G’ December 31st 2023!!
Enjoy a tremendous, safe New Year AND practice chapter dubbed ‘Fantastic House’ (..ha!)! Many thanks, and we’ll see you in 2024!!
Notepad and colored-pencils in-hand, Charolette slipped past a bed and sat at a small, sunray-filled table and drew. Moments later, she heard her name called. “Yes, Aunt Bess?”
“Did you say you wanted apple juice or orange juice?” a voice said.
“Apple, please.” Before long, she glanced through an open closet door, and across a walk-in closet, at a full-length, wall-mounted mirror in which she could see her reflection seated at the table. Suddenly however, circular waves rippled throughout the mirror’s surface like a stone-struck pond which distorted her reflection. Just then, her aunt stepped through the mirror, breakfast tray in-hand.
The woman strolled through the closet and into the bedroom to the table on which she placed a tray filled with scrambled eggs, turkey sausage, and buttered toast with a small vase, sprouting with daisies, in a corner. “Here we are.” She clasped her hands before her. “Well, bon appetite, and if you need anything just—” Out of the blue, she snapped her fingers. “Oh, yes…” She dashed through the closet to the mirror, reached through, and pulled out a tall milk glass and then ambled to the table, shaking her head. “All my down-to-upstairs order confirming and I still all but forgot the milk.” She sat it beside the tray, and Charolette smiled.
“Many thanks, Aunt Bess. Everything smells so mouthwatering.”
Aunt Bess nodded. “Well, let’s just hope everything tastes the part—to be honest, it’s been ages since I’ve cooked breakfast. I’m a lunch and dinner gal.”
“I’ve no doubt it will.” Charolette shaded a page, shoved the notepad aside, and slid the tray to herself, and her aunt peered at the drawing.
“Should we expect another masterpiece soon?” the woman said.
“Perhaps if I ever draw a first one.”
“Oh, I’m certain you’ve plenty already.” Aunt Bess pointed at the notepad. “May I?”
“Sure.” Charolette slid the pad across the table, and the woman sat in a chair and flipped pages.
“Wow Charolette, we could frame each one.” She tilted a sunlit, pedestal-mounted bouquet drawing, whose multi-colored flowers exploded in every direction, toward her niece. “Especially this one.”
Charolette sank her fork into a sausage, shoveled it into her mouth, and chewed, peering at the picture. “Oh yes,” she said, hand over her mouth. “That was one I had to draw. I do my best not to allow an inspiration go to waste.”
Aunt Bess tilted it back toward herself and held it at an angle. “You call it an inspiration.” She held it closer to her face. “I believe call it…my earliest memory.”
“Sorry, auntie?!”
“Your picture, sweetie: it’s a spot-on portrayal of three-year old Aunt Bess’ memory.”
Charolette sputtered and coughed as though she all but choked. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, before your parents had ever met, your Grandma Josephine had decorated a sitting room just like this with a floral arrangement just like this which she placed on a pedestal just like this.” She gazed across the bedroom into a distant corner. “I remember walking to the room’s doorway and seeing sunrays slant through a floor-to-ceiling window onto this same bouquet. Sometimes she’d open the window, and the wind would play in the curtains and then in the flowers themselves.” She looked at Charolette who sat, mouth agape. “Where did you see—?”
“No where!”
“What do you mean, ‘No where’?”
“I mean, there must be some mistake. No way could I paint a portrait only three-year old you’d witnessed.”
“Sweetie, only a week ago, the only way I could carry a food tray form a downstairs kitchen to an upstairs bedroom was via a staircase.” She flipped a page. “So, you’ll have to believe me when I tell you—” She leaned closer to the page. “Where did you get this?”
Charolette chewed her lip. “Get what?” She watched the pad tilt toward her and then studied a child, play rug drawing which featured wooden blocks which spelled-out B-E-T-S. “Okay well, since the cat’s out the bag, I had a question about: as I child, were you into illegal gambling or something?”
Aunt Bess slapped the pad on the table. “I have you know I was trying to spell ‘Bess’!”
Charolette chuckled. “I figured it.”
Her aunt shook her head, reached across the table, and snatched a sausage. “This is for attempting to turn my hair a shade whiter.” She ate it. “So, you’ve found this house’s next
fantastic feature.”
Charolette nodded.
“But why not tell ol’ Aunt Bess? I know you and I’ve only been acquainted a couple weeks, but I’d thought the mirror thing had fast-tracked us past any secretive phase.”
“Oh no, I trust you, auntie.”
“Then what gives? Why didn’t you tell me what you’d found?”
“Because it hadn’t been until you’d sat down that I was certain what it was.”
The woman sighed. “Makes since. How could you know for certain? You wouldn’t. You could only speculate. But now that you know for certain, how’s about you tell—”
“Oh no, auntie. Don’t make me.”
Aunt Bess raised her palms. “Whoa, your auntie has no interest in asking you to do something you prefer not to. But she does have an interest in asking why.”
“Because before the mirrors, I’d tested you via the invisible attic-terrace-to-statue-garden staircase, and you’d said you’d use it despite our nosy neighbors.”
“Only if I’d forgotten my house key.”
