“And Travellers Now, within that Valley,” by Kathryn Kulpa

At Bolton, by John William Inchbold (England) 1855

“And Travellers Now, within that Valley” 

Nothing had gone right since the white doe appeared. 

When the villagers saw her first, under the milky light of the strawberry moon, they thought the doe was a good omen. A foretelling of prosperity. But the cattle fell ill that year, and half the herd died; the wasting sickness burned through whole families; black blight shriveled potatoes in the ground, and what could come of it? Surely the people would starve. 

Now they spoke of the doe as the devil’s animal, crossed themselves when they glimpsed her scarlet eyes through the trees. A ghostly, unnatural creature. 

In the season of the hunter’s moon, Ruadh’s husband took up his bow, proved the doe mortal. The people gave thanks, wondered where the man’s strange, red-haired wife had gone off to. Never saw her hiding behind the barn door, holding the white doe’s fawn to her breast. 

Nor was she seen in that village again, though rumours ran that in a country to the north, a witch and her white stag familiar brought rich harvests and good health to all who left offerings at their door. Rumours ran, but rumours faded. The wind blew through the empty village to the south, making no sound but the rattle of shuttered windows, the sigh of dry grass. 

Kathryn Kulpa

This story was inspired by Baby, by Mary Carroll (USA) 1923, not by the lovely painting shown.
https://www.artsy.net/artwork/mary-carroll-baby
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The title of this story is a quote from the poem "The Haunted Place" by Edgar Allen Poe.
https://poets.org/poem/haunted-palace

Kathryn Kulpa is a fiction writer and editor. Her flash fiction chapbook Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted is released by New Rivers Press. She is also the author of two flash fiction chapbooks, Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted (New Rivers Press) and Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus), a story collection, Pleasant Drugs (Mid-List Press), and a micro-chapbook, Who’s the Skirt? (Origami Poems Project). Kathryn has published stories in Best Microfiction, Five South, Ghost Parachute, Moon City Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and other journals and anthologies. Kathryn has taught writing workshops at Stonecoast Writers’ Conference, International Women’s Writing Guild, and Writespace, and was a visiting artist at Wheaton College. She also leads writing workshops online through Cleaver magazine, where she is a flash fiction editor.