The Bransward Estate
by Meadowlisp
The two women walked side-by-side, each carrying a bottle of wine, taking care to dodge the blossoms that intruded into the path here and there from the untamed edges of the tightly manicured lawns. The shorter woman, not quite stocky, but too full for her liking under her pink summer dress, already an optimistic choice for the season, so now doubly regretted, consciously kept pace, sandals slapping, and sun hat held down with a tight grip. The taller woman drifted easily along.
“I heard,” said the taller woman, “that Ann’s back in town. Claire saw her at yoga this morning. We were both there of course, and I didn't see her myself, but she swears it was Ann. ”
“Well it's good that somebody is there now at least. I felt just awful leaving her last week. She shouldn't be alone in there.”
“That may be, but still, somebody must've said something. I don't think her school's out yet, not this time of year. Ann wouldn't have just stopped by—I'm sure Madeline is still with it enough at least to know she didn't just stop by—and you know how she is when she thinks people are meddling in her business.” The taller woman stopped and turned on a tight heel, “You didn't happen to say anything, did you?”
Caught, but still seeing the opportunity to catch her breath, the shorter woman paused before speaking. “I'm sure whoever talked to Ann only said what needed to be said. Nothing she couldn't have heard for herself if she did her daughterly duty and cared to ask. And nothing she doesn't have a right to know.”
The taller woman managed not to scoff and resumed walking. Turning the corner to the private drive, the shorter woman allowed herself to be outpaced. Penelope, she knew, would always find something to gripe about. This was nothing new, and nothing too trying to the ties of their acquaintance, especially considering the present circumstances.
As they came up to the Bransward’s estate, or more appropriately, what remained of it, Penelope first, then the trailing Martha found that Ann indeed was back in town. She was busy wrestling a patch of buckthorn which had moved unchecked in with the row of lilacs. Seeing the women, she hurried over and unlatched the gate.
“Oh I'm glad you could make it. My mother's inside preparing dinner.” Ann gestured back over her shoulder, then turning, realizing she was pointing at an empty patch of sky, following with despairing eyes, past the snapped and dangling overhead lines, past the pipes which, with impressive tensile strength, pulled up taut from gouges in the earth like the roots of a tree turned in a storm, along the wide muddy rut to where it terminated, now into the far treeline, at the wayward home of Madeline Bransward.
The two women, both glad to have worn high-hemmed dresses for the occasion, felt rather intrepid as they made their way along the home’s trail, keeping to the outside of the furrowed path. “It does seem it's slowed some, doesn't it?” Penelope held a branch of honeysuckle delicately with two fingers, allowing it to spring back into place only after she had passed.
Martha looked skeptically back at the progress. “Oh surely. Why it's hardly moved at all since last week. I'm sure any day now it will settle down and—” And? She did not continue the thought. She tried not to think too either about how close the house now seemed to be resting to where the wood gave way to the embankment, where the land dissolved into sand and sea.
Weaving through a final few trees the women found themselves at a familiar front stoop. Against the odds, its stately pillars held strong. The front door looked as it always had, its still-pristine white paint evidence that the protruding porch had shielded it from the smeared and smudged fate that had befallen most of the rest of the exterior. Each of the flower pots hung over a small mound of soil where it had clearly spilled or fallen and been hastily re-hung.
Penelope held back to pick pine needles from her shoe as Martha rang the bell. Finding it only gave a hollow click, Martha raised her hand to knock. Before she could, the door opened.
Madeline looked almost regal. If anything, with each passing week since the movement became to much to sensibly ignore, she had become only more assured. She had always been a fastidious woman. This more than anything was what she prided herself in, and what she now—with everything else now drifting away, or more properly, with her now drifting from everything else—clung to. She had on a delicate blue dress. Her hair was contrived into a complicated blonde construction. She peered serenely out at the two women.
“Couldn't Claire make it?”
Martha let Penelope respond. They had discussed how they would handle this. The Bransward club, as it had long been affectionately termed, had dwindled down from its once multi-cul-de-sac spanning numbers to only the four of them. Seeing that one of their small remaining number had deserted might be too much for the woman to bear, they feared. Penelope opted to skirt the issue.
“Hannah's sick again, Claire had to stay back to watch her, the poor darling.
