Mildred Burnside. Pray She Passes Your Home.

Mildred Burnside , spotted last Sunday near the First Church of Christ Scientist
preparing to reinfect the healed. She appears and is gone just as suddenly.
Pray she passes you by for she is a country unto herself where angels fear to tread

They say every village has an idiot. Cloverdale has many of them. What sets Cloverdale apart from other communities isn't our idiots but our very own Mildred Burnside. Eccentric cannot define this time challenged octogenarian. ‘Out There’ is mere child’s play. ‘Way Out There’ doesn’t scratch the surface. 'Insanity’s Chamber Maid' is growing warm and 'The Devil Wears Polyester' is only now keeping the ball in the park.

They say Mildred arrived in Cloverdale nearly 90 years ago as a baby in the back of a gypsy wagon. The wagon was accompanied by the worst storm in the village's history. She was left on the doorstep of the Sisters of Ever Increasing Hope. A week later two of the nuns died of consumption. From that moment on her history fades into brief sitings followed by misfortune.

You known where she's been by what she leaves behind - a depression, thick in the air, wrapped in the smell of cheap dime store perfume laced with the smoke from a cigar. She walks the streets seeking converts for her cause - the disorganization of anything organized. She isn’t afraid of anyone or anything. She laughs at the constable. She scoffs at traffic. She openly defies God in Cloverdale’s houses of worship on a rotating basis (Its the Mormons turn this Sunday. Heaven help them). She scares children and frightens every dog in the village. No one clears the streets of pedestrians faster than a Mildred siting. No one empties a theater or store faster. She has the same effect on the village as a German Air Raid - the streets are cleared and the inhabitants cower in their homes behind black out curtains.

Some say all she needs is love. Perhaps her seven marriages are proof positive of that. But how can someone that regards her fellow humans as dog droppings on the bottom of a shoe need love? No, she is the essence of Chaos that has taken human form. She walks our streets, and just as the grim reaper seeks souls and the drunk seeks the bottle, Mildred seeks happiness. She feeds off it, using the emotion itself to sustain her and passes the joy that accompanies happiness as waste to be flush into oblivion.

Friends, I give you that which cannot be understood. I give you the only thing death is afraid to take. I give you the very object fear fears. I give you Mildred Burnside. And may God save all those that gaze upon her.