While He Sleeps

No one ever talks about Evelyn Pierce. She was an older widowed woman. No one really new her past. All anyone ever new was certain was that this old wrinkled woman’s husband, a man by the name of Nathaniel Patton, had died years ago, far before I was born.

Nathaniel had returned from harvesting their annual wheat crop. Evelyn had been baking a vanilla cake for a church gathering and she stepped out to tend to her flower bed. She left the rusted gas oven on too long, and it leaked. The gas swelled, filling the house, and one little spark flicker for a moment from that old oven... The whole house was enveloped with fire, tongues of fire licking the ceiling, while Nathaniel slept silently in his cedar rocking chair.

37 years later, no one has seen Evelyn. The rumors galavant about. “She did it on purpose!”

”I saw her running away as soon as she knew he was dead!”“She died in the fire too!”

I believe the last one. And you know why? Because I’ve seen her. Not in the daytime. Just at night. In my dreams. It’s dark. Then it bursts into a beautiful and yet horrible crimson-orange as wisps of fire begin to caress my skin as the house crumbles to ashes around me. I am Nathaniel in his rocking chair. Asleep as the world around me burns. I’m asleep but I still see the flames, smell the smoke, feel my flesh shrivel from the heat...

and I see something else...

and old woman...

cackling...

as she she tends to her lilies, tulips, and blood red roses...

And I just now saw the story prompts... oops