MicroHorror

Miss Prissy, as everyone in the whole town had called her for seventy years now, was a great spirit during the Depression years. All day she cleaned and dressed for Mister Philip at the butcher store. “I have butchered my share of animals but I have never put one to death,” she said with pride. “They come to me deceased.” Then, after Mister Philip fell asleep in the evening with his Gazette and brandy, she served anyone who was hungry from their back porch. Sharecroppers, farmers, unemployed. She even served the coloreds, yes she did. Those without a place could stay in her barn, which stopped the wind but not the cold. “Food’s food, and men’s men,” she said. A few times vagrants robbed her of her plates, this nice lady who couldn’t hurt a fly, and once her kitchen was raided. But Miss Prissy didn’t stop her generosity, and kept the town’s downtrodden in their original belt notches. Even during the freeze of ‘34 she had warm bowls of hearty stew always at the ready. When she died in ‘39, the police found nine skeletons in the basement. They weren’t decomposed. They were butchered. Frostbite on their hands and feet showed they all froze to death, probably in the barn. “Men’s men,” she had always said, “and food’s food.”