Patrick Curley

Eighty-Year Atonement

The year was 2031, and the little town of Eston, Saskatchewan, despite its penchant for gossip and minding everyone's business but its own, knew nothing of the momentousness of this day, the day when she would reveal to the young, aspiring journalist the hitherto unknown story of her life. She was now 102 years, but she could remember with absolute precision and clarity the day that her life story had been cast. It was precisely eighty years ago on this very date-when she was a fresh-faced, gorgeous twenty-two-year-old - that her fiance had careened down the precipitous slope of a back-road in the Saskatchewan badlands, and left her with a $20,000 life insurance policy. Now she was about to reveal to a young journalist her true account, the story of a life-long spinster who had never replace the love of her life whom she had so tragically lost.