Embers

“The End Is Near,” the papers had read, back when the paperboy still came. His last visit with the daily paper from the sizable town a county over was several editions ago. The situation was troublesome–Agnes was several crossword puzzles behind as a result. Having grown up in that sizable town, she also enjoyed scanning the obituaries for the ones she recognized. Henry Holmestein had passed two months ago, and she expected his widowed wife, Carol, to follow like a lamb any week now. 

 

Other than her paperless mornings, The End was an event Agnes found she could ignore. The cottage (which was a kind term for the place her father had built for her in her twenties, over forty years ago) was tucked at the base of a cliff that provided shade for much of the day, only allowing sunshine in the very early hours of the morning. The path leading to it was overgrown with grasses and dandelions, and because of the numerous “NO TRESPASSING–PRIVATE PROPERTY” signs she’d hammered to tree trunks all along the way, she didn’t receive many unexpected visitors. 

 

Agnes never paid much attention to the weather. Why should she give any mind to the unusually strong stenches accompanying the breezes nowadays, or the occasional lump of burning coal that landed in her vegetable garden? As long as she lobbed it into the small stream with a shovel in a relatively timely matter, the subtle changes did her little harm. 

 

She had taken to spending more time inside, against her typical summertime habits of reading or knitting on her dilapidated front porch. The outside temperature was shockingly cold for July. It chilled her to the bone. While the wind howled outside–Agnes thought it distinctly mimicked the cries of people in pain–she decided to take care of the spring cleaning she’d neglected months ago. She typically did a thorough clean of the cottage in mid-March, but this year that came far too soon for her to handle after her late husband Marcus’ death. The wind howled as it snuck through crevices in the cottage’s walls, carrying a sharp smell of sulfur with it. Agnes coughed, and set off to find a candle before tidying up. 

 

She and Marcus were fond of routines, and her yearly Valentine’s Day gift of a new scented candle had been one of her favorites. Marcus passed just days after gifting her one labeled “Campfires,” which smelled of marshmallows and evergreens. “I thought it might remind you of home,” he’d said with a smile. It would be unwise to burn bonfires here. It was far too dry in these woods, and Agnes was terrified of their little cottage being sent up in flames. 

 

The candles were stacked precariously on top of each other by the nightstand in their bedroom, with “Campfires” resting on the top of the pile. Agnes had yet to burn it, had only opened it once upon receiving it, doubtful of the creator’s ability to combine the two scents together in a palatable way. They had typically burned candles on the nightstand, but the bedroom seemed to be spared the smell that was plaguing the rest of the cottage for now. She carried it to the main room, and upon opening it, discovered a square of paper tucked inside. 

 

Agnes’ heart rate quickened. They weren’t particularly adventurous in their youth–passing notes in algebra or slipping out of the school during lunch to sit underneath the building’s overhang and watch the rain was the extent of their rebellion–but they hadn’t done anything similar in decades, not even notes like the one now in front of her. The spark hadn’t died, just waned with age. She picked it out of the space between the wax and the lid, fingers trembling. 

 

She decided to light the candle first, to dispel that horrid scent. Uncovering the matches was no easy task. Agnes rifled through the junk drawer, pushing past chewed-on pens and crumpled receipts. The matchbox was shoved in the very back, holding very few matches in its dilapidated case. The candle had three wicks, and she struck a match to light them. 

 

“Campfires” had an even stranger aroma when burning. Marcus was correct. It did remind her of home, late-night bonfires, and their childhood. Only the sweetest fragments of her memory swept through her mind as the fumes spread throughout the cottage. Agnes turned the note round and round in her fingers, watching the candle flicker as it crept down the wick. She set the note down unread, not yet ready for the final words from her husband. She fetched a dry dishrag instead. 

 

Between the two of them, they didn’t have much. A collection of books, of course. Marcus had been an avid reader, and in their later years he would accidentally hold on to library books well past their due dates, to the extent that he simply paid the fees and kept the copies. His late great-uncle’s guitar, gifted decades ago when the man received complaints from his neighbors in his assisted living community, sat lifeless against a cabinet. It was coated in dust even before Marcus had passed. Neither of them was able to carry a melody, and the instrument was so horribly out of tune that even they could tell. 

 

Agnes took the rag to the guitar’s body. The task was long overdue. The strings gave a pleasant hum as she ran the rag along the neck and swept over the sun-faded exterior, before carefully returning it to its spot. There was a noticeable absence of dust where it had rested, but a thorough cleaning of the floors could wait until another day. 

 

Next, she turned to the bookshelves. Agnes had never touched most of the volumes, preferring television and newspapers to novels of any sort. There was no rhyme or reason to the arrangements; books Marcus had purchased sat alongside covers with library barcodes on the spines, all shapes and sizes and colors mixed together. 

 

The bottom shelf was home to her knitting materials and projects, many left long unfinished. She kept the abandoned works in a small wicker bin, which was filled with lone mittens, mere inches worth of scarves, and a bright yellow bonnet intended for her niece, whose fourth child was due in late October. 

 

The mailman had stopped coming as well, so the last news of her niece’s pregnancy was long outdated. Their letters and parcels came to a box nailed to a tree along the main road, which they used to collect weekly. When she checked three days earlier, it was empty. Talk of The End must have frightened the mailman off, as well. Agnes lifted the bin off to swipe the rag underneath, unearthing months of dust. She was thankful for the candle, which kept an allergic reaction to the grime relatively at bay. Her mind wandered back to the note she’d discovered within it, and she stood. 

