Mrs. Anchovies
When I was a kid I had a neighbor called Mrs. Broadwood, but everyone in the neighborhood used to call her Mrs. Anchovies. She rarely left her house and although all of the local kids knew that Mrs. Anchovies lived there, I'd personally never seen her and I just assumed that it was her real name.
One day I was walking past her house with my friend Billy and I made a remark about how odd her name was, then he laughed at me, called me a dumbass and explained that Mrs. Anchovies was just a nickname that everyone gave her.
When I enquired about the origin of the nickname Billy explained to me that Mrs. Anchovies had gone crazy after her husband, a fisherman, drowned when his boat capsized at sea. Billy claimed that after the funeral her behavior became increasingly erratic and she started impaling dead anchovies on small hooks and hanging them on her ears, like fishy earing's. When the anchovies inevitably started to decay she would remove them and bury them in her garden, holding a kind of mock funeral for them. Then she would take two fresh anchovies and hook them onto her earlobes instead. Billy went on to explain that when people had confronted Mrs. Anchovies about her odd behavior, she would only say that the spirit of her dead husband, John Broadwood, was communicating with her through the anchovies. She kept the anchovies close to her ears so that she could hear them "whispering" to her.
I accused Billy of pulling my leg, so he dared me to go trick or treating with him at Halloween and knock on her door, in the hope that she would answer and I would be able to see for myself. So being young and foolish I agreed. Halloween came around a few weeks after that, I dressed up as Dracula and Billy dressed up as a zombie. I can still remember us traipsing through that overgrown garden like it was was yesterday, the shadows were growing longer and Mrs. Anchovies ramshackle house seemed to loom over us, like a monument to her own insanity.
On the way to the front door we passed by some small mounds of earth, the soil looked like it had been disturbed recently and Billy said that it was the "graveyard" where she buried her anchovies. When I knocked on the door I no longer wanted to find out whether or not Billy was lying, I just prayed that she wouldn't answer. A few moments later the door creaked open and the figure of a wizened weather-beaten old lady came into view, I looked at her wrinkly sagging ears and sure enough she had a small fish suspended from each one of them. I was sure that I heard Billy mutter "told you so," under his breath.
"Trick or treat," I mumbled.
She smiled and I caught a glimpse of her decaying yellow teeth.
"I've got something to tell you boys," she announced in a low voice.
I gulped and glanced at Billy, I could tell from the look on his face that we were thinking the same thing, "should we run?"
"These anchovies speak to me, they tell me things" she explained, "sometimes they tell me things about the future, they told me that something bad is gonna happen to one of you boys," she went on.
The way she looked at me made my skin crawl, her eyes were cold and glassy, it was like there was nothing behind them, like her body was still alive but her soul had already departed.
"W...wh....what's gonna happen?" I stammered.
Her smile appeared sinister now, she looked downright menacing.
"When you boys are older, one of you will get lumbago," she said as she let out a soft cackle.
We all thought she was crazy, but we had a lot of growing up to do. Sure enough thirty years later I've got lumbago, I'm still seeing a chiropractor for it to this day.
Credited to stoicangle
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