral, although those details are foggy. I was the center of attention then, too, but I paid no mind to those who came. How could I? I was stuck in my fuzzy brain, distraught after taking care of my ailing mother for so long. I do recall my aunt putting her bony hand on my skin, holding my wrist in a grip safe and strong. Her hand was so, so cold. How come she had more time to live? She whispered something, with those tiny eyes of hers behind her thick lenses looking into mine, and to this day, I’m not sure what she said. I’d sent her a message to her 97 Nokia, and then, when she didn’t answer, I posted a letter in the mail with the message “Please come,” and the morning’s journal obituary. There was no RSVP, so I could only guess if she would come. I bore her no ill will. I barely saw her these last few years, even as my mom’s cancer spread. But it wasn’t like she deserted us, because she was never there. My mother Alma was a late arrival. My grandmother was convinced she was menopausal when the doctor announced she was five months pregnant. By then, Aunt Bernice was in St. Mary’s boarding school for girls. Bernice would come home on the holidays, but Alma would pay her no attention. There was a twelve-year gap, and she had been raised in a stricter religious environment. What would they even talk about?
I came to my senses when she walked in. The faux redhead walked surely, even if she looked shy. She wore a deep, dark brown and orange patterned dress down to her ankles and a cardigan that covered her just below the waist. Although she didn’t go full black, no one would have accused the septuagenarian of improper style. If anything, she proved herself to be the most interesting of the party. She stood out among my aunt’s old church folks. I don’t think she attended the church. Must have known her from somewhere else. But where? I found myself moving towards a mourner, instead of waiting for them to pay their respects. For my part, I could not wait to not hear yet another sentence about “God” and “His Will”.
“Hello?” Somehow, I felt silly saying hi at my aunt’s funeral. “You’re here for my aunt Bernice’s funeral?”
“Oh. Oh!” She was at first surprised by being approached and then by realizing who I was. “I’m sorry for showing up so late in the day. I’m extremely sorry for your loss. I must confess I didn’t know Bernie had any living family members.” Seeing my face, she added. “Oh boy, I probably shouldn’t have said this, should I? It’s just that she was a very private person. Kind, pragmatic, and very, very private. I would add mysterious even. I’m going to stop talking and making myself look like a fool. I’ll just blend in, please don’t mind me.”
“No, no. It’s ok. I’m Angela, her niece, and I didn’t know someone, anyone, called her Bernie. It’s kind of refreshing and also endearing to be honest.”
“I see,” she said, wide-eyed. “Well, Bernie was full of surprises. Like an onion, you know? Just when you thought you’d figured her out, another layer would come right out.”
“Wow. That’s the first time I’ve heard someone speak about my mom’s sister like that. Serious but fair, sure. Mysterious? Never in a million years.”
“Ah! It must have been the floral dresses and all those greys stuck in a bun. I’ve told her that many, many times how much it aged her, in the book club’s tea breaks.”
“What? My aunt attended a book club?”
“Attended? More like, founded. Now I see there’s much you don’t know about your aunt. Private till the end, I fear.” Her last sentence did seem sincere.
“Yes, but please, can you share more about her and this book club?”
“Of course, dear. Well, your aunt started the book club with our local library about four years ago, I think? I only started coming on the fourth or fifth gathering, I suppose. There were about twelve people there. Mostly old ladies and spinsters like me.” She winked. “She got rid of the ladies who showed up just to gossip or something. I still remember her giving a piece of mind to a nanna who was under the impression she was in her own clique of mean ol’ grandmas. She and the others not once returned. On this end, I was just glad to leave the house. I would have read a recipe book if Bernie said that was our monthly reading.”
“And did you? Read a recipe book?
“Oh no. The club’s main theme was the meaning of life.”
“I guess that makes sense. My uncle, whom I knew even less, passed away around that time. I say around that time, because my mother called her sister, and she told her that her husband had died weeks earlier. My mom was in shock. We didn’t even attend the funeral. She took care of everything by herself. She was just so casual and blasé about it. Her reasoning? She knew mom was sick and didn’t want to trouble her with the trip.”
“That’s, that’s very much like her. Yes. If I didn’t know her, I’d be shocked. She could be cold, and in many ways, which might be weird for some folks, she was. Those who were raised in the church, like we were, get it. It was a different time then. I guess we all process things in our own ways.” She sighed. “But she was a good-natured, kind person. That much you must know. Look, I have one on my son’s computer. You can keep it.” She took a photograph from her handbag. Bernice and the other ladies, whom Angela didn’t recognize, sat in a circle with books on their laps. Her aunt sat straight in her chair, had been caught mid-smile probably for her photographer friend.
“Now, I must go. I really just wanted to share what she did with the book club and everything, she saved some lives. Instead of us all rotting away alone at home… She gave us some sense of community even if…”
“Even if…”
“This is surely not the time or the place to speak of the evils of book club management…”
“Please.”
