For nihil -- the OLD CRONE story!!
nihil, you were right, I found it! In between the box with one dead husband's sheet music, and the box with another dead husband's manuscripts...Another stroll down nostalgia lane! <sigh> Yet I also found a whole bunch of undeveloped film, so the trip down-cellar proved useful.
I see from the date that I was ten years old, not eight, when I wrote the following story. Still pre-pubescent, though. And you will see that I was a precocious 10-year-old, as well as a fastidious one, and that I had read too many Elizabethan sonnets.
The Death of the Year
The room was very dark, close, and scantily furnished. A crumpled old woman lay in bed, humming a broken tune, and occasionally pausing to munch and grind her toothless gums together. She lay rigid, staring at the ceiling, and then abruptly fixed her eyes upon the figure of a young girl, who was sitting near the bed. The girl grew restive under the gaze of the old woman, and inquired in a somewhat impatient tone:
"Is there something you want, Aunt?"
"A glass of water, Mary, please."
The girl filled a glass of water at the sink in the corner of the room, and came up to her great-aunt's bedside. She raised the old woman with an expression of distaste, and put the glass to the gummy lips. Some of the water spilled on her face, and trickled lazily down the cruel furrows to her chin.
"How horribly wrinkled she is!" Mary thought. "So old, and dried-up, and ugly. Why doesn't she die! She just lies there, humming and chewing, and ordering me about, and then she goes on and on about the beautiful home she had once, and about her husband who was killed in some accident or other, and her daughter who committed suicide when her boy-friend jilted her. I bet the old hag made it all up."
Mary's meditations were interrupted by a querulous remark from the old woman.
"Watch out, you clumsy thing! You're spilling the water all over my face!"
Mary dutifully wiped the trembling chin with a towel, contemplating her great aunt's visage with revolted fascination.
"To think that she was once beautiful!" Mary marvelled.
The old woman began to speak, half to herself, in a cracked, sing-song voice.
"I want to see out the window, Mary. Move my bed. I want to see the trees. They are so pretty at this time of year. Did I ever tell you about my daughter? She..."
"Yes, Aunt," Mary interrupted. "You told me all about it."
"I did?" The old woman relapsed into bewildered silence, and Mary wheeled her bed ovr to the one small, dirty window in the room. The sight of the sensuous fall day revived the old woman's feelings, for she began to coo placidly to herself, and to chant odd phrases, a senile smile grotesquely adorning her lips. Beside her sat Mary, her reluctant attendant, swinging her foot back and forth in an agony of tedium.
Outside the dark, ugly room, inhabited by a jibbering old woman about to die, and a young girl filled with horror at the sordidness of senility and death, an Autumn day reigned in all ceremony.
Death often takes strange forms; to a human being, how incongruous it seems that the dying year should be attired in the glory of sumpuous, velvety reds and yellows! When Autumn waves her colorful flag aloft, she does not suggest the idea of decay and murdered youth. An Autumn day is a magnificent pageant; one thinks of an emperor dying nobly, surrounded by dukes and princesses, mourned by many nations.
As the year slowly dies, masked in splendor, so also dies an insignificant old woman. And when the land lies still in death, stark yet lovely, and covered with a pall of virginal snow, the old woman will be hastily shovelled underground, as hideous in death as in life.
THE END
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