Thursday, April 5, 2012

The Warner House

A stiff wind blew down the Warner House. The house had been an old, shaggy things that swayed with the movements of the day, so no one was all that surpirised that it had fell. The parents had warned their little ones away from playing in the Warner House and mostly the children listened. There was a legend surrounding the house. Murders, the old standby.

The legend was that Mia Warner would lure children into her home and snake their guts from their bellies to make strings for her guitar and she'd sknned the children to make leather for her shoes. Mia was the crazy, old cannibal witch on the top of the hill and not many children dared to venture into her crumbling home. Like most legends, this had a nuggest of truth mixed in with all the lies and fables. There was an old woman named Mia Warner who did live in the Warner house. The Warner house was once a plush estate sprawling for miles and miles, employing hundreds of people to tend the land and serve the Warner family. Tragedy struck the family and continued to strike the family. The father, Louis Warner, had been a wild gambler and died indebted to many people. Much of the land was sold to pay off the father's debt. That hadn't been the end of it. Louis had willed the remainder of the land to his two sons; Eli and Thomas. Neither were very intelligent, but Eli's stupidity was mixed with a temper. Eli shot his brother, dead and hid the body in a deep well. The rotting, festering body ended up poisoning the well sometime afterward, ironically killing Eli. Before Eli died, he had a daughter, Mia. Mia was saved from the poisoning by the fact that Eli had never acknowledged Mia as his biological daughter. Mia's mother was a whore. Although there were many receipts and many witnesses, Eli  passionately denied fathering the child of a whore or ever going to a whore in the first place. Mia had his blue-gray eyes and his curvy black hair. She even had Eli's tempor. The one thing that helped Eli's case was that Mia wasn't stupid like her father.

Mia had ambition. Her and her mother had stopped to watch a man play his guitar and it was then that she decided that she'd own her own guitar and play like the man had. Most children would have made such a mission for themselves and forgot about it before the day was done. Mia hadn't and she had her hands on her very own guitar, paid for with her very own money, before the year was done. She taught herself how to play it and she played it well. People came from far distances to watch Mia play. They cheered and cooed and best of all, they paid.   

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