In March of that year, a hurricane that had begun stirring in the Caribbean made its way up the Eastern Seaboard and reached Ontario. The storm felled many structures, including the tiny cabin on the Whitlock grounds. The great house escaped unscathed.

Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Whitlock began to lose weight at a rate that alarmed her husband. Eventually, she was hospitalized, but by this time the cancer in her uterus had metastasized. She succumbed on the 21st of June.

As per her Last Will & Testament, Mrs. Whitlock was cremated, and her ashes were divided into separate urns and sent to each of her sons. For the better part of a year Xavier kept his portion of his mother on a table in the living room. But the sight of it, the very idea of it, disturbed Maxine. Eventually Xavier acquiesced and allowed Maxine to move the ashes to a spare room closet, where they sat for a long time in neglect.

Until one wintry day when Maxine was left alone while her husband was away on business. An ice storm had been ravaging the area for nearly thirty-six hours. Many houses had lost power; Maxine’s included. It was while she sat shivering in the unlit, vacant house, that she decided to liberate Mrs. Whitlock from her perch.

A single candle lighted Maxine’s way as she ventured into the neglected room and freed the urn from its cobweb-laden nook.

The dust it held seemed ever-so-faintly to sigh as Maxine turned it gently in her hands. She sat within the candlelit chamber long into the night, holding the urn, listening. She allowed her mind to drift into buried fantasies, ones that heated her insides with shame, with delight. Maxine waited until these sensations became almost unbearable, then she extinguished the candle.

Cast Lots

Cast Lots

“I’m the clerk, I’m the scribe, at the hearings of what cause I know not.”

— Samuel Beckett, “Texts for Nothing”

She finds herself inside a lilting cottage. Gales test the twisted nails that hold the planks of this most humble abode consecutive, firm. The wooden walls creak, as does the bowing cot she rests upon.

The winds are cold and smell of yeast. They insinuate themselves between the slats, snuffing out the low-burning kerosene lamp. There is no moon.

Shifting in a strange bed, with its prodding springs and coarse blankets, the woman is suddenly alerted to…what, a premonition, a memory?

Knowledge; direct irrefutable knowledge that a great peril is encroaching; growing keener, vaster, nearer.

The certainty of this danger rouses in the woman an all-consuming terror, one that reaches a critical mass once she hears the bleating sound that rides the forceful wind. These noises come rhythmically. They penetrate the cottage as surely as a spear.

Flinging back the bedclothes, the woman charges for the door. She is thoughtless in her panic, but is intent only on fleeing, on racing down the first causeway she encounters.