The Town Whispers: Season 1

Chapter 5: The Walls of Riverside

Mildred Morthey lay in bed - her knitted bedspread pulled up tight beneath her chin, and a chill on her back where the blanket had pulled away, having gotten tied around her foot at some point in the night.

Her eyes blinked away the sleep, as she rolled onto her back yawning, and feeling her cold back warm under her own weight.

She smiled thinking of the previous night. Oh what a wonderful and exciting evening it had been.

She'd had her first kiss at the well. She'd never been out to the well, and she'd never had a kiss - well, oh of course she hadn't had a kiss before, because that was her first kiss, and her first kiss had been with Mark LaPointe.

It was a shy kiss. Mark who always seemed so cocky and sure of himself, had been so shy and delicate, and as softly as his lips touched hers, they left an imprint that tingled long after he had pulled his lips away from hers.

As she lay there half asleep, welcoming herself back into the world of the material, she ran her finger over her lips remembering how the hairs on her arms had stood up and her toes had curled when they had kissed.

His hair was combed over, and he wore a freshly washed shirt, a shirt which hadn't been ironed despite being washed, but Mildred thought the crinkles in the nice new shirt were a metaphor for Mark. He too, was full of wrinkles and creases, which she thought, if she was lucky enough, she'd be the one to iron out.

Mark had slapped aftershave on his face, although he clearly had very few hairs on his fair skinned chin, and certainly not enough to shave. He'd been out looking for Matthew earlier with Mildred's father, and the rest of the town, and she could still smell the musk of a hard days work beneath the aftershave, and the scented bar soap.

She lay there for awhile, as the grey, dimmed light of an overcast day became brighter, and brighter, with the rising sun, well hidden behind thick clouds moody and bloated with rain to come.

She could hear her father rustling around in the kitchen, before pushing the back door open, and leaving to work for the day. It was aturday, but people like the Morthey's couldn't afford rest. Rest was for people like the LaPonte's, like Mark LaPonte, who Mildred was daydreaming about.

She fantasized about waking up, sun already high in the sky, she fantasized that he would bring her breakfast in bed, and he'd take the children that they would have out for the day while she had all the time in the world to rest and relax. That's the sort of life she imagined she'd have with Mark.

And what a wonderful life that would be.

But enough was enough.

Mildred had places to be, and she had a ways to go to get there.

The Morthey's weren't rich, in fact they weren't much of anything at all.

In the tradition of the Morthey's, her father was as well not much of anything at all. It wasn't that he didn't work, he'd just never held a job title of one sort or another, he was what you could call a handyman - at the beck and call of all the widows in town with gutters to fix, and lawns to mow, and occasionally he would come home all scratched up from fighting off a nest of racoons from under a porch.

Mildred was an only child, so there was no one to help her father, or keep her company on the days he worked, which was everyday, so Mildred often found herself day dreaming like she had that morning, about Mark, and an easier simpler life.

Mildred's mother was... well the townsfolk of The Fort don't speak about Mildred's mother.

Mildred's mother, known as Edith, was what people would have euphemistically called, for want of better words, an eccentric woman. Eccentric not in the way she dressed - she had dressed according to the income of the Morthey family, in sturdy thick clothing which had seen the sharp end of a needle and the back side of many patches.

Edith was eccentric, because what I'll say that others won't, Edith was a witch.

She wasn't a white witch, or healer, or midwife, or any of those other words used for well intentioned women who had lived and died in the long history of The Fort, she had been something else.

Edith wasn't malicious, or evil, she just never worried herself with the stomach pains, and birthing in The Fort, she'd been one to spend her days off in the woods divining secrets from the way the twigs had snapped free from the trees in the wind and fallen on the ground, or seeking the future in tiny whirling pools of water in the river, where the current hit a hidden rock twisting and turning the water on the surface.