A woman in perpetual mourning sets her world to rights.
The ancient stone mansion before me has been the focus of a lifetime of nightmares. Even the rusted tractor still sits at the property’s edge, its ragged headlamps a reminder of the stolen dreams of my innocence.
I rub the fading tattoo on my forearm.
‘Hannah’. The only physical reminder of the newborn wrenched from my arms and handed to the smiling ‘married’ couple in the mansion’s foyer before they vanished with her into a long-ago twilight.
“Back to the laundry, girl!” Sister Agatha had snapped, “Those sheets won’t wash themselves!”
I’d winced at the pain in my groin, as a new burst of blood trickled down my leg, pooling on the stone floor. The sister stared down in disgust.
“And clean up after yourself, before you go!”
Staggering off for the mop bucket I longed for my mother, who’d not the courage to save me from this fate, as my father dragged me by my coat out the front door into a freezing November night. My sisters tittered, at my tears as I begged him for mercy.
“Saintly Marie is a whore!” they’d taunted, mimicking my father’s words. “Saintly Marie is a silly whore!”
My cries fell on deaf ears and soon I was being trundled through the front door of St. Abernathy’s Home for Unwed Mothers. Without the one hundred dollars to pay for my keep, I was committed to three years of labor in the service of the resident nuns after my delivery.
Two long years went by with no response to my smuggled letters either to father or Richard, my love, begging to be rescued. Richard had forsaken me without a word when I’d told him I was with child. but surely now, he might scrap up the remaining sum to set me free! The long hours, the meager meals, the punishments, the cold hard labor, all for nothing but servitude in this unholy place.
On my final night in captivity, I’d been unexpectedly left alone with Sister Agatha’s keyring that would be the source of my salvation. Not a second did I hesitate to enact the plan which I’d been forming since the day I arrived.
Sister Agatha, raged, upon finding them missing. In the chaos amidst the mounting anger and threats by the nuns, I’d slipped out the service door and run for my life.
I’d just reached the old tractor when light shone from the back door and black-draped figures poured out into the moonlight. They stumbled past me angrily beating the brush with canes as they scoured the field. As I lay curled breathlessly in the tractor’s loader covered in twigs, Father Abernathy’s voice boomed commands to,
“Find the little sinner!”
At the first opportunity, I sprinted to freedom.
Now, staring at the faded sign over the door, I relished the thought of the new development that would soon spring up here. New beginnings.
But sometimes, like the sisters always said, ungodly things must be cleansed.
So, I struck the match.
~by Taree Belardes
NYC 500 word story comp 2024
Genre; Historical Fiction
Object to include; A tractor
Action; Teasing
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