A collection of mixed genre short stories highlighting the bizarre and surprising. Humor, horror, romance and adventure with an occasional murder thrown in. Love lost and found and even avoided. The real and imagined, reflected in troubled and flawe...
I was twenty-five when I met her during a European tour of my family roots. I had traced a branch of my family to the Von Senftenbergs, a minor aristocratic family with an ancestral home near Frankfurt am Main. My parents died when I was young and what little information I had about my lineage was contained in yellowed documents and second-hand stories. I felt like an anchorless boat drifting in the seas. I desperately wanted some...any connection to my past.
It happened that there was a party on the day of my arrival at the manor house, a birthday celebration for the family governess. She was ninety-five.
People seemed scared of her and she sat alone beneath a finely embroidered shawl in a far corner of the impressive ballroom where the festivities were playing out. I went over to pay my respects and when I did, her eyes widened; they were sharp eyes, like those of a bird of prey. Her hands were soft and warm, but with a grip that belied her age.
Her name was Sylvie O'Hara. She pulled me close and pushed me to a seated position on the divan at her side. Sylvie cackled and shook her head. She addressed me in a odd accent with a surprisingly youthful voice. "You poor boy," she chirped, "You look exactly like him."
"Like who?" I asked.
"My poor Frances... my poor foolish, stupid... stupid Frances." She reached into her massive purse and pulled out a worn leather book, "This tells it all. God is very funny and very cruel. He loves irony most of all. Do you know when German Father's Day is, young man?"
She answered her own question before I had time to respond. "May the 8th, the same day as the Feast of the Ascension, when Christ ascended into heaven," she pressed the book into my hand, "take this...if the family finds it, they'll burn it. Bring it back in a few days...I always take tea at noon in the gardens." A group of well-wishers came over and Sylvie shooed me off.
I returned to my hotel confused and intrigued. After a much needed glass of cognac, I opened the well-worn tome and began to read. It was part diary, part family history. There were some clippings and some letters. The woman that emerged from those pages was unlike anyone I had ever known.
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The Sylvie I was introduced to in those pages was exceptionally bright, exceptionally poor, and exceptionally attractive. She was a mulatto, born of an Irish father and a Senegalese mother, both of whom died before she was ten.
The only good fortune of her birth was that she was born on Martinique, a French Caribbean island where non-whites were treated fairly well. And while the dark-skinned citizens were treated with at least moderate respect, the poor there, like the poor anywhere were treated miserably and Sylvie's circumstances were as impoverished as all but the most destitute of citizens.
The Frances Von Senftenberg she had mistaken me for was a man marked by destiny, but marked while the gods were drunk and bored.
Born to a well- to-do Prussian family in 1875, he was doomed to a career in either law or war, both of which were family traditions dating back further into the misty European past than anyone cared to admit.
