Member-only story
A Scattering of Crows
Vincent Van Gogh’s last day
Auvers-sur-Oise, France
July 29, 1890
Morning
Vincent awoke in his rented room in Auvers-sur-Oise, the first rays of dawn filtering through the dusty skylight. The room was sparsely furnished — a creaky bed, a rickety chair, and a small wooden table littered with tubes of paint, brushes upright in their pots like attentive schoolchildren. Everywhere the scent of linseed oil and turpentine.
Vincent rubbed his eyes. Outside his window, he heard people talking… a woman and a man. The woman laughed intermittently. The man spoke quickly, telling a story. Downstairs, he heard the sounds of cabinets opening and closing. His landlady was awake. The faint smell of wood smoke wound its way to his nostrils. Another day.
He must ask the landlady about the gun. She had one, he knew, wrapped in a shawl in her bedroom. He knew because she had told him about it once.
Mrs. Dupont, his kind-hearted landlady, was a widowed woman with four children, three sturdy boys ranging in age from 14 to 5, and a daughter of eight with thin blonde hair and eyes like the sea. The boys, full of restless energy and mischief, often played in the yard, their laughter ringing through the house. The youngest, a black haired, cherubic child with dimpled cheeks…
