The New English Teacher Sucks (GxG)

Chapter Eleven

July 9th, 1920

I've grown quite familiar with the face of Death. It would creep to me like a stop sign in the distance, sticking out on a wooden stick smack in the middle of two foggy crossroads. My life would begin to slow down before I was even halfway near, and before I knew it, the world would suddenly stop spinning, and everything that ever made a sound way before and after I was born would come to a halting silence.

That's how my world felt the day I lost my youngest sister, Adelaide.

It was approaching almost three months since her funeral, and another one was already brewing.

I thought I was going a little mad when I would step out into the break of dawn and the cold darkness of our porch, and hear a gentle hum of Church Hymns carrying in the wind and rattling the dead leaves off of the surrounding pine trees.

But I would return to the house stripped of all warmth and gaze upon the serene, pale skin of my sick mother, and at that moment, I knew.

The Church Hymns and the Dead Leaves. The ever-growing cold snuck into my bones and chilled everything I touched except the burning fever that would tremble across my mother's body.

Death was making his presence known again, and no matter how many locks and bolts I fastened on our wooden door, the steel hooves of his rapidly galloping black horses were determined to charge through them.

I don't know how long I sat by my mother's side in her dimly lit room, holding her hand and pressing a wet cloth to her forehead with the other. With only one candle burning, I kept it close to her so I wouldn't miss a sudden change in her appearance. Her eyes could barely keep themselves open but the dancing shadows from the candle kept telling me otherwise. I continued to rub the palm of my thumb along the weak pulse in her wrist, my only indication that she was still alive.

She was the only family I had left — present, and I'd be damned if she left this earth without saying goodbye like the rest of them did.

Addy was the first to go even if we had to send her off in an empty casket. At the funeral, I had tried to imagine her soul resting peacefully in the dark wooden box. But every time I closed my eyes, the only thing I saw was her hands scratching at the wood as she kicked and screamed her plea to get out.

Then there was Beth who my parents believed ran off in the middle of the night with her boyfriend. No trace of them could be found no matter how far and wide my father looked. He'd go out in search every evening after work, most of the time which I accompanied him. But I figure after a while he got tired of tearing through empty bushes and dark forests for something that didn't want to be found.

I believe everything started to take a toll on him and he was suffering mentally a lot more than he was letting on. Combined with his PTSD from the war, Addy's, and then Beth's disappearance, it was all too much for him.

He started looking at me as if I would be the next one to leave. And that... well, it frightened me. It scared me because his fear eventually grew into my fear. But because I knew I didn't plan on going anywhere anytime soon, I knew he would. I used to see it in his eyes every morning when he sat alone outside on the nimble porch. He would lose his sight in the distant trees and cry silently. And every day he would look less and less like himself. Less like my father and too much like someone I could barely recognize. My mother started referring to him as the ghost roaming our house. I would get upset at her for it but deep down I knew she was only speaking of the inevitable. And she behaved as if she had already said her goodbyes to him and sent him away to the furthest part of her mind.

Mentally, he was already gone but physically... he was just the ghost roaming our house. But then, barely a few weeks after Beth's disappearance, I found him bound by the neck and swinging stiffly in the large pear tree in our backyard. The sight ripped me apart and I hadn't spoken a word to anyone. My throat swelled tight and my vocal cords were too constricted with grief.