What Passes Down

Short Uncanny Fiction for Valentine's Day

Greetings, Talebones Readers…

Happy belated Valentine’s Day! I had hoped to get this one ready in time for the day itself, but it needed a little more cooking time in the drafting stage. But I’m glad it did, and happy with the result!

My goal for this one was to tell an uncanny little love story, but with a Talebones flavor. I won’t say too much more—better to let the story speak for itself, as usual.

I hope you enjoy!

If you like this story, and you want to see more like it, please let me know with a like, comment, share, or restack!

And for more fiction fun of various shapes and sizes, subscribe for free!

---

Photo by Laura Fuhrman on Unsplash

The nursing home hallway yawned ahead of me like the too-bright aisle of an unadorned church, lined with its stooped congregants and hallowed doorways; I tried to smile at each one as I passed them, looking for the right room number.

Attempts had been made at home-like touches: potted plants, framed artwork, soft swing tunes playing from the speakers overhead. Somewhere, a TV was playing a game show in an unseen meeting room. There was a gentle hum of conversation and activity, punctuated every so often by someone’s loud, startling laughter in a distant corridor.

At room number A12, I stopped. The nameplate beside the door said HAROLD HAYES. I knocked.

“Come in,” said a deep voice from inside. I entered politely.

The last time I visited a nursing home I had been a child, giving out Christmas cookies and singing carols, and my memories were hazy. When I opened the door I expected a hospital room, beeping machines, a bed that rose and lowered with the push of a button, but instead what I found looked more like a clean room in a mid-sized hotel. There were framed photos scattered on the surfaces, tidy piles of bachelor clutter, and scuffmarks in the no-pile carpet, mapping the old man’s movements: bed, chair, bathroom.

The old man himself, Harold, was sitting in his chair facing the TV. He turned to look at me as I entered, wearing his blue bathrobe over a clean T-shirt and striped pajama pants.

I tried to see an echo of my grandmother in his face, but failed to.

“You’re Julia,” said the old man, muting the volume on the TV.

I nodded. “That’s me. It’s nice to finally meet you, Harold.”

He grunted. “Make yourself comfortable. Want coffee? Tea? Orange juice?”

“Oh, no thank you. I won’t take up too much of your time.” I pulled a chair from the corner over to sit near him, but at a respectful distance. We were family, but not kin.

“Remind me,” he said, “you’re Flossie’s…not daughter, too young for that. Granddaughter, then.”

I nodded. “Yes, Flossie is—was—my grandma.”

He paused, thoughtful, eyes on the silent photoplay on the TV. “I wanted to make the funeral. Thanks to my heart problems I’m not allowed to fly anymore. Did you go? Was it alright?”

“It was lovely,” I said, and quickly changed the subject. I didn’t want to lose his focus on regrets; the siblings hadn’t been on speaking terms for years, and no one had been willing to fess up to that story. “On the phone, I told you I wanted your help identifying some people in a family photo. Are you still up for that?”

He shrugged. “I can take a look. Your folks didn’t know who they were?”

They didn’t. I had gone over for dinner one night and brought the photo with me—low light, dog barking in the backyard, lasagna in the oven, the stale smells of childhood. My mom and dad sat at the wide and deep-scored dinner table they’ve had since the eighties, slipping on their reading glasses to study the photo as I slid it over to them. When they eventually handed it back, shrugging, my mom had said, “That’s the thing with old photos, isn’t it? You just never know.”

“Mom had no idea,” I said to Harold, reaching into my purse to draw out the photo, keeping it facedown so I could avoid its gaze. “I inherited some stuff from Flossie’s house, and this photo was in the box with the rest. It’s the one I can’t quite figure out. I’ve asked around, and no one else seems to know.”

Harold held out his hand, like asking me to dance. I gave him the photo.

He studied it for longer than I thought he would, soaking up the details. His eyes were inscrutable.

“This was in Flossie’s stuff,” he said, finally. Not really a question. “Yeah, she always did like to hold on to stuff like this.”

He turned the photo over, and the twin gaze of the couple on the front now bore into me.

It was a posed couple’s portrait in the brassy sepia of the early 1900s. Studio quality; they had saved up for this. The woman sat in a chair with the man standing just slightly behind her, his hand resting casually on the chairback. Both were dressed in what I assumed was their Sunday best for the portrait, all high necklines and buttons. Understated, but formal.

At first glance, it was just a normal antique. But there was something about the details. Their facial expressions. She was beautiful and odd and radiant with love, and he was handsome and wry, and his fingertips were tangled subtly in her hair. It was a too-human photo for the time period, somehow. Too open, too sensual, too easy to read the expressions on their faces.

It fascinated me.