“Well, the club started out as something very philosophical, you know? We discussed life, living a good life, and accepting death. Like, reading Hesse, and Twain, and all that, but in the last few months, your aunt —, she wasn’t the same. She told me she had a vision of some sort, probably a nightmare, which she would not share with me, but she was scared. After that, the tone of the books changed. They started getting dark. A little too dark for some of the book club attendees. At some point, we were four in the meetings, five at best. Bernie pushed the group too far, telling a tall tale that the library insisted we read books that weren’t getting much love and mostly chose books that dabbled in the occult and in dark magic. Things many of us didn’t understand or believe. She… She wanted to communicate with the dead. We had by that point made a long journey with her. We knew what was coming for us, that death would eventually find us all and take us in her arms, and we did accept it. We did. I’m afraid Bernie must have stopped believing in that and got furious when we questioned her about it. She was what? 85? We couldn’t let our shared good memories be wasted like that, so some people stopped coming to the library. I’m so sorry, I’m just rambling. Just tell me, dear, if you can, how did she die?”
“My aunt fell. She must’ve tripped on the corridor rug, fallen, and broken her femur. She tried to drag herself to the front door, but her body couldn’t take it. Her next-door neighbor was away for a few weeks, visiting her newborn grandchild, and the other one downstairs, a hard-of-hearing, 90-year-plus widower, didn’t realize something was wrong. I called her two days before they ruled her death in the death certificate, and she didn’t answer, but I didn’t think much of it. I guessed I would try again some weeks later, eventually. The neighbors called the police when they smelled the rot.”
***
The phrase stitched in questionable embroidery on the frame hung on top of the corridors’ archway took Angela by surprise: “Death is only the beginning.” She didn’t know what to expect. That wasn’t certainly it, for a woman she understood, had been extremely religious all her life. She wasn’t expecting her to run a book club too, so the joke was on her. Mysterious, huh?
A sickly sweet, tangy smell remained. So, there are remnants after all. She’d have to brave through it all. It was the second time in her life she would have to sort through someone’s belongings and find them a destination after they were gone. This should be easy. She had been staying in a hotel. Something about staying in a dead person’s house didn’t sit well with her. Alas, she couldn’t postpone it much longer. The house was atypically devoid of knick-knacks. No porcelain statuettes or paintings on the walls. Not one picture in sight. The furniture was plain. Somehow it fit with what she knew of an aunt who mostly existed in the yearly postcards of celebrations and spoke of such trivialities as the weather on the phone. You can take a girl out of a boarding school, but you can’t take it off of her. Deep green, aggressive rugs spread throughout the floor, except in the entrance of Bernie’s bedroom. There, the rug had been roughly cut, and a big brownish stain covered the hardwood floor. It stood at the very end of the corridor, paving the way either to the kitchen or the bedroom, making it the exact opposite of the main entrance. Angela would make an extra effort not to step on it when she needed to go to either room. Maybe she’d leave it for last. Where are the crucifixes, though? The walls hadn’t seen paint in a while, so where they once stood, now there were only whiter shades of the missing objects. Something pure, in a tired old wall. Each room has had at least one in various sizes at some point in the past. She recalled what the spinster had mentioned. Maybe Bernice did turn her back on the church after all.
The cleanup is never easy. You may clean a house of its contents, but what to make of its memories? She’d sell what she could, discard some in the bin, and maybe donate something to Goodwill. Why didn’t she think of speaking with Bernice’s church pals? Stupid. The house was in mint good condition, though. With a paint job and minor repairs, it should be a quick sell. The kitchen was pretty quick. Her aunt had taken good care of the porcelain and kept the good cutlery in its original set. It was old, as in early-century-good-taste-old. Angela would keep that. She didn’t care much for the tacky tablecloths folded neatly in every other drawer.
Angela found the one sign of a past life in the kitchen. Bernice had left an opened newspaper with a crossword almost complete across her tiny kitchen’s island. Angela’s eyes ran through the solutions vying for the missing word. Ten letters. “Across: 31 – mental health disorder in which a caregiver creates the appearance of health problems in another person”. Bernice’s black pen had already found “proxy”. Funny. She crumpled the newspaper and threw it into the bin. Now, let’s find the good linen.
***
It was six p.m. when she finished the living room. She’d found almost nothing to keep. The sun was disappearing fast on the horizon, peeking through the heavy curtains. Why did I leave the bedroom for last? I guess I could come tomorrow… but then I won’t be able to visit the city. Might as well push through. Her phone vibrated in the jeans back pocket. Her flight’s early check-in reminder.
A recurring thought lingered in her mind. She took the phone from her bag. The hospital had given it back after liberating the body to the funeral home. There wasn’t much to the contents found with her. A pair of ordinary beaded pendants, her aunt’s marriage ring, a black permanent ink expensive-looking pen that was apparently hard to loosen from the cadaver’s closed fist, and an old gray Nokia. She plugged the phone in to charge the battery. As usual, with old ladies, a sticker on the back of the equipment revealed the pincode. Angela dragged her already exhausted body to the room, carefully enough not to step on the stain. Somehow, in the twilight, it seemed even larger.
