Speculation by Edmund Jorgensen

Author:Edmund Jorgensen [Jorgensen, Edmund]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Inkwell & Often
Published: 2011-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Mildred led us through every room on each of the house's two stories, giving us the history of nearly every object we came across—how much it had cost her and where, if she had bought it, or who had given it to her and when, if it had been a gift. In her bedroom she walked us down the long wall of framed photographs that she had hung there, stopping before each one and identifying the subjects for us, giving us the year and manner of their deaths and some unique fact or anecdote about each of them. Usually the anecdote involved some mistreatment or injustice directed at Mildred herself, and Cheryl made no attempt to hide on her face how much these injured remembrances rubbed her the wrong way.

"This is my youngest brother Jack, but we called him Jack-Jack. He got drunk and drowned in the lake down by the Preserve in '84. He used to call me 'mildewed rosebush' when we were little.

"This is my father. He died of a stroke in '88. The doctor said that it was so big he wouldn't have felt a thing. He paid for all my dresses but he didn't like it when I wore my nails this long. My mother made me cut them for his funeral but then I started using false nails right after it was over."

As she progressed along the wall it became clear that she had never married, had no children, and no surviving relatives to speak of, and despite Cheryl's obvious dislike I began to feel a pang of tenderness for this batty, chatty old woman, all alone in the world, passing her days in this remote house with no company but these photographs and her mute, damaged house-mate.

"Come on downstairs," said Mildred when I thought we were finally finished, "you folks have to see the finale."

At first "the finale" appeared to be the basement, which had been finished into a guest apartment with an attached bathroom and a private entrance in the back. The air was a little humid and the temperature a few degrees lower than the first floor, but overall it was a pleasant, livable space—if a bit thin to serve as the finale of our tour. But it was not the entire apartment that Mildred intended to show off.

"This is the guest apartment where Norman would stay when he visited. And here," said Mildred, opening a door off the bedroom, "I have saved the best for last. I always dreamt of having a trophy room, so that's what I call this, ah-ha-ha-ha, the trophy room."

The trophy room was really more of a walk-in closet than a room, but at least it didn't contain any trophies either. What it did contain, as revealed by the bare hanging bulb that Mildred switched on, were several huge stacks of leather notebooks against the right wall and several shorter stacks against the left. There were many hundreds in total, perhaps more than a thousand.

"Are all these..."

"Not

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