The Ghostwriter's Words

Sara: All She Owned and Owed

She still occasionally cherished the memory of her father's shocked expression as she'd defied him and the way she did. At the time, she had no way of understanding how much of that expression was laced with lust as he took his last look at her naked body.

Sara's recollections jumped directly from her father's house to the pool beneath the waterfall, with only the vaguest memory of how she'd come to be there. There were unfocused flashes that may have been memories or only her imagination's reconstruction from a journey she'd repeated so many times before. There was no reason she would have varied the route she'd always taken to the waterfall to swim or bathe. She'd have walked along the path from the house that ran alongside her father's fields, then through the trees of the small woods that bordered her father's property. More accurately, the property that Sammy provided them. He was Mr. Fry to them, and her, until he'd insisted Sara call him Sammy.

She would discover it had never been her father's house after all! And it became more hers than her father's early that next morning, after all the wonderous things, unknown until that magic night, that she and Sammy did, that she could never have imagined before experiencing them. Sammy had promised her all that was his was hers, and only a few months later, once she'd learned to sign her name, there were legal papers to make it all official. And her father's house officially became hers.

The significance of her ownership of the house was a realization many years coming. And unfortunately, it came far too many years after her father's death for her to return and demand he get out of her house instead, then watch his sorry naked ass walk out the door, his clothes piled on the floor alongside hers since there was nothing the man had ever owned that wasn't from Sammy's generosity. Nothing which Sammy hadn't told her had since become hers.

Continuing to reconstruct her probable path from her father's house - her house! It had been her fucking house! She'd have gone out to the road from 'her' house, past the estate's front gate, then along the stone wall that had once been the original property line. She'd have crossed the bridge over the stream a hundred yards above the falls. Near enough to hear it and sometimes, depending on the wind, would have blown back on her naked flesh. It was only a short distance from there to the low spot in the wall, which was still the spot she climbed over, then she would have had the choice of either of the two paths to the waterfall and the pool beneath it.

She had no memory of the path she'd chosen that day, the steeper and quicker, or the longer, more gradual, and safer of the two. Had she done what had become her more frequent choice, slipped and slid down the steeper, quicker path, then edged along the narrow ledge to the secret place she'd discovered hidden behind the waterfall? Or had she taken the longer, easier, and safer path since she'd been wearing neither clothes nor shoes? And, if she came from behind the falls, she'd have needed to swim beneath it to the pool it had created, an experience she'd always enjoyed once she'd been daring enough to attempt it. She had no memory of doing so that day, but that didn't mean it hadn't happened.

She'd have walked for miles along the road, barefoot and naked, with no memory of having done so nor of anyone stopping to ask if she'd needed help. She was amazed her feet hadn't been cut and bleeding from something she'd stepped on along the way. Maybe they had. Or her knees weren't scraped raw, as they occasionally week after climbing over the wall, or she didn't have various nicks and bruises on her behind from her naked slide down the steeper path. Again, she may have had all the above but no memory of them.

Before she found herself treading water in the pool beneath the waterfall, her last memory was standing naked and defiant in front of her father, with her mother screaming in the background for him not to dare touch her. Had he tried? Had her father reached out with the intent of touching her naked flesh? She couldn't remember, and she had no recollection of opening the door or walking out of the house, both of which must have happened; unless her father had opened the door and shoved her from the house in defiance of her mother's demand not to touch her. Her mind at that moment had been a bright, blinding white, static blank, which allowed her to retain nothing of what had passed from that instant she'd stood naked in front of her father until she found herself naked in the pool beneath the falls.