In the neighbourhood of Cedar Hills, the
people were kind and very friendly. The houses, built many years ago by people
wanting to have their personal paradises not too far from everything good in
the city, were established in a very perfect order, each different from the
next but still seeming like a family. Not one house seemed out of touch, except
for the one at then end of Maple road, just by the tall trees that belonged to
the park. That house was the odd one out.
People
were extremely nice. They would have all these parties and gatherings, to eat
food or watch a movie. Sometimes they did this inside of their houses and other
times they would occupy the street and do a nice night outside or something
like that. The children were all specially close, having a group that headed
every morning to school together, in bicycles. However, in that one ugly house,
there were no children. No one ever heard much out of it, least of all a laugh.
Once
a month, every single person in the neighbourhood, made out of about two
hundred people, got reunited in another of their gatherings in order to talk
about the most pressing things involving their community. If one of the
lampposts of the street failed, it was there they decided how to proceed with
the local council. Of course, the woman that lived in the run down house was
never in those meetings. Actually, many people had never ever seen her face
while others had already forgotten.
But the meetings were mostly about people
talking to others and sharing their love for each other by singing some music,
showing their talents and even sharing personal news that wouldn’t normally be
in public record. They loved their community and trusted everyone in it. They
were close, so close in fact that when something bad happened, everyone was
there for the person in need. Again, except the old lady from Maple street, who
people had already learned to forget about.
Bad things rarely happened in the
neighbourhood. In the recent years, the most awful thing to happen was when a
storm ravaged through the city and many trees fell because of the potency of
the wind. Many houses had minor damages but the neighbours helped in a very
short time to have it all looked as it had always looked: perfect. However, a
large tree destroyed the garage area of the house no one ever talked about. It
was the first time in years they ever talked about it, as if it had become real
only because of the wood scattered all over the place.
Reparations on that house were done only
several weeks after the storm had passed. The people, concerned by how their
neighbourhood would look which such a horrible stain on it, decided to write
letters and then sliding them under the door. No one ever tried to talk in
person to the woman that lived inside. They just wrote letter after letter
until they got tired of it. And when they did, they decided to forget the house
was there, again. They just didn’t want to know anything about it.
Children, however, were not as “kind” as their
parents. They couldn’t block out the house so easily, particularly because it
stood by the entrance to the forest, a place where they liked to play and
explore. The fact that they had to pass by the house every time they wanted to
enter the forest, made it impossible to just forget about its existence. They
couldn’t do what their parents do and often even stopped in front of the house
and talked quite loudly in front of it, about the person living in there.
Kids are mean. They used awful words to
describe the woman, the house and everything they could come up with about the
two of them. They insisted the old lady inside was probably dead. And even if
she wasn’t, she was clearly a witch or some kind of sorceress. They also all
agreed that the house was haunted, probably because of the woman’s tendency to
kill every single man that became her husband. She was kind of like a black
widow but in a human form and even deadlier than any animal.
None of them could know for sure whom she was
or why she didn’t seem to mind about the state of her house. The children often
asked their parents about it but they never really received answers. Parents
liked to pretend the one thing that made their neighbourhood out of the norm
was just not real, not even there. One day, the people from the city council
decided to remove the tree that had destroyed the garage. Weeks later, the
garage was repaired, looking as if nothing had happened.
Of course, children attributed this to the
woman’s powers. They could have realized that the materials used in the repairs
were not very good or that it was obvious the garage could collapse again by
being hit hard by a gust of wind. But the fact that there was such mystery
around the house, made it clear that they preferred to answer all questions
about it from a supernatural point of view. But when kids grew older, they
forgot about those thoughts and the words they used to mock the woman and the
house, and they became just like their parents.
But no matter what the neighbours thought,
including their children, the woman inside still lived and had no plans to go
anywhere else. She was called Sara and she had lived in the house more than any
other person in the neighbourhood. The reason her house seemed like the odd one
out was that it had stood there long before plans to build other houses and
streets had been laid out. Her home was ultimately included in the plans, in an
effort to have a certain harmony.
Of course, that wasn’t what happened at the
end because everyone disliked her house even more than they disliked her. She
remembered clearly that her last day outside was when the first families
decided to move into the other houses. You see, there was a reason why Sara
lived so far from other people and it was that, her father had built her a home
because of a psychological condition she had, where she couldn’t stand too many
noises or constant contact with other people.
She didn’t interact with her neighbours, not
because she thought she was better or because she hated them, it was because
she naturally feared them. She felt it every time she saw one of them out the
window. She hated when they spoke loudly in her front lawn or when they held
parties on that street. She would close doors and windows in her bedroom and
then sleep inside her bathtub, where another door would protect her from the
people outside and their words and hands.
Sara
had been raped when she was just a teenager and her father had always felt
responsible for what had happened. He felt he could have done so much more to
save her, to put her away from danger. But when it happened, he decided he
would do what he thought was best for her. As she became more and more
aggressive to other people after her recovery, he decided to build on a land he
had acquired long ago and that was how the house came to be, made only for her.
He had been dead for many years and she wasn’t
going to last much longer. Although still agile and sharp, she was an older
woman that depended on family she had never seen to deliver her food at night,
through her backyard. She only ate things she could stock for a long time.
Sara never felt she needed other people to
survive. She had learned to think those boxes of food just appeared there, out
of the blue. It was better that way. Inside of the house, it was her own worlds
with her own rules and that’s how she lived, in almost exile.