Madeline seemed to accept the answer. “Some people just never get a break, though with the way she feeds them it's hardly a shock they're turning out so sickly—oh, come in already. Everything's prepared.”
The house was much the same as it has been at the prior week’s dinner; the table sat huge, solitary in the center of what had been the living room, far from all the walls and anything which might be prone to fall or topple onto it. The vases and ceramics had been replaced with wicker bowls and such (Madeline had always loudly considered them tacky, but given the circumstances…) the hutches and cabinets had been taped shut and secured in various makeshift ways to the walls, though that hadn't been enough to save what remained of the china within. Bookshelves sat empty and the books that once had proudly lined their shelves now sat in sturdy but uncareful mounds as hidden as they could be made.
Madeline hurried in ahead of the women as they removed their shoes, beating them the table to clear the fourth setting. The three that remained, clustered in the center of the table, consisted of paper plates, plastic cups, and perhaps less for fear of damage than for the incongruity of metal in such company, plastic utensils as well. They sat, Martha and Madeline on one side, Penelope on the other, and immediately got to work uncorking the wine.
Dinner proceeded as it had so many times before. Despite the presentation, the wine tasted just fine, and Madeline remained an impressive cook. The roast was cooked to perfection. All three women were willing to overlook the small shifts and creaks of the house, though on a few occasions they were enough to overturn their glasses and rattle their chairs. In months and years past they might've filled the silence that followed dinner with gossip or games of cards. But now even the most innocent gossip felt like it revolved gravitationally around a subject they'd prefer to avoid, and they knew no games of cards for three people they would care to play, not to mention one which would survive the playing surface, by then with the house canted at some twenty degrees. So they sat quietly and made it clear, without speaking more than was absolutely necessary, how very much they had enjoyed the wine and the roast and the carrots.
Martha excused herself to the washroom, where, with the aid of months of practice, she deftly, silently poured a bottle of seawater down the sink drain. With a gulp, the pipes swallowed the water. Martha heard a wistful creaking in the floorboards, a shudder as the house tasted the sea and remembered its calling.
There was a banging at the front door. Just as Ann came in, the house lurched tremendously, working with a renewed purpose toward the sea. Martha braced herself between her chair and the table. Penelope dropped to the floor and hunched up. Madeline let out a contained yelp, but sat in place. From the kitchen there came a crashing sound.
“Oh, Ann,” cried Madeline, once the house had settled enough to not drown out the words “I hope you're not tracking mud all over the floor again.”
Ann, who had indeed tracked a considerable amount of mud on the floor, gave her mother a withering glare and departed with a huffing finality.
Madeline drew back the curtains on the far french doors. The house was now situated on the beach. The sunset over the water came through uninterrupted. The shore stretched cooly in both directions. “What a pleasant view.”
Further down the shore, and beyond the view of the women, beached on the sand were a few decaying architects, washed up from benthic schools. Their bloated corpses seemed almost to unravel into their writhing forms, the larval spiral staircases snaking helically off, flat panes of glass growing like crystals, slabs of concrete emerging, flawless and imposing even in infancy from the rot.
“Well I think it's time I get going,” said Penelope. “Lately Peter gets all in a fuss when I get home late.” She made toward the door without waiting for pleasantries, and then, almost offhandedly before she put her shoes back on, she continued, “Do you think, Madeline, that I could borrow some of your jewelry for the banquet next week?”
Madeline eyed her icily. The house tremored once more, the water now audibly lapping up against the far wall. “Just have it back by next next Friday.”
When Madeline returned with the jewelry box, Martha spoke up, “You know, I have to be going too, but Tom and I will be doing work at the new house this week, we don't want to move the pets just yet. I'm wondering if you might want to stay at the old house for while, just until we get situated, watch the pets for us?”
“Oh, no. I'm much too old to be moving. And there's so much to be done around here.”
The women collected their things, Penelope now decked in as much jewelery as she could carry, and they left. Madeline sat back down alone at the table and made no attempt at a proper goodbye.
“I'm having a few people over on Monday,” said Martha at the top of the embankment before the two women parted, “A sort of housewarming this time, but I'm hoping it might become a more regular thing. You should come by.”
Penelope smiled and assented, looking one last time to the shore where sat, proudly and half-submerged, the Bransward estate.