Our house

The door opened onto a scene that took her breath away. The hall was entrenched in dust, thick drifts carpeted the table and the sideboard and the chairs were ghosted in white sheets, yellowed with age.

The walls, the chocolate barred wooden panelling was still intact and the noise of her footsteps on the prairie of stone echoed back and forth with resonances of the years gone by. She walked forward, with each step a billow of dust was disturbed, clouding around her bare ankles.

Her skirt hugged tight over her hips and her small feet, delicate in her small, sensible shoes picked their way gingerly across the room. Her room.

The long trestle table stretched from one high wall to the other, giving an impression of height and the dark wooden recesses sucked the light from the darkening windows so that the ceiling seemed to recede behind a veil of dust.

“This is all mine,” she thought and then stopped herself quickly, “not so much mine, as my responsibility” She remembered her fathers words “We hold the estates in trust, it belongs to our children” But the children didn’t always want that legacy.

The house was dark and the air sticky with age and decay, just like the family line. Anne looked up at the walls, oppressively brown. She felt smothered, she couldn’t stay here. This was not her home; this was a corpse, lifeless, soulless and steeped with memories which burned the touch.

The air was heavy, clouded with the dust and a suppressed layer of deathly hysteria. “Death they say is the ultimate release,” Anne thought dully to herself, but for her, it had proved the ultimate entrapment.

By Laura Mingins