Mark M Bulmer

In the summer of 2010, we attended a family gathering at the Wutherington family's northern estate.

It was ghastly.

Great aunt Ribeca, her name spelt in the most ghastly way possible, was a horrible and ghastly woman. Her manner was simply atrocious.

I tried to engage with her several times, on everything from needlework to the recent outbreak in the lower city. The best I received, to the finest of comments, was a low hum.

I felt out of place. I. Me. Out of place.

Impossible and unacceptable.

More unacceptable than impossible, but both. At the same time.

He dragged me there a minimum of twice each year. There were family gatherings aplenty, three weddings, two of what they called 'funerals', six children, a sudden vanishing which was never fully explained, and, gasp, a divorce.

Each time was more unpleasant than the last. More horrid. More fetid. More ghastly.

The aunts approached evil. The uncles approached lecherousness. The cousins whispered and pointed and whispered, then pointed further.

His mother. I could write of her until the end of my days and not begin to describe the misery she poured upon the world. It gushed from her. Bucketful after bucketful. A torrent of nastiness.

There was, however, one spot. One place. One tiny, hidden corner from which I could look upon beauty such that most humans cannot understand.

It wasn't the pond. It wasn't the trees. Not the falling and floating leaves, not the ducks drifting across the water to no particular place in no particular hurry, not the reeds along the shore. Not even the butterflies which fluttered by far too infrequently for my liking. There was no one particular thing.

It was the all, the everything, the together.

Had he known of this place, there is a tiny chance I would have ended there, with the view to entertain me forever.

None knew, for I kept it secret. It was the one thing which was fully mine.

Gone, now. Like all things, like all thoughts, like all beliefs.

I'm not sure how he murdered me, though I assume it was quick and, to the best of my recollection, painless.

There was dragging. There was chopping. There was burning.

There was sprinkling.

I am underground. This is obvious from the total lack of light. It is darker than one would believe possible.

Ghastly dark.