Anna In The Garden

15

15

Her dreams filled with many and varied images. Some she could not quite comprehend. Flashes of light and metal and strange voices speaking words she could bare hear and understand less. Other dreams were more familiar, yet twisted into parodies of events that had occurred, but in very different ways.

Dreams of Mother and Father walking through the iron gates of the garden, leaving on their around-the-world sojourn, their backs receding into the snow covered distance, never looking back. Slow, methodical steps carrying them further and further away from her.

She knew very well that Mother and Father had left in a carriage. At least, that was how she remembered it. Now she could not feel at all certain whether her dream showed the correct order of events, that her memory failed her, or that her memory was how it all happened on that sad, lonely day.

She awoke to darkness, save for thin slivers of light intruding past the thick velvet curtains draped over the windows. Her bedclothes felt damp, as though she had sweated most profusely during the night, and were now rumpled and far more disorganised than usual. She posited that she had tossed and turned during her nocturnal fantasies. Something she could not remember ever doing in the past.

Unused to waking herself, Anna stared up to the ceiling of her room where she noticed, for the first time, paint peeling from the plastered surface. She tried to remember how long ago the room last benefitted from a coat of paint and that memory also escaped her. Ever since meeting the girl, for the first time, she had found her memory less than reliable.

Sitting up, hands pressing down into the softness of her mattress, she blinked in the little light and looked around her cold room.

Nursey stood at the bottom of her bed.

With hands clasped together, resting upon her distended stomach, Nursey stared at Anna with narrowed eyes. Her dark dress appeared to blend in with the shadows of the room, the key chain at her waist seemed to have grown, with thicker links, a longer hoop and the keyring festooned with far more keys than Anna recalled Nursey carrying before.

It was all illusion, of course, her sleepy eyes and the darkness of the room causing her to see things other than what they were. Yet, Nursey did seem to loom above the bed, staring, saying nothing. Only the tick-tick-tick of the clock upon the mantle broke the silence.

Before Anna could utter a single word, Nursey stirred. Releasing one of her hands from the other, raising it up before her, she opened her curled fingers. As though revealing the flourish at the conclusion of a performance of sleight-of-hand, the shape of a key appeared between the tips of her fingers.

A terribly small and insignificant looking key. The key to Father's study, left in the lock of the door, the night before.

For some reason, Anna felt the chill of the morning far more than usual. The chill crept up her back, causing her muscles to contract and throb. The hairs on her arms flexed and stood on end. The ones at the nape of her neck tingled and Anna had to force herself not to scratch. Gripping the damp covers, she clutched them tight to her chest and resisted the temptation to scamper backwards.

Still silent, Nursey leaned forward, placing the key upon the bedcovers at the foot of the bed and, once done, turned her body. Her head remained pointing towards Anna, those narrowed eyes seeping disappointment deep into Anna's soul, weaving and wending their gaze into Anna's heart and squeezing, causing a flutter within Anna's chest.

Then her head followed the direction of her body, moving away from Anna's bed, walking in those too-small steps, for a woman her size, towards the door. Her broad back offering even greater condemnation than her dark, staring eyes. She did not look again to Anna as she pressed down upon the handle of the door.