Member-only story
The Reluctant Bride
A short story of a turn-of-the century girl’s dreams
Sunshine covered the children in the one-room schoolhouse. Nothing escaped the morning light flooding through Mountain Gap School’s paned windows. Sunlight highlighted the crooked part in Mary Lou’s hair and the patch on Tommy’s shirt. Only the scratching of chalk on slates and the snuffles of a child with a cold disturbed the quiet.
Outside, the Carolina Road squeezed the clapboard school up against Hogback Mountain. No longer the haunt of thieves and brigands, the meandering road traced the spine of the mountains and carried traffic all the way from the Potomac River down into the Carolinas.
Red-headed Ellie Harrell glanced up, distracted from her mathematics by the clip-clop of a passing horse and wagon. At eight, her skinny feet didn’t reach the floor, but rather, swung like pendulums. Ellie struggled each morning with the buttons lining the sides of her high-topped shoes. Melissa Everhart shared the oak and iron desk. Melissa, undisturbed by the road racket, huddled over her slate. A sheet of her glossy black hair hid her scrawled numbers. Melissa’s feet hung motionless. She was not a wiggler like Ellie.
Legs pumping the air, Ellie’s eyes flitted about. Pale green as a Luna moth and opaque as milk glass, they peered through the window at the oak’s three remaining red leaves.