Harold read out loud what was written on the back, in someone’s looping script: “Mary and husband, 1905.”

“Mary, yeah. Mom thought maybe she had heard someone talk about a Mary, but she wasn’t sure.”

Harold turned the photo back over in his liver-spotted hands, tapped it gently against the fingertips of his other hand, and then gave it back to me.

“We had an aunt called Mary,” he said. “She was our dad’s older sister.”

The skin on the back of my neck tightened at the certainty in his voice. “Wait, really? That’s…that’s amazing. Where did she live?”

“Out along the coast somewhere.”

“Do you know her husband’s name? The guy in the photo?”

Harold shrugged. He had picked up the remote and was fidgeting with it, yearning to turn the volume back up. “Couldn’t say. We didn’t talk about it.”

“Didn’t talk about what?”

“Mary and her husband,” he said. “It wasn’t discussed.”

Just like that, the curtain closed again, and I felt the familiar exhaustion wash over me, living in a family that didn’t discuss things. There were no stories, no rumors, no funny little inside jokes. Harold and his own sister hadn’t spoken for years, and no one talked about it. Strangers appeared in family photos, and no one talked about it.

Either we were a family of deep secrets, or no one cared enough to remember the little things and hand them down to those who cared.

Harold added, “Families are funny that way,” before he started to shift in his chair, like he was getting ready to walk me out. “If that’s all you wanted, it’s getting close to meal time for me—”

“Wait,” I said, “uh…is there anything else you can tell me? Anything at all?”

Harold shook his head. “Like I said, it wasn’t discussed, and I never met her. I’m sorry.”

“But you had to hear something,” I said, hating the wheedling insistence in my own voice. “Rumors, gossip…”

His face darkened. “I’d be careful with that kind of thing. These are real people we’re talking about, here. Real lives, not a magazine.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” I looked down at the photo. The man and the woman gazed back up at me. “I’m just trying to understand. It feels like torture, sometimes, not knowing things about my own family. You and Flossie didn’t talk, but no one tells me why or what happened—”

He bristled. “Nothing happened. We just lost touch. It’s normal.”

“Fine, but at least that’s an answer. That’s all I’m after, here. Answers. Even if they’re boring or silly or dumb.”

I held the photo, and it seemed to draw away from me. “I just want to understand.”

Harold fiddled with the remote for a moment or two longer before he seemed to make his mind up. He clicked the TV off completely, then settled back in his chair.

“I only know one story about Mary,” he said. “And it’s such obvious horse-shit that it feels unfair to tell it to you. That’s the trouble with old stories. They get passed along like eye color or hair color and no one remembers who started it or why. But you’re asking, right?”

I nodded. “Yes, I’m asking.”

He steepled his fingers, drew a breath, and began, “Mary lived on the coast, as I said. Some little windswept place up in the northwest, where she gathered shellfish to sell. She was a little…they used to say ‘touched’ in those days, but they probably don’t say that anymore.”

He looked over at me, like an appeal for arbitration on the word choice. I shrugged.

“She was odd, I guess,” he continued. “Lived on the outskirts of town in her own little shack house. Midwife, maybe? I don’t remember if that’s true. That’s not important.

“There was a big storm one night, and a shipwreck. Horrible. Awful. Bodies washing ashore, survivors screaming on the beach, wreckage filling the little bay there. The townspeople did what they could, carrying the survivors up to the meeting hall. Triage, you know. There was no hospital to speak of for miles and miles, so folk stepped up and invited the wounded into their homes to be tended. That’s how they did it in those days.

“Mary heard the screaming and she came running. The meeting hall was all chaos, but there was one survivor in the corner—half-drowned, pale and shivering—and no one else was paying any attention to him, so she took him home, back to her place, and she took care of him. Nursed him very well. As he grew stronger over a week or so, they fell in love with each other. So deep that they thought maybe they should get married.”

I could feel my eyebrows rise. “Wow,” I said.

Harold smiled, a fleeting expression, but it turned his face sort of childlike; I could see an echo of the teen boy he had been, once. “When you know you know, I guess.”

“Sounds like it,” I replied. “So that’s how they met? Mary and her husband?”

“That’s how the story goes,” he said.

“Doesn’t sound like horse-shit to me. Sounds pretty believable, especially for those days.”

Harold’s boyish expression vanished. “Hold your applause. That’s not the end of the story.

“One morning, Mary was out gathering shellfish along the beach, taking a turn she didn’t normally take into a little cove she didn’t normally visit. In there, she stumbled across a corpse lying on the rocks. And even though it had clearly been there for a week or so, she recognized it: it was the corpse of the man she had nursed back to health, the one she had fallen in love with and wanted to marry. But that was impossible, see, because she had just left her lover sleeping peacefully in the shack house.”

