The Happenings of Woods' Lake

My aunt Martha always tells me that I was born into tragedy and therefore, by rights, should spend the whole of my life soaked in it as well, and aloud I suppose I must agree with her and therefore always do, but in my mind I most heartily disagree with both claims.

On paper, I can understand well what she means to tell me, for it is clear that the beginnings of my life are hardly the start of any fairy tale. When I was too young to have any living memory, my parents died, and I was sent to live with my aunt. She refuses to speak of them, so much so that I know not whether she was sister to my mother or my father. She has a portrait of them both, but it was taken before even there wedding day, and so I am not in it even as an inconsequential, hypothetical thought. She keeps the picture locked away in her attic study, where she conducts business of a personal nature that I am not privy to. In my opinion, based off my careful observation and intentional eavesdropping, this so-called business consists mainly of crying, and then cleaning herself up afterwards so that I should never be able to tell.

My aunt’s life is more tragic than mine, in my opinion, but for me to ever tell her so would have much the same affect that stabbing her with a knife might. She is entirely alone in the world except for me, who she tries desperately and yet utterly fails to understand. Our natures are too different, but she refuses to see this. Iron and silver may lie side by side and be mistaken for one another, but they are not the same. In this way, I resemble her physically, but our thoughts are as incomprehensible to one another as to be entirely different languages. I feel bad for her, but not as bad as she feels for me.

She owns an inn, or rather many of them. Her property, which she implies will fall to me some day as it fell to her - which is to say, by means of inheritance from one ancestral line or another - has one main house (ours), two rows of smaller houses able to fit comfortably enough a happy family of four or an eccentric party of one (able to be rented seasonly), and a smattering of smaller, individual cabins which lie in wait in random and unexplainable places throughout the property (I’ve no idea how many of these there are, or if they are similar to one another, or if there is any pattern as to where they are on the property).

In the houses, there are tenants which are of a respectable nature. Some have been living on the property as long or even longer than I have, and are as much a part of the scenery as the trees or the tower of the main house, which rises so high as to be seen even as far away as the town our property lies of the outskirts of. As to the inhabitants of the private cabins, I make no comment, for they either move on too quickly for an informed opinion to be developed or else are so reclusive their bodies may well have been rotting for a century or more and none would know. (They’re not, of course. If they were, they would be unable to pay rent. But this is truly the only certainty anyone has that they remain.)

There is a church just off the property - called Woods’ Lake in honor of our family - , and this is where I spend much of my time. It is a friendlier place for children than our dark and winding mansion is, and when I was a child I found better company in priests trained to take care of grieving children than I did in an aunt I’d never heard of who spent her time either locked away in an attic or visiting tenants I was not allowed to speak to. While I have long outgrown the need for her company, I still appreciate that offered by Father Ben.

To list my constant acquaintances: Aunt Martha, Father Ben, Father Michael, Sister Louisa, Taylor and Thomas (my tutors; Aunt Martha would rather be swallowed up into the earth than enter town every day to bring me to school), Miss Helen (our live-in, elusive housekeeper), Victoria, Florence, and Charlotte (sisters, all three, who live in houses on the property), and my cousins.

My relations visit infrequently and unpredictably at best, and inconveniently or outright destructively at worst. When I was very young, they were a source of delight to me, but as I grew older I began to realize that none ever came more than once, and none were able or willing to explain to me how exactly we shared a common blood line. Currently, I view them with a sort of wearied curiosity, and ignore them outright as often as not. Aunt Martha does not seem to care how I act either way, so I suppose I am doing no real harm to anyone. Few enough of my ‘cousins’ seek me out that I have reason to believe none of them care much about me. I don’t mind.

In this objective light, my life may seem rather gray or dim, but under the light of my eyes it glows brightly enough as to fill up quite happily my whole world. I have Miss Helen to tell me stories and fairy tales, Father Ben to comfort me and dispel the fearful ones from my mind, Father Michael to teach me whatever odd skill or nearly-lost art he sees fit on any given day, Taylor to teach me practical every-day things, Tom to teach me practical scholarly things, and three friends to distract me from learning all together. I have an aunt to remind me of my past, and enough cousins in a suspended state of ‘just passing though’ to remind me that I have a future. I have entire lifetimes in books that I can visit or re-visit whenever I may choose.

Despite its tragic aspects and the insistences of all those around me, my life reeks more of long and winding hallways, church incense, and the flowers that grow near the woods and around the shore of the lake, than it does of tragedy, and I would have it no other way.