We Have Always Lived in the Castle

by Shirley Jackson

I told myself it was pride and would not avoid going into Stella’s no matter how much I wanted to be at home, but I knew, too, that Stella would see me pass if I did not go in, and perhaps think I was afraid, and that thought I could not endure.

I always did, that I could walk home across the sky instead of through the village.

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.

The people of the village have always hated us.

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 would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain and dying. I would then help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs. Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true. “It’s wrong to hate them,” Constance said, “it only weakens you,” but I hated them anyway, and wondered why it had been worth while creating them in the first place.

I get her

Without looking I could see the grinning and the gesturing; I wished they were all dead and I was walking on their bodies.

I’ve been wanting so badly to find a character like this🫶🏾

I always held my groceries carefully along here, because one terrible morning I had dropped the shopping bag and the eggs broke and the milk spilled and I gathered up what I could while they shouted, telling myself that whatever I did I would not run away, shovelling cans and boxes and spilled sugar wildly back into the shopping bag, telling myself not to run away.

Some of the people in the village had real faces that I knew and could hate individually; Jim Donell and his wife were among these, because they were deliberate instead of just hating dully and from habit like the others.

When Jim Donell thought of something to say he said it as often and in as many ways as possible, perhaps because he had very few ideas and had to wring each one dry.

😂😂

They saw me at once, and I thought of them rotting away and curling in pain and crying out loud; I wanted them doubled up and crying on the ground in front of me.

had eaten fire. Their throats will burn when the words come out, and in their bellies they will feel a torment hotter than a thousand fires.

Helen Clarke was eating sandwiches, reaching down past Constance to take one after another. She wouldn’t behave like this anywhere else, I thought, only here.

Constance.” I began dressing Helen Clarke in my mind, putting her in a bathing suit on a snow bank, setting her high in the hard branches of a tree in a dress of flimsy pink ruffles that caught and pulled and tore; she was tangled in the tree and screaming and I almost laughed.

“A little bit, maybe. I can’t help it when people are frightened; I always want to frighten them more.”

“Don’t you ever want to leave here, Merricat?” “Where could we go?” I asked her. “What place would be better for us than this? Who wants us, outside? The world is full of terrible people.”

He refused to take care of you during the trial, did you know that? And he never let our names be mentioned in his house.” “Then why do you mention his name in our house?”

The hole would hold his head nicely. I laughed when I found a round stone the right size, and scratched a face on it and buried it in the hole. “Goodbye, Charles,” I said. “Next time don’t go around taking other people’s things.”

“Merricat, said Constance, would you like a cup of tea?”

??

“I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die.” Constance stirred, and the leaves rustled. “The way you did before?” she asked. It had never been spoken of between us, not once in six years. “Yes,” I said after a minute, “the way I did before.”

I bloody knew it

“Uncle Julian used to sit right here,” I said. “It would be a good day, today, for Uncle Julian to sit in the sun.” “I hope he was warm when he died. Perhaps he remembered the sun for a minute.”

Awwwwww

but when the ground was soft Constance planted a yellow rosebush at Uncle Julian’s spot on the lawn, and one night I went down to the creek and buried Uncle Julian’s initialled gold pencil by the water, so the creek would always speak his name.

“The ladies don’t like little boys,” the second woman said; she was one of the bad ones; I could see her mouth from the side and it was the mouth of a snake.

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