• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Are you going to tell me what the doxie was talking about?” said Anne.

Cathy stopped at the open door and said, “Cathy wants to do that.”

Inside the cabin, the most elderly woman that Anne had ever seen stood at the stove and stirred a steamy pot with a big, wooden spoon. She put down the spoon and wiped her hands on her apron. She patted her white hair, which was plaited in a bun on top of her head, and turned her full, round, peasant’s body to face Anne. She looked at Anne for several long moments and said, “Well!”

“Indeed,” replied Anne.

“Come in, come in. Make yourself to home.”

The entire cabin was a single small room. It was dim inside, with only two small windows cut through the massive log walls. Anne walked around the cluttered space that was bedroom, living room, kitchen, and storeroom. The only partitions were walls of boxed food and provisions. The ceiling beam was draped with bunches of drying herbs and underwear. The flooring, uneven and rotten in places, was covered with odd scraps of carpet.

“You live here?” Anne said incredulously.

“I am privileged to live here.”

A mouse emerged from under the barrel stove in the center of the room and dashed to cover inside a stack of spruce kindling. Anne could hear the valley breeze whistling in the creosote-soaked stovepipe. “Forgive me,” said Anne, “but you’re the real, physical Cathy?”

“Yes,” said Cathy, patting her ample hip, “still on the hoof, so to speak.” She sat down in one of two battered, mismatched chairs and motioned for Anne to take the other.

Anne sat cautiously; the chair seemed solid enough. “No offense, but the Cathy I knew liked nice things.”

“The Cathy you knew was fortunate to learn the true value of things.”

Anne looked around the room and noticed a little table with carved legs and an inlaid top of polished gemstones and rare woods. It was strikingly out of place here. Moreover, it was hers. Cathy pointed to a large framed mirror mounted to the logs high on the far wall. It too was Anne’s.

“Did I give you these things?”

Cathy studied her a moment. “No, Ben did.”

“Tell me.”

“I hate to spoil that lovely newlywed happiness of yours.”

“The what?” Anne put down her clutch bouquet and felt her face with her hands. She got up and went to look at herself in the mirror. The room it reflected was like a scene from some strange fairy tale about a crone and a bride in a woodcutter’s hut. The bride was smiling from ear to ear. Anne decided this was either the happiest bride in history or a lunatic in a white dress. She turned away, embarrassed. “Believe me,” she said, “I don’t feel anything like that. The opposite, in fact.”

“Sorry to hear it.” Cathy got up to stir the pot on the stove. “I was the first to notice her disease. That was back in college when we were girls. I took it to be youthful eccentricity. After graduation, after her marriage, she grew progressively worse. Bouts of depression that deepened and lengthened. She was finally diagnosed to be suffering from profound chronic pathological depression. Ben placed her under psychiatric care, and she endured a whole raft of cures. Nothing helped, and only after she died…”

Anne gave a start. “Anne’s dead! Of course. Why didn’t I figure that out?”

“Yes, dear, dead these many years.”

“How?”

Cathy returned to her chair. “They thought they had her stabilized. Not cured, but well enough to lead an outwardly normal life. Then one day, she disappeared. We were frantic. She managed to elude the authorities for a week. When we found her, she was pregnant.”

“What? Oh, yes. I remember seeing Anne pregnant.”

“That was Bobby.” Cathy waited for Anne to say something. When she didn’t, Cathy said, “He wasn’t Ben’s.”

“Oh, I see,” said Anne. “Whose was he?”

“I was hoping you’d know. She didn’t tell you? Then no one knows. The paternal DNA was unregistered. So it wasn’t commercial sperm nor, thankfully, from a licensed clone. It might have been from anybody, from some stoned streetsitter. We had