Some more writing for the characters Magnolia, Marie, and Cora, who I've posted other pieces about. Drawings of Magnolia being grumpy to come.......
Two railroad lines ran west
along the outskirts of Tipperary Village. Only one was still in use, the other
track had long since been choked with scotch grass and weeds, a looming pile of
rocks and cement chunks spilling onto the ties. No trains stopped in Tipperary.
Magnolia liked to walk to the
rock pile in the evenings, after leaving the Red House from the back. Marie
would accompany her, and they would kick off their shoes and sit on the big
smooth boulders with their backs to the scraggly woods.
There were the weird rusted remains of something strewn
by the tracks, a strange metal frame just taller than their heads with a
rotted-out platform sitting there, plus pipes and corrugated sheets and other generally
dangerous and sharp-edged scraps;.
The girls weren’t stupid. They
didn’t stand beneath the falling-down platform (it was only a matter of time
before it really did crash down, hopefully not on anyone’s head) or cut their
bare feet on all the rusty metal. “You girls’ll get lockjaw from playing down
there, with all that rubbish by the train track,” Colleen, the cook, had warned
them. They were careful after that, especially careful, as the dictionary had
led them from “lockjaw” to “tetanus” to a very unpleasant sounding description
of that disease.
Of course, Ms. Caddigan had no
knowledge whatsoever of Magnolia and Marie’s nightly escapes. Cora knew, but
Magnolia had blackmailed her into silence by telling her if she told that witch
Ms. Caddigan, she’d do what she’d done before and put a snake in her bed and
toad’s eggs in her nightgown.
It was the evening of the first
day of August, just before the cousin’s second month at the Red House began. No
escapes to their secret spot had been possible for over a week, and Magnolia
had already complained to Marie three times that day that she was losing her
mind.
Marie believed her. It would be
hard for anyone, and was even harder
for Magnolia to be cooped up in a stuffy old manor house where the amount of
people she didn’t like far outnumbered the people she did.
When Marie told her there were good chances of
making a break for the secret spot that evening, Magnolia was so relieved and
excited she believed maybe she would go insane after all waiting for dinner to
be over.
But nothing of great drama
happened—their cousin Cora continued to be a brat, Ms. Caddigan continued to be
a condescending, expensive-clothes-wearing evil witch, the steak continued to be
tough and Magnolia didn’t explode or start throwing silverware. This was a
definite good thing.
The two girls quietly put on
their sweaters and slipped into the kitchen, while Cora glared at them from the
upstairs landing.
“Tell Ms. Caddigan we’re taking
our baths if she asks.”
This was what Marie always whispered to
Colleen through the screen door as they were leaving. Both girls were positive
she wouldn’t tell on them: Colleen was sensible and had been kind to them since
they’d arrived, and was also possibly the exact opposite of Ms. Caddigan, which
said good things about her character.
The walk to the railroad tracks
was short, perhaps six minutes at most, and involved walking to the end of the
rambling gardens on the south side of the house and cutting behind the
groundskeeper’s hut, where a man named Charley Day lived. The girls had yet to
hear him speak a complete sentence, but he seemed friendly enough.
“It’s August first, right?”
Magnolia was trying to braid three pine needles together as they walked. Marie
nodded.
“The day after tomorrow, we’ll
have been here exactly two months. Can you believe it--?”
She glanced over at Magnolia,
who had dropped the pine needles and was scowling. Marie stopped walking.
“You hate it here, don’t you.”
It wasn’t even a question. Magnolia sighed deeply and plopped onto the ground.
“I appreciate the Red House itself. I still want to explore those
attics that Colleen told us not to go in…and I like looking at that tapestry of
the elephant impaling people on its tusks. And I like our secret spot…” She
stopped and looked Marie straight in the eye.
“But Marie. I despise Ms. Caddigan. She’s made of
plastic, I’m positive. And Cora is being more insufferable than ever and I so want to punch her most of the time
and HOW am I going to last another two months in tiny little Tipperary village
where the only thing the townspeople talk about is how cloudy it is and who the postman last had an affair with! AHHHHH!”
She lay down on her back in the exact middle of the path and closed her eyes
against the darkening sky.
Marie sighed too and held out
her hand. Her cousin was very obviously at her wit’s end, and honestly she was
worried as well as to how Magnolia was going to get through two more months here.
She was fairly sure her self-control was all but used up by now.
“Come on. Get up. This is
halfway over, you know. Now, shall we?” Marie heaved Magnolia to her feet and
they walked away in step down the packed-dirt path.
.JPG)
