THE MIRACLES AND MINDLESS PURSUITS OF HILDA WHITBY: a short story

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From the February 2023 edition of Belle Ombre:

One week after the fire claimed her grown son and English setter, her horses and wagons, her rifles and ledgers, her personal library, her precisely calibrated lab instruments and voluminous notebooks in which she’d recorded her secret chemical formulae, Hilda Whitby stood with her back to the riverbank and surveyed for a final time the scorched two-acre parcel where the house, barn, and lumber mill once stood. Despite the warm weather, she wore a heavy cotton dress that reached to her ankles, one of the few garments that had survived the explosion and the one she wore to the funeral held in the Methodist churchyard overlooking the valley. To a leather leg strap under her skirt, she fastened a dissection knife salvaged from the smoldering pile of debris that once served as her private laboratory. The seven-inch blade might prove useful should she happen upon one of the desperate highwaymen known to roam the locks after sundown. While the canal had brought prosperity to the valley, it had also brought plenty of mischief.

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