The Whimberry Slaughter
The town of Whimberry might have died out or remained in obscurity, a tiny backwater east of the Mississippi River, visited only by the mailman and those people who got lost on the winding roads. It might have, but it didn’t. Instead, it stands in memory as the site of the Whimberry Slaughter, one of the greatest slaughters in American history and one that may never be understood.
In 1898, thirteen-year-old Tessa Whiteley came home from a walk in the woods at the edge of town to find a scene that her young mind could not even have conceived of. The town was unnaturally quiet, and Tessa felt the twist of unease in her gut, but she thought that it was surely her imagination.
Then she turned the corner around her uncle and aunt’s big house, and saw the first body. It was her twenty-three-year-old cousin Patsy, lying limp beside the road with her head twisted at an odd angle. Her neck was broken.
Tessa, who would never have reason to think she’d find her cousin’s body on the walk home, ran to see if she was okay, and that’s when she saw the second body. Her uncle, his blood sprayed across the flowerbeds and the side of the house.
It was about now that Tessa started to panic, and as she ran through town looking for someone, anyone, to help her, she passed more bodies. Everyone in town, it seemed; everyone she knew was dead.
Tessa Whiteley wasn’t found until two days later, when the delivery man for the grocery store came in on his regular weekly run and called the police as soon as he saw the town. When Mississippi police from several counties, state troopers, and FBI descended on Whimberry, Tessa was discovered huddled in the gazebo on the outskirts of town, unable to speak and on the verge of frostbite. Whimberry had a population of 227, and Tessa Whiteley was the only survivor.
I have weird dreams. They’re not about me, and they’re not in first person, and they almost never have anything to do with my actual life—instead, they tend to be epic cinematic original fictional narratives. Very useful when you’re a writer and a creative. Well, they all seem epic and cinematic at the time; only some of them remain so upon waking.
This was a pretty good one. Not the massacre itself, but rather, the story behind it, which goes kind of off the rails but does explain why everyone in Whimberry died. I’m thinking about writing it down, so I gave it a start today.
