Mrs. P’s Pearls

Mrs. Pennyweather’s old cracked pearls were yellow. So were her teeth, her fingernails, and the tiles on the floor below the tea-stained sink. So was the satin wedding dress, hanging like a ghost in the spider-haunted closet, its trim once-whiteness sagging into jaundice-colored shapelessness. Even the mice that lived comfortably in the corners of her kitchen had a grey-yellow look about them, as though they’d evolved to match the color of the cheese in the jawless traps.
 
“Every pearl,” Mrs. Pennyweather would tell whoever would listen (they were few), “is a memory.” She’d lift each one delicately, as though recollection might rub off if the touch were incautious. “These two are me and Albert. Bright as buttons we were.” She’d open a tin that had once held shortbread. Inside, a faded photo showed a youthful pair smiling. The pearls at the bride’s throat shone with moony whiteness.
 
“This one,” she’d say, holding it close against her neck as though warming it–“is Albert’s favorite egg custard. He said it made him cosy all through, like slippers in his belly. I’m going to be buried with them, you know, so’s Albert will know it’s me. Anyone wants ‘em they’ll have to take ‘em from my dead hands,” she’d call, as the visitor hurried away with murmured excuses.
 
Mrs. Pennyweather faded gradually—maybe into the yellowed wallpaper, maybe into the fallen leaves in the yard as green turned to ochre. At first, no-one noticed; then one ventured inside and found only the pearls, a newly-white, lustrous circle on the kitchen floor. The string that had once bound them together had gone.
 
The thought roved uneasily among the neighbors: Perhaps the mice had eaten her? Were they plumper? Increasing exponentially? The rodents met the worried glances of the humans straight on, look for look. As though they knew something.

 
 

Wherever and however Mrs. Pennyweather had gone, after a week or two, one thing was clear: she wasn’t coming back. When neighbors tried to gather the pearls, they scattered, ricocheting off pots and shattering teacups. Captured and corralled in the old cookie-tin, they rattled furiously inside it, making dents in the metal that protruded like skeleton fingertips.
 
Lacking a body, the neighbors buried the tin. Remorse made them erect a gravestone. Her name was all they knew about her, but the tiny grey slab had room only for “Mrs. P.”  They bowed their heads briefly in acknowledgement of their own indifference, and left. Six feet down, the rattling of the pearls was like gunfire.
 
Young Will-next-door couldn’t sleep that night. The pearl he’d slipped into his pocket, thinking it would make a good marble to trade, glowed in the dark–a livid knowing eye. The rain on the roof was like the clattering of pearls on tin.
 
At daybreak he ran, knelt beside the gravestone, and took out the pearl with trembling fingers. Raced home again, howling that a withered hand had sprung from the earth and grabbed him. “It would’a pulled me right into the ground if I hadn’t run!” he bawled. No-one wanted to believe him, but the pearls had ceased their desperate rattling.
 
The yellow bruises encircling Will’s wrist stayed until the spring. The day they finally disappeared, a green shoot sprang up beside the gravestone and unfurled a single jonquil, pearly-white and yellow. It stood serene through summer and fall. In winter, its heart was a small golden sun in the snow. No-one remembered planting it.