Harold stopped and looked at me, meaningfully. “You see what I mean?”

Suddenly, the corners of the tidy room around us seemed to crawl. My mind raced to catch up. “…you’re saying that the man she saved wasn’t alive?”

“So goes the story. He died the night of the shipwreck, out in the cove. She fell for a ghost.”

“But…wait…”

I stopped. I started, let out a surprised laugh, then stopped again.

“That…can’t be real,” I finally managed to say.

“I told you that. Horse shit.”

“What happened after she found the corpse?”

“She didn’t seem to mind,” Harold said, gesturing with his hand at the photo in my lap. “She married him, didn’t she.”

I looked down at the photo in my hand. Mary and husband, 1905.

Goosebumps rose along my arms.

“This has to be a different guy,” I said.

Harold shrugged. “Never heard any other stories about Mary, let alone about her marrying anyone else. But that’s the trouble with these things. You just never know. It’s like a long game of Telephone. A pile of pebbles bouncing down a hill. Some of the details skew off, get lost along the way. Who knows.”

Mary seemed to stare up at me from the photo, daring me with her eyes. Her husband’s fingertips, just a small detail in the photo, brushed the ends of her hair. Too alive. But was there an otherworldly transparency to his shape? Was that what I had sensed about the photo, an uncanny wrongness about the way the man stood, the way his eyes seemed to see beyond the boxy camera, the portrait studio, the cobbled city streets of a new century, the world we know? A cheating of death, despite everything.

Is that what I had sensed, and recognized?

Mary stared at me, unblinking.

Does it matter? she seemed to say. Does it matter?

In my bewildered silence, Harold had turned the TV back on, volume back up, as if he hoped the mundane sound might cleanse him from the act of recounting a family scandal to someone he considered a stranger.

I stood up and tucked the photo back into my purse.

“You’re a good storyteller, Harold,” I said, finally. “And I’m grateful. It was really nice to finally meet you.”

He looked up at me as I stood to go, and his lip twitched with something like emotion, but he only said, “Drive safe.”

*******

I spent the three-hour drive home in silence, contemplating all I had been told, wondering how many other pebbles had rolled down the hill of the last decades, centuries…skewed off, and gotten lost forever.

Heritable traits, heritable stories, these things that pass down.

I thought about Mary, wandering the coastline beaches with her basket full of shellfish, the gray sea throbbing at her side, the hidden cove cold with death, and finding the corpse of the man she had believed to be alive.

Did she cry? Did she scream? Did her heart pound with terror?

Or did she only ponder the absurdity of it, the gentle humor of realizing that your lover isn’t what you thought…but loving them anyway. Choosing them anyway.

In my mind’s eye, I could see her picking her way back up that beach, back to the little house where he slept unaware of her discovery, and lying down beside him, and not caring even a little bit.

I could see it in that photo: defiance in the face of the impossible.

Does it matter? Does it really matter?

When it’s love, does it truly matter?

I pulled into our driveway in the dark, the golden glow of the living room lights turning the early spring darkness bright with promise. Inside, the old house—dear old haunted thing!—was rich with the smell of something savory. Pot roast, probably; it was a favorite. I called out a hello and sank into the couch. I pulled the photo from my purse, holding it to my chest, closing my eyes against the fading adrenaline from such a long drive, the heavy-limbed fatigue of a long day.

From the kitchen, I heard Charles call, “How did it go?”

“I found him,” I replied. “Harold.”

Charles appeared in the doorway with a glass of wine, and my heart leapt. It always did, when I saw him, even now. Even after ten years together.

Even after everything.

“What did he say?” he asked, handing me the glass and leaning against the couch.

“It took a little convincing, but he finally told me their story,” I replied. “It was pretty wild.”

Charles’ eyes widened with humor, ever so slightly. Wry and handsome.

“Wilder than ours?” he asked.

I looked up at him. He stood like Mary’s husband, hand resting on the back of the couch. The same look of death, cheated. That look that held me rapt, always. His fingertips tangled gently in my hair.

It doesn’t matter. Not even a little bit.

“No,” I replied, reaching out for his cold hand. “No wilder than ours.”

Want more short Talebones fiction? Try this:

---

✨Talebones runs on YOUR support! ✨

• My Tip-Jar! - Enjoyed this story? Show your appreciation with a one-time tip!

• Work With Me! - Looking for an editor, beta reader, proofreader, or copywriter? Look no further! Check out my Work With Me page for rates and services.

• Shop My Books! - Explore my self-published works, both ebook and paperback, available from various retailers!

• Visit the Gift Shop! - Grab a piece of Talebones swag for your very own! Mugs, tees, hats, sweatshirts, and more, updated seasonally!