Reflected sorrows

Chapter 17

The papers that had once lain tidily upstairs were strewn in a scattering of rainfall that resembled the most violent, tranquil storm – one that seethed for months, laying a foundation of soaking rain that seeped through into your bones and made you shiver in a cocoon of terror, afraid to gaze upon the wavering trees as they fell – afraid to glance out at all the faces rushing in from the cold; The fears festered and rotted into swathes of cloak that waved around in the wind in a transparent dance, and the raindrops were paper scattered across the room, the piano lashed at by winds too powerful to reside within the world in which she had spent so long cowering from those incessant rains; no surface was not slick with ink-stained paper and quills that coughed up and spluttered words that she could not detangle through the slur of perishing hope that they had been soaked in before they were spluttered into the outside to emerge as mere melodies of malady and dreary grief. She reached out and placed a single sheet of the scattered notes in her hand, her poise tangled in a silk web of intricate designs – it was stained by ink to unrecognisable lengths, coated in a veil of widow's sorrow that hid all from the world, too ashamed to tell such a woeful tale to a storm that did not care. The eyes of the leaves, green to point of gleaming, sinister glee and glimmering with insidious mockery and deceit, were deafened, and so the ink dribbled down like a young child's tears, coating the paper in its slick feathers of muted screams and cries for help unanswered. She gazed toward the piano, so skeletal now – surely... She could not have done this; her hand was inarticulate, her mind woebegone and eternally lurching toward sorrow, a tear lurking behind every corner she turned; but this could not have been her. Quivering with guilt placed upon her shoulders that she tried to throw, tried again and again to relieve herself of, but could never deter from withering away her joy, she gazed upon it in a sense of shock; the monster had breathed a breath of fury. And she could not control that.

She took tentative steps toward the single skeleton in the centre, its keys stained in incriminating scarlet and its metal warped and dented by a cruel hand of such dull, unrelenting remorselessness, and her gaze was solemn with a kind of bleak remorse – it could not have been her, surely? With her unsteady hand, she rolled her fingers over every nook of the dented machine, hoping some part of it would perhaps seem to be a smile among cold faces, but there were tears. Unpatchable and ravine-like as they began to spread further like a disease, decaying all the music and dissonance that had once been so unbearable. Like a photo, black and white with grains among the smiling faces, burning slowly as a cigar in a beloved father's mouth. Slowly rotting away until the tendrils of black seeking their prey consumed it with an insatiable malice in their eyes, shattering every smile until it was a grin a of determination to keep a mask from slipping away. Slowly they endured the stares and the hands reached out, multiplying as if they were simply a beast clawing at life through a haze of will to survive; they tore the memory in their hand, leaving her to stare at whatever remained of the place. It was wracked with bleak silence, and clawed at her throat and her ears, begging her to stay and look a while upon the ink-infested tendrils of yellow paper, bearing every word like a cloak around her neck as the world went dark, and the footsteps of another became moulded into a kind of purgatory that she wished would go – go away from all of her earth bound soul and leave her to perish. But she saw it – the red flashing within every reflection. The faces she saw in the gaping tears lying within every wall. She had to leave. She couldn't remain here while all seemed to grin with malice and foreboding; a melancholy resided still within her. A grey tint over every moment and every blink. She couldn't let it spread. The door lay open – it was still rotting and made of the same, dark, dust coated wood. The same soaked paintwork that had once glowed with brilliance and joy. She knew something was wrong; the door lay wide open as a mouth about to speak words that may reveal the truth, or the hope in the eyes of a child that would soon perish in the fear of logic and expectations.