Mable's Mirror - An Avery Story

The sun burning Avery with rampageous fury once shone upon the glabrous pate of Aristotle. Diogenes once asked the all-conquering Alexander to step aside lest he block the former’s only dalliance with sybaritic delight. In Aristotle’s case, perhaps the sun birthed his illuminating axiom, ‘Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom’. Had Aristotle weathered Avery’s orb, he might have taken a rather different view.

As the sun orbited our planet, millennia passed. New truths escaped from the penumbra cast by befouled meliorism. H.P. Lovecraft, not famed for his love of high-UV sunblock, mulled upon his dank thoughts from within the impenetrable bleakness of the shadows within his gothic hinterland. In the absence of the sun, he concluded, “The oldest and the strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear, is fear of the unknown.”

In Avery, no one knew anything about themselves beyond the imperative to survive, to screw others before they screwed you. Personal reflection and self-analysis were express tickets to oblivion. Before an epiphany had struck, the bullet or the blade would surely have claimed dibs on all life’s deckchairs. No chance of wisdom when you are sunbathing six feet under.

Let’s just say that if fear were a currency, Avery had sufficient collateral to safeguard any loan. What its denizens really feared were themselves. The scabrous surface of their personalities thinly veiling the unexamined evil within. In the same way they did not perform an autopsy on the mangled carcass of rotting roadkill, Avery’s souls knew better than to look within. Best let the horror remain unknown…let it seep out of your pores like filth-stained sweat at noon.

Mable Densone rocked to and fro, the chair nearly as old as the fragile bones they supported. Mable enjoyed the vulture-like squawk the runners voiced, a rhythmic remedy for her unvoiced loneliness. Images of Jed scuttered across the cinema screen of her failing memory, each flickering like a monochrome scene disinterred from the recalcitrant clutches of her suppressed past. Her skeletal frame echoing each inhalation and exhalation of breath. To an untrained eye, Mable’s ghoulish body would have been considered more dead than alive. Her rasping, shallow breaths death throes rather than the fragile evidence of a pertinacious will to exist.

She and Jed had known. When they lit the fire in old Barnum’s barn they had known. Not motiveless malignance, something far more explicable. Barnum had threatened to kick them out of the bar business and install his youngest son Clinton as the new bar keep. Barnum owned the bar and the building housing it.

Clinton was a loser, his intellect one notch down from a barn rat and far less cunning. His father reasoned better to have Clinton behind a bar, than left to find his own way. Servicing drunks would keep him occupied and out of Clinton’s receding hair. Two good reasons to turf Mable and Jed out; they’d be fine…perpetually hungry and bitter, but fine.

Mable came up with the plan, Jed followed along like tumbleweed blown along by the force of her will. She’d known the fire would likely destroy not just the barn, but the dilapidated outbuildings connecting it to Clinton’s place. It had to look like an accident with no intended victim. They had doused Clinton’s veranda in gas, pouring what was left from the jerry can under the front door…silently.

The flames had licked dry timber with lusty, combustive lips before erupting into a burgeoning conflagration that gave Clinton no chance of escape. As the tendrils of the fire wrapped themselves around the buildings, the void within Mable swallowed the heat like a black hole consuming a galaxy.

Decades later, Jed’s conscience was still being scalded by the fire’s white embers. By Avery’s standards, he had been, if not a good man, at least one who intuited regret for his more monstrous actions. Mable had no such qualms. She knew better than to rake those embers, preferring the gelid detachment of pragmatism over the heat of guilt.

When Jed had let a few loose words find the ears of Clarke, Mable had encouraged Jed to be careful. Pouring the boiling kettle over his legs as he slept that night had been her way of reminding him not to play with fire. The idea had crawled into her mind from within the fetid cave of her malevolent soul. She did not question it. She did not understand its siren-like call, or want to see the creatures who sang to her. Best not to look into that abyss, there might be things down there even she would fear.

Jed’s accident had cauterised Clarke’s curiosity, for with no facts to go on the fire of his suspicions, he’d let that hearth go cold. Mable kept a poker close by, but never used it, so she and Jed were in the clear. Burying Jed three summers ago had saddened Mable. She did not miss the man, she missed sharing her secrets.

Three years later, Mable had sold her rights to the bar business and bought a shack in which to die. She haunted the dwelling as though a timber mausoleum, knowing what she was…a living corpse. As she rocked herself to sleep, the warm desert air deprived of the furnace heating it, became as cold as the icy fingers of death. Mable had known herself alright, and she’d always feared what she did not know …the true depths of her sinning soul. That fear had forbidden introspection.

She too would deliquesce in Avery’s sordid soil, replenishing it with knowing ignorance. In Avery, it’s never wise to look into the abyss…that was a mirror no more useful than a good conscience, or guilt-saturated regret. Lovecraft might have liked Mable, perhaps even smiled at the Latin joke her name played. As for Aristotle, he’d have shunned her iniquitous virtues like Diogenes avoiding an unwanted shadow. As for the sun, well it never got personal and would never care.