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René by Olga Wolstenholme

René was his name. I mean, the name of the boy and the name of the grandfather.

René – the boy – had a dream, six months before it happened. He was ten years old and he saw René – the grandfather – from the waist up, smiling at him engulfed in flames, in the fireplace he’d built himself.

You see the grandfather was a squatter. Before the laws changed, he’d found a piece of land in the woods and built himself a lodge.

Rainbow he’d called it.

“I saw the two stone fireplaces – the ones from my dream – they still held upright like you see sometimes in war movies after a city has been bombed.

The men from the morgue were collecting his remains. The found him next to his favourite dog – My mother was delirious – All I could see was his burnt torso.”

The boy told me that the American tourist staying at the lodge disappeared that day. He’d found what looked like a bullet hole in the cooler the old man would sit on.

Everyone thought he’d been murdered.

René – the boy – he found a gas can next to the burnt down lodge. On it was the framed image of a Saint and under the frame was 47 dollars in Canadian and American bills. The old man’s wife recognized the money she’d given to him the day before the fire.

It could have been an accident.

But, René – the grandfather – he couldn’t write. I always thought that he’d left a suicide note consisting of a gas can, 47 dollars, and the framed image of a saint.

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Olga Wolstenholme is the creator of the up and coming pro-sex feminist blog Cuntlove. A regular contributor to the blog SexGenderBody and she also writes a weekly column for Pop My Cherry Review.  A graduate of Queen’s University with a BA in Theatre, she currently lives in Montreal where she is spending her days exploring all that the blogosphere has to offer and thinking about the art of storytelling.

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