Quest for Mortality

A reverse on the human quest for immortality...

No one knew she was there. Except maybe the crickets and swallows that nested in the attic. That was where she lived. In the small pink hat box that sat upon the decaying lavender and green love-seat. She had a tiny stuffed dog, once a toy for a doll, that she snuggled with at night, clutching it to herself on her little bed of cotton wadding that she had pulled from a tattered cushion.  She was still a child, though 100 years old. She had lived in the house her whole life, though the past 90 years she had not been seen in it. She barely remembered what or who she was, but she was still very much a small girl. She hated the dark, it frightened her terribly, it always had. She had once gone and climbed into her parent’s bed when the darkness scared her, but her parents had left long ago and she was alone to face the darkness with the little stuffed dog.

            She didn’t know how or why she was there. She barely remembered the day she had died, it had been so long ago. But she remembered how quite well. Tom, the kitchen boy, an indentured servant had poisoned her out of revenge for servitude. He was treated well, but hated her father and had laced her tea with arsenic bought from an apothecary on the corner. She had died soon after, the poison not taking long to surge through her small body. It was an odd feeling she had when she died, instead of falling asleep like she had imaged, she had risen above herself and found she was standing in the room where her parents were grieving over her body. She had tried to get her mother’s attention but her mother seemed neither to hear her or see her. Her father was just the same. She took to drifting about her house, still staying in her own room, in the bed where she’d died. But after her parents moved away, another family moved in, and her room was given to another little girl. Frightened of the strangers she retreated to the attic into the little pink hat box on the decaying lavender and green love-seat. Sometimes when the family was out, she would drift about the house, into the room that was once hers, the other little girl’s dolls and toys now strewn about the bed. She smiled softly to herself, but her mind was troubled. She had never believed in ghosts, but yet she was one. She still said her prayers every night. She prayed for mortality. She prayed that she could rest in peace, and one day, she found herself being led out of the attic by a glowing angel, so beautiful that she was afraid, but her kind words calmed the little girl and so for the last time she left the little brown dog and the little pink hat box on the decaying lavender and green love seat, and was at peace. 

Author's Note

This is an older piece of mine, written a few years ago, inspired by a sentence I read in a magazine.