Member-only story
Short Fiction
Fine China and Swine
A Quiet Rebellion in Velvet and Mud
They said she was mad.
Not with any sentiment as dark as malice, or at least not exactly. They just used that tongue-clucking, tilted-head tone people use when someone stops playing by the rules. When someone removes the lace from the curtains and starts growing wildflowers instead of roses.
“She actually used to be… sort of normal,” the butcher muttered to the baker. “She taught piano. Had that shy, quiet little husband who sold shoes. What was his name again?”
They no longer exactly remember, and maybe that was always the point.
She didn’t take much when she left the house on Hazel Street. Just her books, her perfume, and three heavy trunks of clothes she hadn’t worn in years — gowns she once called “ridiculous” and now called “essential.” She also took a single teacup with a crack in it and a chipped plate shaped like a scallop shell.
She left the wedding china. She’d never actually wanted it anyway.
The farmhouse was already hers, an inheritance from a great-aunt no one remembered. It sat just past the willow grove, just down a little dusty dirt road that likely hadn’t seen a carriage in half a century. The house was crooked, and the roof leaked…
