A Haunted House at the End of the World | Autumn Bettinger
Is this the end of the world?
“It may be, old girl. Are you ready?”
Marigold slid a wrinkled hand up the faded post of her house. The ghosts were heavy with the coming storm—anxiety manifesting in creaky floorboards and swinging tapestries. Marigold leaned over the porch railing as the first plump drops of the apocalypse battered her front garden. The other seaside towns along the bluffs began to wink out, obscured by the storm that ingested the world with a swirling, single-minded intensity.
The satellite images had been all over the media before the internet went dark—a storm cell so large it covered half the planet. Earth’s own great red spot, only the color of bruised and necrotic skin: mottled purple veined with oily black. Sickly. Contagious.
KA-CHUNK. The backup generator kicked in.
Marigold closed her eyes as the storm consumed, bloating on snapped branches and tsunami waves.
I will protect you.
“No need.”
The house shuddered. Marigold was nudged back inside by rolling porch boards that nipped along her fuzzy slippers. The door snapped shut behind her, and the locks chunked home.
“I’m happy to be here with you, at the end,” Marigold said as she shuffled towards the kitchen. The wind exploded. Rain drowned gutters and sloshed beneath the foundation.
Is it, though? The end?
“I don’t think we’re getting out of this one.”
Marigold settled herself in the breakfast nook. A cup of tea waited on the table. It smelled of garden lavender and lemon balm. The house must have hidden a bundle of those dried herbs from last harvest. Marigold’s favorite tea. The bond she shared with the house lay sticky with memories and murmured adorations. She mourned its destruction much more than the passing of her own unremarkable life.
We got out of that thing with Ron.
“Murdering my asshole husband was decidedly less complicated than surviving an extinction event.”
But you are resourceful and clever. You fed me so many.
“Killing men is easy. I’m just sorry you had to keep their weak souls inside you.”
Once they were a part of me, they loved you, like I do.
Hail whipped through shingles, softball-sized chunks of ice splintering rafters and shattering siding. Marigold sipped her tea as the house crowded around her with every last ounce of structural support. It coddled Marigold, collapsing into just one, tight room. It crumpled offices and bathrooms, slapped hallways against kitchen walls to reinforce this last bastion of safety. The storm sucked up the windows as the exterior shredded.
The kitchen walls were so close, bent so deeply that Marigold could brush the wallpaper with her pale fingers. She smiled, love radiating between them as the roof buckled and plaster rained down, splashing into her tea and dusting Marigold like sugar. The room disintegrated.
“Buying a haunted house was the best thing I ever did,” Marigold whispered as the wind ripped them away.
About the Author:
Autumn Bettinger is a short-form fiction writer and full-time mother of two living in Portland, Oregon. She was the 2024 Fishtrap fellow, has won the Tadpole Press 100-Word Writing Contest, The Not Quite Write Flash Fiction Prize and the Silver Scribes Prize. All of Autumn’s published works can be found at autumnbettinger.com