The Ogress had a real name, and quite the lovely one, hardly fit for a sweaty mountain of flesh such as herself. The name could be found, half faded, on a squirreled-away love letter. It remained there, waiting to be forgotten.
It had been years, decades maybe, since this moniker of a happy, almost pretty little girl was swallowed up by the more fitting "Ma'am Houcheloup." She did not answer to any other name but that of her deceased husband. She barely remembered life before him.
For sympathy's sake, we shall not refer to our subject as "the Ogress." We will not even call her "Ma'am Houcheluop."
We will call her Arielle.
Arielle could scarcely remember life before her husband. She had snatches of half-imagined memories which she saw when she was least expecting them- a green hill, a pasture, a cottage. She could hear echoes of voices when she was half asleep, a sweet voice, a rough voice.
This was all she had of her childhood, as it was one worth forgetting, and Arielle herself would not have known she was born in the countryside had she not a cache of rural sayings and superstitions at her disposal, almost from birth.
She enjoyed talking about the country for hours at length, but these rustic recollections were only recitations of things she had read about her home. They were not memories.
Arielle had no excuse for forgetting her life; only that life before M. Hucheloup had not been worth remembering.
It had been years, and slowly, M. Hucheloup was beginning to fade from her horrible memory. His voice became but a whisper in the back of her mind, his face but a guessed at jumble of features scrawled with ink on her bedroom wall. Every day, she forgot him a little more, and every day, she looked loathingly at her reflection in the mirror. She glared at the woman who dare forget such an angel as her M. Hucheloup.
She had been brooding on this, one dreary, blustery day. Arielle was perched on a chair half her size, in the back of her caf's private room. The pretty revolutionary was talking to a large group, and she was attempting to follow his speech. She couldn't.
She sighed. She quite liked the pretty revolutionary, and she was not alone. Still, he was too young for her tastes, and so she admired him from afar.
She grew angry at herself, as she so often did, at looking at another man.
"Not even cold in the ground and you're already eyeing up ye next dish! What a tramp I am! Oh!" She said woefully, under her breath. M. Hucheloup was indeed cold in the ground and perhaps maggoty- the poor man had received the services of a rather cheap undertaker.
Arielle only forgot her sadness when the cries for wine became louder than the pretty revolutionary's cry of freedom.
"We know where this country's loyalties lie, now don't we!" she bellowed happily, addressing no-one in particular. She bustled out of the room, her mind temporarily clear of any thoughts that did not have to do with pleasing her thirsty rebels.
Arielle was about to enter the kitchen when she heard a voice behind her.
"Ay, missus!" it came.
Arielle slowly turned around and was face to face with her first law-abiding customer in days. She talked with him, haltingly, feeling more and more like there was something about him that she could not put her finger on.
When she left the room to scrounge up scraps for what she thought was an ordinary beggar, it hit her. This man looked like her husband... Her husband had come back to her!
This "beggar" was her husband's ghost!