Aunt Jane's Will

For the Month of May, I've chosen to embark on a few different writing challenges, and one of them was through the Narrative Method.

I thought it would be cool to share what I came up with on the fly during the session! :D

I could hear the soft sound of the heater as it ran in the distance. It was a weird looking contraption; old, beige, and somewhat greying thing that looked more like a radiator than a heater.

And, yet…it wasn’t a radiator at all. And my introduction to it came with a crashing pain that I couldn’t have expected. Then again, maybe I just needed to pay more attention?

The bizarre thing sat boldly in place, as if to mock the aggravation it had set before me. It was a new building, a new apartment and I had never seen such a contraption before. It literally hopped out of nowhere to meet with me in such a violent encounter — it nearly knocked me flat on my butt.

I came around the corner swiftly, being caught off guard the instant I did, and upon crashing right into it, I winced — the pain radiating up my shin toward my knee cap as I lifted my leg,

“Ow- what the hell is that?” The screeches of my wincing now piped down in place of my querying mind. I had no idea why someone would set it adjacent to the corner where one had no choice but to run smack into it. It even jutted out slightly, as if it had been intentionally set up to be a boobytrap and I had been just the sucker to find it.

How quaint, because Aunt Jane had never allowed me into her house beyond the sitting room and now that I was the sole heir responsible for clearing out her estate, the place had become a labyrinthine task, and somehow I was the perfect one to meet it.

The timing here, was critical as well because I had a life and obligations of my own, and yet here I was cradling my injured knee like a toddler who’d skinned it.

Certainly, not the way to completing a monumental chore such as the one laid out before me, and I knew that the realtor would be in by the end of the week. Strange, but you never really expect things to break into the clearing this way, and when they do the rush to hurry up and get it done become more of a hurry up, and wait. Maybe that was part of my lesson in being given this task, but I still hadn’t found any clue as to how to go through and canvas everything and doing it alone was starting to make me feel overwhelmed and exhausted.

How did I wind up here?

That begins a story that started with the death of my mother, and my becoming the ward of my Aunt at the age of nine. She had always been somewhat of an eccentric, and as aforementioned I was not allowed beyond the sitting room to any of the rooms I now explored. I had no idea what I would find, and part of that terrified me. How cold it be that this woman who had raised me after losing her sister, never married, and had this gigantic house had kept so much hidden away?

I wondered, if there weren’t so untold truth hidden in the recesses of all those rooms I was forbidden from entering and now there was no one to stop me.

“Anthony?” I whirled around having heard my name uttered as clear as day, and yet glancing about the perimeter there was nothing there.