excerpt
In Millie Harper’s house on Pike Street in the town of
Emblem, Ronald Harrison lay awake in his upstairs bedroom.
Tired from a long day on the farm he thought that, like most
nights, he would be asleep in minutes. But something had kept him
wakeful and restless for the last two hours.
For several days he had tried to ignore the niggling feeling that
Aunt Millie was not well. The woman who had taken him in as
an eleven-year-old distraught child afraid of an abusive father, had
become like a grandmother to him, and he had learned to love her
deeply. Actually, Ronald often told himself, it was easy to love Millie
Harper, Tyne’s outspoken aunt. Short and stocky in frame, and in
her early seventies, she had an energy level that amazed him. But not
in recent days – or was it actually weeks, and he had failed to notice?
Millie’s face had lost some of its radiance and her eyes no longer
registered the good humoured spark he had grown used to seeing
there. She often appeared weary and, although she didn’t complain,
she seemed to be going to bed earlier every night. And she had stayed
home from church the previous Sunday, another thing that Ronald
found disturbing. He couldn’t remember Aunt Millie missing a Mass
since he had come to live with her.
This evening as they ate dinner, he had asked if she wasn’t feeling
well, and she replied with her usual show of bravado, “I’m just a little
tired. I always get this way when spring work starts in the garden. I’ll
get my strength back in a few days.”
Mayanaam
vequinox
Manolis 