(July 2022) Seeing as you have just recently purchased your house, I must tell you of your new neighbour, the leftward one, in that elaborately deckinged house from which always billows smoke. I doubt, I do, that you, despite living in our area for all your life, have heard of her. Not because you are uninformed, which you aren’t, but because these things are nowadays rarely taught, as such was the war’s effect that our community’s lore has become nigh-forgotten. Here, a sketch, an inkling, regarding her peculiar and disturbing behaviour.
She puts fruit, sometimes meat, on her platter and keeps it there for weeks, letting it rot and grow haggard, as if she takes pleasure in displaying the grotesque, enjoying the smell fill up her house and getting a high from seeing the fruit in such a state. It’s all so exhilarating—the browning, the crumbling, the shrivelling up. In her mind she is a gardener, cultivating decay and planting mass onto the mound, trimming her perfect hedge whenever she runs her fingers through the mound to proper it into a cone-shape. She then, once the fruit is lovely enough, scrapes it all into a box which she bathes in ice until there are no more bugs left wandering about—bugs ruin the experience, the novelty, they’re too alive, and she doesn’t like to share. Her concoction is then placed back onto the platter. This process, after time, forms a mound of dust-like rot, with new fruit or freshly-chopped meat placed on top, ready for the next harvest. Great pride is taken in the mound’s growing, its expanding presence gussying the house, its cuteness satisfying all her senses.
Perhaps you find this strange but not worrying. Then might I remind you that your house’s previous owners, an agricultural family owning also some livestock, moved because of failing harvests and fox-ridden nights.