Reflected sorrows

Chapter 19

She saw the trees; she only saw their branches cackling and shaking in insidious joy at her tear that she wept, before wiping it away, her gaze fearful – she recognised that voice; it felt as if it were a memory scattered and buried underneath the ground like one of those ghosts that she had walked above; their faces had been buried and never commemorated. They were covered in chocolate – a mark of fatal innocence, and the memories were never brought out, even for a moment – she knew that voice, but there was something bleak in its twisted whispers, rasping as if it were on the brink of a death so cold. So... bleak. So unforgivable. So cruel. So silent – perhaps it was the memories long forgotten haunting her – perhaps it was like a recurring nightmare, still writhing in horror and screams as if it were still happening before the mind's eye of a terrified child, innocence fatal as a black flower dropped into a drink and diffusing in night-like tendrils into the red of a sunset-coloured wine. But the vessel was gone – and the small echoes within her mind that reached through the air in laughs of the innocent, murdered souls. She saw them now, buried beneath the ground in faint bones that few could see, thin as a piece of paper that was never read. She knew that voice – she knew it from a dark shadow of childhood – from a grief-ridden, looming shadow still poignant in its darkness. She knew it. She knew it. She knew it. And yet the eternal night from which she had dragged it, entrails trailing behind, felt too distant, like a line being erased bit by bit - a photograph being torn into strips of memory, shards cast into the dirt; the voice was uncannily familiar, bathed in melancholy beyond all that could be heard by one who saw the figure. In a rasping whisper, it had tightened the noose around her neck, the cold jewels that had once been a facade of a smile etched into white, bleak bone now deep engraved in her skin as a reminder of her malady.

She glanced back one last time, but all she heard was the clattering of bones thrown carelessly into a grave before being sewn and stitched with brown threads back into an earth that punished and tormented them as the earth, in its slimy, intolerable tendrils, seeked their quarry and leapt upon it as if it were a ravenous crow; that voice was the soil stitching the last stone into the grave and the footsteps echoing and ringing out into the distance. It was the laughs as the men's shovels were cast down for the next man who would need bones to shatter and wither; it rang out again and again and again in her mind: "You still have time". Youstillhavetimeyoustillhavetimeyoustillhavetimeyoustillhavetimeyoustillhavetimeyoustillhave... Time...You... Still... Have... Time... The clattering bones shattered as they fell into the deep, deep hole in the sewn land, the stones and pebbles of previous memories cast into the ground scraping them. She looked at the trees – they spoke not a single word; their drooped leaves were forlorn, downcast and sorrowful – the rain dripping from their leaves fell in droplets as they wept in the rolling, incessant thunder. The tears came to their tips, the ends a dagger through a heartbroken lover's heart, and their wail echoed through the trees. It was as wretched as the night owl's cry muted by hills of stone. It was as cruelly reflected as the sorrow of a lover as they watched their beloved wander into a fog, blood seething through the mist and smiling at the lost soul. She walked past it as if there was nothing there. The noose wasn't tightening, was it? She was just hysterical. Just mad. Just a disillusioned collection of footsteps gathered in an unrelenting storm of wailing and muted screams. The rope scratched against her neck as the water trickled in a stream of melted copper down the path alongside her, just behind so that she knew the streams were there. Just watching and listening. They ran down, their breaths whistling past her ears.

Her footsteps were smiles of the wicked as their axe fell onto the pale skin of a tree, the leaves stained brown as they fell into the rain-soaked mud and the eyes glinting for a moment before closing to reveal bark. They crunched like those branches against the ground, leaves drowned carelessly in puddles beneath the ridges of stone and dirt needles that could not sew together the bonds that had held for so long, and the ravines held the muted screams echoed and rippled through the rivers, making the branches, in their shattered state tremble and quail. The road crunched like the shattering bones of memory beneath her feet, and she sighed, seeing the looming figure of the mansion before her, and turning a corner, straining the puppeteer's strings.