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Owen's Wynd
by Eva Carson
EXCERPT
… Mary turned the pages. The book listed the three main wynds of Wyndsgate — Narrow, Church, and Owen’s. Lots of Scottish towns, especially on the east coast, had wynds. The notable quality of Wyndsgate was the history, or myth, connected to its main three wynds and the name of the town. She looked at the cover of the book. Eerie in the East: Scottish Ghost Stories Vol. 2.
Legend had it that Wyndsgate sat on a very old spot, a kind of entry way to that part of Scotland by sea, and on its shore, men made the choice whether to turn to good, to convention, or to evil. Narrow, Church, or Owen’s.
The old woman had been watching Mary read, looking over her shoulder at the pages. ‘Enter ye in at the strait gate,’ she said. ‘For wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.’
The woman had recited the Scripture comfortably from memory. Mary had been brought up in a Christian household and recognised it at once. Steven, on the other hand, only had a notion that the woman had said something Biblical, having been formed in a comfortably secular lower middle-class suburb. His relationship to religion went no further than the ragbag of hymns and services he’d been made to endure at school and at funerals, and the usual boy’s navigation of the whole Glasgow deal with the football, in which he knew he was meant to regard himself as Protestant.
‘Narrow isn’t church?’ Mary said.
‘Narrow is much older than that,’ the woman said. And it was as though she’d shot a bolt of strangeness through the picture bibles and Sunday school colouring books of Mary’s childhood. The woman smiled. …
… Read the complete story in our anthology Broken Ground.
Eva Carson
Eva Carson was born in Glasgow in 1984 and now lives in Fife. She’s inspired by the spooky and the strange, towns and cities, and stories of the coast. Her stories have been published by The Fiction Desk, Carmen et Error and 404 Ink Magazine.
