“The Scroll and the Flame”

I have been playing around with AI and wanted to see what it could do. I gave it all the information I had on Monroe’s black sheep couple, Sidney and Annie Saunders and told it to write me their story. Here is what it came up with. A few things are incorrect, but the story is pretty good!

Based on the rich and tragic narrative from the document, here is a fictionalized story inspired by the true events of Sidney W. Saunders and Annie E. Livingston:

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“The Scroll and the Flame”

The statue of Sidney Saunders towered above the cemetery’s iron gates, his stone eyes forever fixed on the heart of Monroe. Beneath his left hand, a scroll lay unfurled—etched into its cold surface were the faded words of a marriage license, long dismissed as myth. For years, visitors had paused at the monument, reading and rereading the lines with a mix of curiosity and discomfort, as if the dead themselves still whispered their truths to anyone who’d listen.

Annie Saunders stood in its shadow once more, gray-haired now, her face framed by a dark veil. Her gloved hand rested lightly on the scroll’s edge.

“I did everything for you,” she whispered. “Everything.”

Fifty years earlier, Monroe had gossiped her and Sidney into infamy. They’d called her a madam, a mistress, a fraud. Said he was a drunk, a firebug, a man who torched his way to wealth. But behind the headlines and rumors was something deeper—loneliness, pride, grief—and love, buried beneath shame and scandal.

They met in Bastrop as children, long before war came and carved Sidney into a soldier. He returned from the Siege of Vicksburg a boy with a scar and a thousand-yard stare, but Annie still saw him—not the uniform or the bottle, just the man who once gave her a ribbon for her hair.

Their love was quiet at first. A child, Willie, was born before vows were spoken. They fled to St. Louis for the wedding, far from judging eyes, far from the whispers. But the whispers followed them back.

“She’s not his wife.”
“That boy? Not his.”
“She was paid to stay.”

And yet, they stayed. Sidney built a business; Annie built a home. Then came the fires—first in 1871, then in 1888. Whether accident or arson, the flames left more than ash behind. They left suspicion.

Sidney changed after Willie died. He wandered the house at night, mumbled to himself in front of the mirror, stared too long at his own revolver. He was convinced the town wanted him dead.

One cold January night, he bought a cemetery plot.

Ten days later, a shot echoed across the street. Neighbors ran to find Annie screaming beside him. Sidney lay on the floor, blood soaking into the wood. He would live only a day longer—silent, blinking, his hand in hers.

“He thought I was dying,” she told the judge later. “He couldn’t live without me.”

But the town didn’t believe her. His siblings didn’t either. They claimed there had never been a marriage, that the scroll on the monument was a lie. They took nearly everything—except a slice of land in Texarkana and a sliver of justice.

With the money she had left, Annie built the tomb.

For three months she kept Sidney’s body in a shed behind her home, guarding him like a relic. Neighbors crossed the street to avoid her house. Some said she spoke to his coffin. Others swore she read the Bible aloud to the dead.

When the tomb was ready, she placed him inside—along with Willie’s coffin, a red wagon, his velocipede, a sewing machine, even Sidney’s chair. Curtains hung over the tomb’s niche like it was a sitting room. Annie visited every day.

Years passed. She remarried—Texarkana’s mayor no less—and even adopted a child. But her second marriage ended in betrayal, and by the time the gas flame caught her dress one November morning, Annie had already become a ghost in waiting.

They buried her in the last niche of the tomb, without inscription. But she’s there. The woman whose grief built a monument no one could ignore.

And yet, the questions remain.

Was the scroll on the statue the truth or a weapon she forged from memory and desperation?

Did Sidney really take his life for love—or was Annie his last audience?

In 2001, the Register of Marriage was finally discovered in the St. Louis archives, confirming the date etched in stone: March 25, 1875. But it was filed fourteen years late—months after his death, in the thick of Annie’s inheritance battle.

Was it proof? Or a parting shot?

No one knows for sure.

But if you visit Monroe’s cemetery today, stand in front of the statue, and look closely at the scroll, you may catch your own reflection in its polished surface. And you may hear, if you listen long enough, a voice on the wind:

“Sidney, I could have well forgiven that last seemingly cruel act of thine…”