Abigail’s Ghost

Mother’s funeral was finally over,

All the dishes washed, and food put away

Black-clad, mourning guests had all departed.

His sister had stayed to help him clean up.

He had kissed her goodbye in the driveway.

Odd to sleep again in his mother’s house.

She died in her great poster bed upstairs.

James sat watching the embers slowly die out

A reflection in the window, he turned

No one there.  So it had begun again.

Mom was not the first to die in this house.

Abigail? He asked. Fire crackled back.

She died three hundred years before, died here

In this very  house. It was smaller then.

Sixteen, really too young to be a bride.

Golden hair, blue eyes reflecting silence.

Obedient child. A jealous husband.

Twenty years her senior. Horrible things!

They say he beat her, although never proved.

Made her watch unchristian horrible things!

James saw her first when he was merely ten.

Wandering the house, sobbing in the dark.

Twenty December seventeen nineteen.

It was the shortest day. She took her life.

Slit her wrists with a kitchen knife. They say

A suicide! Banned her from the church yard.

No one knew where her remains were buried.

James knew. They were in the old root cellar.

At sixteen she had seen horrible things.

Unchristian things. Her husband only laughed,

Mocked her innocence, hitting her harder.

They might have understood had she killed him.

But she took her own life. James turned again

Towards the weeping spirit. Vacant blue eyes.

A corruption with her soul on fire.

Blood seeping to the floor. Horrible things!

Abigail? He asked. She had disappeared.

Returned to eternal desperation.