 

Agnes took the note from the kitchen table to the rocking chair next to the lamp and unfolded it, blank side facing her. The scrap of paper wasn’t large–upon closer inspection of the texture and shape, she reasoned that it was an extra page torn from a novel. She wasn’t discouraged by the size and what it could mean for its contents. Marcus’ handwriting was minuscule and far neater than her own. Agnes paused for a brief moment, before turning the page over. 

 

“Dear Nessy,” it began, and she had to laugh. Marcus hadn’t said her childhood nickname in over fifty years, not since he stopped teasing her with it in high school. She wiped a stray tear from her cheek and continued. 

 

Dear Nessy, 

I slipped this note in yesterday after I noticed the way your nose wrinkled in response to the scent. I’m curious; how long will it take you to go and light it? I suspect at least a month or two, while you whittle down the rest of your stock. 

When you do find it, kindly leave this note somewhere you suspect I 

will neglect it for a similar timeframe. In the pocket of my suit, perhaps? 

Although that seems an obvious place, now. 

Times like these, when you are only across the room–too far to reach out to, but within the same walls as I–I recall how lucky a man I am. 

As always, 

–Marcus 

 

Agnes tried not to hold the paper too tight, tried not to rip its edges, but failed nonetheless. Tiny tears marked the places her hands had been. His passing had been sudden. A stroke took him on a brisk winter’s morning, while she was shopping in town. They had neither a phone nor cell service, and he was lifeless upon her return, crumpled against the very bookshelf she’d just cleaned. 

 

She stood, placing the note in her pocket, and debated on whether or not to extinguish “Campfires” before taking leave of the cottage. Agnes opened the door and decided to leave it burning. The wind had died down a substantial amount, but the grotesque odor rushed back into the cottage and made her gag. She slammed the door shut behind her, and set off down the path leading to town. 

 

Marcus was buried in his childhood hometown, hundreds of miles away. Though his family had moved when he was very young, his great-uncle had been a practicing mortician and cemetery caretaker there. His gift to each niece and nephew upon their birth was a grave plot–morbid in the moment, but invaluable nowadays. With his resting place so distant, Agnes had constructed a memorial of her own, just off the beaten path. 

 

She buried his reading glasses two days after the funeral, alone. It was late February, and the ground was thoroughly frozen, so they were only inches beneath the surface. There was a makeshift cross next to the shed Agnes had intended to stake once the earth warmed. She hadn’t gotten around to it yet, so she took it with her. 

 

As she strolled through the woods, a thick fog started up despite the afternoon hour. The stench disappeared with its appearance, and though it obscured most of the path before her, Agnes welcomed the change. The dim atmosphere was almost peaceful, and having something that Marcus had held–written, even–just days before his death gave her the strength she’d lacked for months. 

 

The memorial was on the upper banks of the creek that passed the cottage as well, about halfway to town. While the creek followed the path quite close along the way, it veered south at this halfway mark. It was right about here, as she returned from her visit to town that brisk winter morning, that she received a horrifying premotion that something was wrong. Agnes found that the frame of the glasses was just visible above the dirt they were buried in, likely a result of snowmelt-driven erosion and curious squirrels. The earth was malleable, now, and she uncovered the rest of the object with her hands. 

 

One of the lenses escaped during its time underground, and Agnes popped it back into place before cleaning both with the hem of her shirt. She had done this for Marcus when he was alive, too. He rarely noticed the massive smudges that covered most of the glass. Agnes used to routinely rinse them in the sink before setting them to dry while he napped with a novel in his hands, snoring lightly due to the angle his rocking chair sat him in. The cleanliness didn’t matter as much now, and she was less thorough than she might have once been. She carved a larger hole this time, almost a foot deep, and set the glasses back down. 

 

Agnes retrieved the note from her pocket, ignoring the agonized scream that sounded from another part of the woods. It was a rabid coyote, she was sure; it was crazed enough to be out with the sun, or tricked by the fog into thinking dusk was rising. She rubbed her thumb back and forth across the lines Marcus had penned for her. “When you do find it, kindly leave this note somewhere you suspect I will neglect it for a similar timeframe,” he had asked. 

 

This was silly. He would never find it here. The memorial and the grave, they were not connected. Many cultures believed that belongings buried with the dead would be there to aid them when they crossed over. Would this count? The cottage was too small to keep this little slip of paper inside of it. It would haunt her, surely, knowing this final piece of Marcus’ memory lurked within a cabinet or was tucked between pages of a novel. Agnes took a deep breath. This was his last request while living, though he wasn’t aware at the time. Rereading the note would make it harder to abandon here, so she folded it up as she found it and dropped it over the glasses. 

 

There was another scream, closer this time. Agnes stood. Her knees left deep scars in the bank. She kicked dirt back over the grave and the indents, before picking up the wooden cross to drive it into the ground with her weight. 

 

Hesitation would make it harder to leave, so she turned her back to the creek’s bank, ignoring the now chorus of woeful voices coming from multiple points around her. The fog thickened, and Agnes remembered that “Campfires” was still burning back in the cottage. Though this burden was laid to rest, there was still much to do, and so she wove through the woods back to the main path. 

 

Perhaps the paperboy had delivered while she was out.