Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-3541151-20141204173145

My grandpa used to tell us a bedtime story every few weeks, a folklore he created. It was called "By and By". It was a tale of a young women living alone who desperately seeks companionship. And while she gets her wish, it's not as pleasant as she hoped.

It's kind of a simple little tale, and I'm guessing Grandpa just wanted to scare us tots with it, so for fun, though not in the month of October, I thought I'd share it here on this site.

It has been recurring in my mind lately, and although I found it amusing to recount Grandpa's creative little story, I just tried to brush it off. But it returned. It popped in my head like constant email from a spam folder. It rang the doorbell of my brain leaving it's images of the macabre of my youth, and I'm ashamed to say it frightened me at one point.

It's stupid to be scared of a made-up kid's story I know, but I was in bed and I live alone. It chilled my blood, and it was as if I were a kid, again. Afraid of all the silly things, taking them to a level of seriousness that most adults are above.

Sorry folks, I know you want a story, and that's what I'm here to deliver. Without further adieu, By and By.

By and By (The Story)

In the olden days, in the woodland of an old country, a Farmer and his wife spent their lives. They had built a house together made of wood from trees they had cut down, and took care and raised many fruits and vegetables in their garden. They knew that a person had to work to own anything, work to stay alive. And they did.

A couple years into their adventure they called life, the wife birthed a beautiful baby girl, who they named Diane. Diane as she grew was taught their wise ways, the hunt of the deer, the labor of gardening. She grew into a wise and responsible member of the family.

One of the things Diane was told and instructed against, was staying out in the vast wilderness after hours. When it got dark, their beautiful light blue and green woods became a deadly, dangerous place. She was forbidden to stay out there when dusk grayed the land.

She could be, working or playing in the distance, or maybe making a friend with an animal that her parents told her she'd hunt when she grew. But when she heard the distant "Return Bells" Mom rang to signal time to come home, she would grudgingly pull away from whatever it was she was doing and meet in for curfew.

She had obeyed, but always questioned her parents curfew rule. She minded and followed all the rest, but she doubted this one. She felt that maybe the woods became more beautiful at night, and her parents simply wanted to keep it all for themselves.

She pictured in her bed as darkness swept into her open window, that magic entered the woods after hours. She pictured impossible plants growing, plants that moved intelligently and might play with her. She saw her parents playing with them. She pictured impossibly delicious fruit, fruit that tasted sweet on a level of otherworldly, made you float like a person in love in the old fairy tale books. She pictured her parents, eating them and laughing at her expense. She grew angry with each passing thought. Her face crumpled with her jealous thoughts. Speaking of the fairy tales, she pictured beanstalks growing, like in "Jack and the Beanstalk". She saw them growing, growing in her own back yard! Growing while she slept in here and missed them. She saw her parents climbing the stalks, finding the Goose who laid the golden eggs without her, cruel laughter emanating down to the forest floor as they climbed down. Enjoying all the things she couldn't do because of the stupid curfew!

Still, Diane never broke that rule as long as she lived with her parents. Not because she bid their warnings, not because she believed them or thought they were important warnings. Not even because she was afraid of punishment from her parents, which she was. They were strict hard working people, after all. What's not to fear?

She respected her wise parents, and she respected their rules, well to their deaths. In her mid-twenties, her father died.

One morning as she ate breakfast at the kitchen table, her mother cooking fresh meat on their sort of-stove for her father, they heard the guttural screams drift through the open kitchen window. It drifted out to them, as if the smell of a cooling pie placed upon the sill.

Reacting with terror and actions, both women awkwardly bolted out the kitchen's screen door, and dashed madly in the direction of the scream. Diane and her mother stopped dead in their tracks. At the end of the path of the side of the house, lying as lifeless as a piece of wood, was Diane's father. Her mind recalled that he looked like a piece of wood he showed her to cut in her mid-teens.

Love and regret welled tears of sorrow into her eyes. She scrambled for him, her mother tried to hold her back to prevent her heartbreak, but she missed, and Diane's heart was already as broken as well as her father's had ceased beating.

Diane knelt clumsily beside the husk that was once her dad. Disbelief inher heart, and the need to revive her father in her intentions. She grabbed and half cradled his right shoulder, as if he were her child. She looked down frantically at him, her hair falling over her face, wet with her nervous sweating.

"Dad, no!" She croaked helplessly. "Please don't do this. Please come back!" She screamed in a tea chocked voice. She kept at it, though her mother tried to pull away. She couldn't. Her mother didn't exist, the world around them didn't exist. Diane and her father entered a shadow world, where it was up to her to wake him up. She tried desperately, getting meaner and louder. Expecting as though her father was only sleeping there in the garden.

When her mother put her hand in front of her father's face, and no breeze met it, she snapped back to reality. She saw her father for what he had become. And she reentered the shadow world, this time without him. It was the acceptance she dealt with this time. And she cried there.

She swung in disbelief on the backyard swing her father had made and hung on the big slopping dead tree. She remembered asking him if it would hold, fearing the tree would collapse from it. He assured her it was very strong and even better for swings because of the tilting branch.She swung there in a kind of shocked silence, recalling past instances of her father and breaking into cries now and again.

When the sky got a little darker, and swirls of purple entered the endless blue patch, she guessed that her mother wouldn't mind her staying out passed curfew on this occasion. Not that she wanted to stay out after hours anymore, she just expected it this time. It's not like stupid rules mattered anymore.

When the return bells rang on schedule, she went into anger, anger that momentarily delivered her from her grieving. Surely her father's death was important enough to outweigh the system of one stupid rule! But the bells rang anyway, loud and orderly. She felt disgusted. As if her mother was disrespecting her father's death, acting as if nothing at all happened today.

Diane walked with anger halfway there, ready to chew her Mom's head off like a dragon, but changed her person on the other half. She respected her Mom, and her way of life far too much, besides, she figured she was all she had left, now.

When she turned 28, Diane had nothing left. 