The room was mostly what she had hoped. She emptied the closet. Nothing to see here. Boring clothes for a somewhat boring old lady. She found the most interesting items in a pretty big wooden chest. Uhh naughty. Some sassy satin negligees, which mustn’t have been worn for a few decades, stood on one side of the chests’ contents on top of old embroidered tablecloths, a jewelry box, dozens of opened letters still inside their original envelopes, the missing crucifixes, and dozens of photo albums neatly organized by year and events. “Alma’s birth”, “Alma’s birthday”, “Alma’s Christening” and so on, all the way up to Angela’s college graduation. That album had loads of loose photographs between the pages. A photo, faded to an ashy yellow by time, stood out to her inquiring mind. The siblings standing on their town’s church’s stairs with their arms around each other, smiling. Angela took it from its pocket and folded it neatly to better observe her preteen mother. She promised herself she’d take a closer look later on, to gather all of her and her mother’s pictures. It was now eight or so. She went back to the living room. Angela could have sworn the stain had grown bigger as she had to jump over it. She was getting antsy about doing the cleanup into the night. Let’s call it a day. If I come early, I’ll get it sorted in no time. Absent-minded, she picked up the Nokia, entered the PIN code, and got to the calls. There they were, five rejected calls from Bernice to Angela and one, about half a second, to the emergency services, on her last day. Must have been when the battery died. Angela deleted the calls and stretched. Then she felt motion back in the bedroom, like papers being blown by the wind. Slowly, she peeked through the door and into the corridor. She still saw some of them hovering and landing just outside the bedroom, onto the stain. Angela advanced through the rug in suspicious doubt. The letters. Without reading them, she already knew what they meant. The stain was so big now she’d have to step on it, but she had other things to worry about, like: is someone else here? There was not. The room was as quiet as she’d left it. Nothing under the high queen-sized bed. The wardrobes’ doors were open wide as she’d left them. The clothes were in bags, ready for donation.
Crouched over the papers, she froze. Her mother’s handwriting. “Unwell”, “wasting her life”, “afraid”, “I need to leave this place”… It hurt as much as when she found the letters from her aunt under Alma’s mattress. They were hidden from her. Her sole caretaker. Angela felt that rage filling her up all over again, making her body hot like scalding water in a pot. She was the one person who had ever really cared for Alma in her lifetime. The sisters were conspiring to take Alma away from her. That was when she knew her mother could not suffer anymore. She had to be let go. I have to burn these. Angela gathered the letters close to her chest, intent on doing so, but suddenly her body couldn’t move. The floor had grown a red-brown weave around her and wouldn’t let her leave. The weave turned into two sets of darkened skeletal arms that jumped from the grown, hungry to pull her down. The stain also had two pairs of accusing, glaring eyes she knew all too well. She would scream too, but her arms were now stuck inside the rotted wood, and a hand covered her mouth. She could not reach her phone. Angela panicked as she realized what was happening. I covered her mouth into silence. She was immersed in the darkened floorboard quicksand until only her frightened eyes and nose were above the floor. Below the boards, a tight cast had enveloped her body, leaving her unable to fight back. Her lips touched the wood; the pungent smell became so strong she could now taste it. Only then did she see. Hidden in the stain where her aunt’s body decayed, there were entire sentences, the letters so small that they could only be read up close. They bled into the wood’s veins and fused with the stain. Written by a dying old person’s trembling hand. A hate-fueled diatribe, with all kinds of accusations from someone gone insane. The ramblings went on and on, about a guilty one, and how justice would come for her. Angela’s name and number were scattered around the lunatics’ ravings. Scribbled over and over again, as if the writer was wishing her punishment into existence to some greater power. And there was that final phrase, the letters shakier than before, ending the speech that closed her sentence. Tears filled her panicked, bulging eyes and rolled down her cheeks to the floor. She finally understood the words uttered by Aunt Bernice that day, in her mother’s funeral: “Death is only the beginning.” In the distance, — she heard it loud and clear —, the plugged-in Nokia kept ringing.
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About
Rita Santos was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in a year when Halley’s comet passed, and swears that one day she’ll write about it. As a child, she wanted to be a writer, a designer, an architect, a painter, and a bunch of other things. And she may still want to be all of those. After emerging not unscathed from the corporate world and a decade-long fight with creative block, she had an idea and wrote and published her first short story for a Portuguese site specializing in all things horror. It would be the rekindling of an old romance with writing and lots more horror. Since then, she has launched her first collection of short stories, “31 Faces of Terror”, and published half a dozen stories in the portuguese horror-focused media Fábrica do Terror, among others.
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