Write Wednesday, Resurrected.

(picture from Google, specifically seenonrealestate.com)

In honor of the long forgotten (by me, of course) Write Wednesday tradition,

I have decided to share with you a story I wrote for my fiction writing class.
(In which I got an A*, mehehe)

It is entitled:

The Mortician

The Mortensen’s were a quiet family; an aging man, an aging wife. They lived in a grey three-story Victorian style mansion that had been in the family since their ancestors crossed the ocean. The same plot of land on which the first Mortensen built his humble wooden home, onto which the second had added a few bedrooms and an indoor bathroom, in which the third lived in with his family, which the fourth tore down and rebuilt from the foundation the elegant and magnificent mansion that came to be the envy of the township. In which the fifth Mortensen lived, the sixth, and the seventh, Hal Mortensen, who had respect for his house and heritage, but had become preoccupied with other things beside the upkeep of the family home.

The Mortensen’s had been mortuary-folk since Hal’s great-great-grandfather, who rebuilt the house and added a large basement in which to conduct his work. The family business had operated out of the Mortensen house ever since then, with frequent threats of discontinuation from the last two Mortensen wives, who got the shivers at the thought of such things being done underneath their own kitchen. But the Mortensen men had been bred for their charm, and such outbursts were usually calmed within minutes, and the importance of keeping the family tradition explained with a comforting smile.

Though their great grey house had been neglected lately, it did not retract from its intimidating grandeur. The peeling and fading paint gave the impression of a strong appaloosa mare; the rotting shingles the old skin of a Regal Snake, the cracked glass windows were like the teeth of a ferocious beast. Admirable—from a distance.

The season was turning; it had been a lush, wet summer and the garden spiders were as big as apricots. The vegetables in the gardens around the neighborhood had yielded a plentiful harvest, more than enough to bottle away in glass jars and save for the bleak months ahead. Each bough of each tree was heavy-laden with large leaves, and their bark was strong and smelled sweet. As summer days grew shorter, the neighbors threw parties on their lawns and ate peaches and marveled at the earth’s good health. But the Mortensen’s never came to the parties.

Hal Mortensen had been growing steadily bitter over the past decade. He was too old, he was too tired, he was too anxious to get away from the rot and monotony that had consumed his life. Each day was death—his bedroom where his grandmother had passed of cholera, where the curtains were tattered and the wallpaper worn through, the basement where he spent hours with the deceased in the dimly lit damp, the backyard cemetery, the dead trees and yellow grass, even the hollow look in his aging wife’s eyes. Each day he would wake up a little later, dreading going to work—though it was only a floor below him—groan at the cracks in the ceiling, until finally shuffling into the bathroom to shave.

But today, today was a different sort of day. Today Hal woke early; he kissed his wife on the cheek before springing out of bed as if the night had given him back ten years. He showered and shaved and watered his lawn before heading to the basement. He smiled at each body as he passed through them on his way to the sink against the back wall, where he cleaned his hands and donned his gloves and let the latex snap snugly against his weathered skin. He clicked on his old olive-green Penncrest and turned the dial until he found the news.

The TV mumbled in the background as Hal trimmed a mustache and pricked a medial epicondyle and flicked a pump on. He whistled some Louis Armstrong as he shuffled through some papers on his desk, barely hearing his wife’s anxious shouting from the top of the stairs. He grinned to himself as he set the papers down and turned the pump off on his way to the staircase, where his wife was calling his name fearfully and begging him to come upstairs.

Hal pulled off his gloves and set them on the railing, turning his head toward the sounds of the sirens on the TV screen, echoed by the set in the living room upstairs. He walked quickly up the stairs and saw his wife on the couch in front of the television. There were long streaks of tears on her cheeks, and she was holding her hands up to cover her open mouth. The banner on the bottom of the TV screen described the picture of a dozen fire trucks, ambulances and squad cars piled in front of an deteriorating brick building. Gas leak causes tragic death of approximately 23 senior citizens this morning. Investigators say there were no… Hal’s wife cried into a faded throw pillow as she listed the names of the people she knew were there, and Hal felt sorry for her. He sat on the couch next to her and wrapped his arm around her thin shoulders. He handed her the pocket handkerchief she had made for his birthday last year, and rocked her back and forth in his arms as he scanned the rotting walls of the living room. He felt sorry for her.

But he did not feel guilty.