Trifecta Weekly Challenge: ENIGMA

She didn't want to become an enigma. The old lady shuttered in her house now that she couldn't drive, rarely seen except at twilight when she would pace, through her dirty windows. She could imagine just that, how she looked, shrunken and bent and shadowy until she actually pulled shut the old wood shutters.

She knew the enigma of the aged, before she got this old, having watched in all these years other generations die away on the street. The last of them before herself, had been Mrs. Canister who used to live on the corner, and for years was only seen to let her dog out on a rope. She always wore a faded blue kerchief, and eventually wasn't even seen driving her rickety rusty sedan up to the grocery store. By the time she died, her house was peeling and engulfed by weeds.


It was an early spring, but already her own grass was encroaching on the house. So were the weeds. When she was able, she would have on a whim run outside and ripped them up by the fistfuls to toss them back into the woods. Now she could barely pull up her own socks let alone pull up the most superficially rooted weed.


She would spend the day calling newspaper ads for someone to come and cut her grass. To weed the driveway. And she would open wide her slatted shutters to let in the sun. And hope that once she was gone, her children wouldn't do what Mrs. Canister's had done, sell the house to be bulldozed down to its original earth, once potato fields that she herself could actually remember. She could remember digging a hand firmly into the earth and pulling out a potato and boiling it for dinner.