Pick a Prompt

3) While cleaning out your attic, you discover an old wedding dress and a VERY old photo of a happy man and woman, the woman in that same dress. As you touch the photo, you get a flash of what happened the day it was taken. Write that scene...


We'd lived here for more than ten years yet this was the first time I'd ever had the courage to go beyond that fourth step into the attic. The pull-down stairs were creaky and shifted when you looked at them, but I braved the contraption and found my way into a dusty old attic filled with remnants of the past. An old dress maker's mannequin almost sent me running back down the stairs but I reined in my wits and set about the task that had haunted me since we bought the home; cleaning the attic.

Musty old boxes were stacked in a circle around the room in piles about chest high. In the center of the haphazard circle was an old trunk with brass buckles and hinges. That caught my attention. It seemed almost untouched by time unlike the other elements of the attic. The mid morning sun gleamed a warm patch of light perfectly through two stacks of boxes and onto the top of the warm leather covered wood.

I went to it, suddenly feeling like it was the most important piece of the house's history. There were faded spots on the backside but the rest was almost untouched. I ran my palm over the top and held my breath as my fingertips found warm spots mingling with cold spots. What did I expect to find? A mummified body? Old bones that would turn to dust if disturbed? A spirit who didn't want to be found?

I was scaring myself and Carter had warned me about getting spooked. That's what kept the attic untouched for the last ten years. Brushing aside my fears, I flipped the latches and turned the clasp lock in the middle. The trunk opened just a smidge, a hodge podge of floral scents wafting up around me as I calmed my thudding heart. At least it wasn't the smell of death. No bones or dead bodies or boogeymen.

Steadying my nerves, I barely touched the lid and watched it squeek open like what I imagined the strained lifting of a draw bridge would have sounded like. I blinked at the contents, forcing myself to study the delicate items yellowed with time. There was a bouquet of flowers wrapped in delicate lace around the stems. Stalks of cherry blossom with iris and buttercup. But the silken petals of flowers had long disappeared and were instead replaced by the rough texture of stone.

Surely it wasn't stone. The flowers had color, although dried and wilted and no longer alive. It was a trick of the mind. I wanted to reach in and touch but I was afraid; afraid of feeling stone where ancient petals should have turned to dust, but I couldn't stop myself. The flowers were cold and heavy as if they'd been petrified. A cold breath whispered in the dusty motes of air. That was my breath. In the middle of a Texas August. A chill climbed my back but I swore I wouldn't scare myself into putting this off any longer.

I dropped the bouquet into the trunk but the flowers did not disintegrate into dust as it should have. It was rock hard, tangible, untouched. The white lace next to it seemed to beckon me. I plucked it from the trunk, using a delicate touch. The dress had yellowed with time, the long sleeves barely held to the shoulders with its old threads. The dress swept the floor as I held it up. At the waistband were colorful feathers and beads carefully sewn onto the dress so that they would sway with any movement. It seemed an odd combination, like a fusion of two styles that didn't belong together.

I pressed the dress against me, trying to imagine the story behind it. Lost in music that wasn't playing, I swirled around the circle of boxes and past. That's when I saw the colorless sketch float from the cuff of the dress and fall noiselessly to the ground just within the circle. Curious, I laid the dress back in the trunk and reached for the picture.

The image was blurry, with blacks and grays and whites all blending into silhouettes. I focused on the picture, holding it up against the light hoping to see something. Her face was beautiful. She had high, pronounced cheek bones and light hair that looked as fine as silk, piled high on her head with feather and beading accessories. She looked kind, regal, wealthy. He was handsome too, skin dark even in the old black and white pencil drawing. His hair was black as ebony and pulled back from his prominent cheekbones and dark eyes. He wore a feather headband with a single feather dangling near his ear. The suit he wore looked expensive for the time but so out of place on a man like him.

A cold breeze ruffled through the airless attic stirring the dust motes around me, and suddenly my world began to dissolve. The dusty sun of the past was overhead, trees and brush growing up around me. In the distance I saw this house, only it wasn't as I knew it, yet somehow I felt this was my home. The clapboard house looked sturdy but smoldering in the summer heat. I saw the man and woman from the photo.

His skin was bronzed, his pride so palpable in the air that I almost couldn't look at him even from thirty yards away. He wore the suit with no shoes and his head band. She wore the dress; her mother's wedding dress bedecked with jewels and feathers; jewels from his mother. They were beautiful together, their love so intense that it almost rippled in the heat of summer. She reached for his hand and laughed as he tugged at the tie.

"If we are to make this union work, we have to accept these parts of each other," she'd said to him, a happy smile on her lips. I almost expected him to sigh or roll his eyes, but he stood tall, shoulders squared and kissed her back with such pure adoration and love that it made me ache to remember when had I ever been loved like that.

"You know your father will send his ranch hands here when he knows you've married a savage," he said the last word with such venom.

"My father knows that I love you. He might disown me, but he'd never send someone to harm you," she chuckled, but I sensed the trepidation in her words. She wanted to believe he wouldn't but she wasn't as sure as she pretended.

"The blue blood daughter of a man like him marries a half breed savage and you think there won't be trouble to contend with? We will take our precautions, but if I must die tonight, there is no greater honor than for your love," he said, voice steely and sultry at the same time.

Then in a flash it was night, the sun traveling across the sky in mere seconds, stars blinking to life, clouds skipping across the open universe until it stood still in the dark. A single light glowed within, no doubt that in the fireplace. In the distance I heard the galloping hoofbeats of horses. I had no idea what hoofbeats really sounded like in person, but I just knew. And I knew it was more than a handful.

My heart palpated in my chest. I saw the groom come to porch, wearing slacks without boots or a shirt. Still integrating their worlds. My heart ached for him; for them. Because as the rest of the illusion began to swirl away, I knew what happened. Flashes of the night ripped through my mind as the sky swirled away and the night turned to the dusty old attic and the chill of the knowledge of that night crept through my mind.

He'd killed them. He'd had his own daughter killed. He'd let those men kill them, strip them down to nothing but their underthings, and set the house on fire. When the last of the smoldering ashes cooled in the afternoon sun that day, he'd set the bouquet and dress and sketch in the trunk and left the trunk in the ashes.