We Have Always Lived in the Castle

by Shirley Jackson

I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the deathcup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

The last time I glanced at the library books on the kitchen shelf they were more than five months overdue, and I wondered whether I would have chosen differently if I had known that these were the last books, the ones which would stand forever on our kitchen shelf.

Therefore it was not pride that took me into the village twice a week, or even stubbornness, but only the simple need for books and food.

In this village the men stayed young and did the gossiping and the women aged with grey evil weariness and stood silently waiting for the men to get up and come home.

we did not accept mail, and we did not have a telephone; both had become unbearable six years before—but

I always thought about rot when I came toward the row of stores; I thought about burning black painful rot that ate away from inside, hurting dreadfully. I wished it on the village.

I always stood perfectly straight and stiff when the children came close, because I was afraid of them. I was afraid that they might touch me and the mothers would come at me like a flock of taloned hawks; that was always the picture I had in my mind—birds descending, striking, gashing with razor claws.

I could make them run like rabbits, I thought, if I said to them what I really wanted to,

My niece, after all, was acquitted of murder.

“It could be said that there is danger everywhere,”

“Taste, madam? Have you ever tasted arsenic?

“fate intervened. Some of us, that day, she led inexorably through the gates of death. Some of us, innocent and unsuspecting, took, unwillingly, that one last step to oblivion. Some of us took very little sugar.”

A woman born for tragedy, perhaps, although inclined to be a little silly.

“Well, I’ve never killed anybody, so I don’t know—I

“She told the police those people deserved to die.” “She was excited, madam. Perhaps the remark was misconstrued. My niece is not hard-hearted; besides, she thought at the time that I was among them and although I deserve to die—we all do, do we not?—I hardly think that my niece is the one to point it out.”

“We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.”

the thought of a ring around my finger always made me feel tied tight, because rings had no openings to get out of,

“I think you have forgotten yourself, young man, to take such a tone to me. I am pleased that you are repentant, but you have taken far too much of my time. Please be extremely quiet now.”

bow your heads to our beloved Mary Katherine, I thought, or you will be dead.

“The least Charles could have done,” Constance said, considering seriously, “was shoot himself through the head in the driveway.”