“Then I told you about the mirrors, and you began using them.”
“Only when Grandma Josephine wasn’t home.”
Charolette’s eyebrows elevated. “What about yesterday?”
“Yesterday, I was knitting in a spare bedroom but had to monitor a ham in an oven.”
“And now you’ve asking where our door to the past is.”
Aunt Bess lifted her eyes as though into clouds. “‘Door into the past’. What’s not to love about the possibilities! Today, we could record winning lottery numbers, leap back in time, and tell our past selves! We could be rich!”
Charolette sighed. “Auntie…”
Her aunt wiped a hand through the air. “Goodness, I’m only kidding. I’d never use this house’s capabilities for something that’d stain my conscious.”
“But not only would the door’s misuse stain a conscious, it could even stain a life: to head back into the past and disrupt any event could trigger a chain of events which could lead to someone not reaching this present day in time.”
“So, we can’t visit the past and change stuff—got it,” Aunt Bess said. She stood, clapped her hands, and rubbed them together. “Now, where’s the door?”
“‘Where’?”
“Yes, ‘where’? And remember, you’ve yet to lie to your Aunt Bess…”
Charolette lowered her eyes, but after a moment, she raised them, took up a toast slice, and gestured across the bedroom toward a lofty cabinet. “The door’s over yonder.”
Aunt Bess dashed to the cabinet, paused, and then inched the cabinet doors open. Several shelves packed with large, folded shirts laid. She reached through the shirts and knocked on the cabinet’s rear wooden paneling and then folded her arms. “Nothing’s here except mother’s shirt overflow space.” She studied Charolette who was gnawing on a second toast slice. “‘Over yonder’, ay?” She closed the cabinet and then peered all around the area—behind the cabinet, under a desk, and behind a free-standing mirror. Before long however, beside the cabinet, she ambled to a second bed room window and glimpsed back at her niece. “‘Yonder…’. She peered through the window into a rear yard and saw a guest house with a chair situated in its flower bed and faced a downstairs, stained glass window. “Charolette, when did you draw those pictures?”
“Yesterday…”
Aunt Bess turned at smiled at her.
“Honest, auntie…”
Her aunt shook her head. “I believe you.”
“You do?”
“Yes.” She crossed the room to her. “Because throughout the days before that, it’d rained.” She picked-up a crumb-filled plate. “I’ll take this. You sit here and finish your milk.” She strolled into the closet and closed the door, and Charolette lifted her glass.
“Rain?!” Charolette said to herself and then drank.
Suddenly, inside the closet, a dish clattered, and Charolette snapped her eyes toward the closet door and then thought.
“Rain!!”
She slammed the glass on the table, darted to the closet door, and snatched it open. On the floor, halfway before the door and the mirror, the plate sat, and Charolette tore through the closet, hurtled the plate, and leapt into the mirror. She landed before a second closet door, thrust it open, and stepped into a downstairs corridor. Across it laid the kitchen, she tore through it to a patio door which laid partway open. Through it, beyond a patio and rear yard, she could see her auntie approaching the guest house window. “Auntie, wait!” She raced through the door, patio, and rear yard and slowed beside her auntie who stood stock-still beside the chair in the flower bed, gazing though the stained glass.
“Auntie?”
Tear in her eye, she auntie glanced at her and the reached toward the glass.
“Auntie.” Charolette opened her hand, and her auntie took it, and they both stepped through the glass and into a kitchen where they saw a young woman dash about—refrigerator, to stove, to sink, to refrigerator, to stove, to countertop where a small box laid.
“Elizabeth?” the young woman said and turned a dial on the box. “Elizabeth, mommy’s coming!” The woman dashed out the room and up a staircase.
Charolette gaped. “What that—?”
Aunt Bess nodded. “Yes—my mother.”
They ambled through the kitchen and up the staircase where they saw the woman sprinting room to room.
“Elizabeth??” the woman said. “Elizabeth??” She ambled past Charolette rubbing her forehead. “I should’ve known a baby gate couldn’t hold you.”
Aunt Bess released Charolette’s hand. She crept to a nearby room, looked inside the door, and slapped a hand over her mouth, and Charolette slipped to the door, as well. Inside, a baby gate laid horizonal, and behind it, a child’s playroom whose play rug contained the blocks Charolette had painted.
Charolette chuckled. “So, this really was the—” She noticed Aunt Bess was no longer beside her and then glanced down a corridor. At the end, she saw her auntie standing in a doorway, staring inside, hand over her mouth, and shuttering. So, she crept down the hallway, and partway there, the young woman stamped through another doorway and marched toward last door where Aunt Bess stood.
“Elizabeth?”
The woman barreled past Aunt Bess and stood just inside the room, and Charolette arrived beside her aunt and watched the woman gaze at the child sat on a hardwood floor and colored, eyes toggling between a sunlit, pedestal-mounted bouquet, whose multi-colored flowers exploded in every direction, and a floor-to-ceiling window whose curtains danced in the wind.
Charolette cupped a hand over her mouth, as well, and watched the woman amble to the child draped in a yellow dress decorated with pink bows and kneeled.
“Can mommy expect another masterpiece soon?” the woman said.