Reflected sorrows

Chapter 32

The tears of widow's grief were wept from clouds of gas that burned her eyes and glowed with malice, stealing away the joy of a wife, the life that she had once had, fighting to keep through the unclear path of scattered mirrors; the clouds seemed to glower toward the rain, the blood of a poor, spindly needle dropped from those clouds, so murky and ravenous; and those tears were simply less of a sting – not a bee but the sting of a bloodstained present. The sting of knowing that that smile was simply a cruel goodbye from those who had loved you. As she wandered through the halls, she heard those calls – somehow it was just a whimper from the branches, trembling before calming, seeing the brooding ink and quill up ahead, clouds scribbled and shaded by that same widow, working to fill the abyss of silence that choked the life out of every breath, making it seem hollow and empty of life; in a slumber, simply waiting to be woken up only to come crashing back into that murky haze once again. It was not worth a thing – every raindrop to fall onto the glass, scraping against it with its demonic tongue, the whispers filling the air; every bitter tear wept for he who will never be set free from the eternal chains of darkness was devoured by that insatiable jaw, the teeth stained in crimson and drenched in the remorse of the murderer. Every footfall seemed to be another flood, another torrent of waves of armies falling to the hand that held them like puppets. The wind was a sigh, breathed by every root and every moment of inescapable dread. Goodbye, it seemed to whimper, growing impatiently cruel and lashing at the mourning widow as she watched her untidy hair grow from under the ground, emerging as a memory, then dip once again beneath. Her blood was shed again and again. The dripping of that tap was incessant, seeming never to halt and wonder why. Why the urns were so stuck fast to the ceiling. Why the merry go round was such a slow, unbearable speed. Tick. Tock. And a long pause. For a while it was nothing, then once again it struck. Those undoubting tears never wondered why. They just knew that the candles were out, and so nothing could relight them but the hand that had stolen away their spirit.

Then she was brought back to the dank gloom of the halls through which she wondered, the sky weeping for her despite her pleas that it halts and realise that the hopeful flame had long been extinguished, the smoke still trailing and cackling with dreary laughter as it did – but the roots still flowed outside, the ground visible through the shattered glass, almost too low and yet framed in an angelic light, sinister and cruel. It sung but was cut off by the blanket of silence of grief that echoed through the winds and the walls, that simply swished their crooked, weary hand through the air and the screams were a memory, a dance long ago danced that never once halted its incessant echo. That window frame was simply a frame for a picture, perhaps a reflection, she thought to herself. The image of the widow's hair flowing in a crimson river down into deep ravines in the ground, the roots tangled and knotted with exhaustion. They crept closer, their writhing mass cruelly sinister in their pace, hoping that she gaze upon them yet never sparing her a glance. They were the vipers of curiosity that snatch away from so many their lives and hopes, watching as they perish with joy. Their skin was worn by age, cracked and bleeding and still then crawling onward. A slow, mocking pace of deathly dread, like a pendulum ticking away the seconds. They carried the sap of some great tree, felled by the pendulum and strangely joyful in their pace. Their skin was parchment, torn at the seams, and they seemed delicate, intricate, a web of glinting fibres of mournful tears knitted into the cruel mass of writhing vipers, all fleeing the winds, staring behind as if to speak, but never saying a thing; More leached through the windows and she watched them flock inside, bathed in that dreary crimson and tainted by the scarlet venom. Those tears and the sighs could only lay their hands on that single knot of squirming roots, tangled and pulsing with the sorrow unfelt by the murderer who stood at an altar, yet cast upon the mournful widow, lonesome and yearning for a smile.

A creak at the door made her turn around, and those roots reached in, crooked fingers that grasped her necklace, pulling and pushing it and driving those shards of daggers into her chest, the roses of a thousand marriages escaped narrowly glaring at her through their nicks and scratches. They twirled around, dancing through the sails of that decaying and rotten boat, and they merged into her eternal prison, the bars of a cage forming in their cruel archway, and the winds lashing her. She was a prisoner, cast into anguish by that crooked hand, holding doves and feathers. She stepped away, but she felt them slithering behind, smoothly yet jaggedly, gracefully yet so crow-like. She knew they were there.

They resided in the woven life that hung in strands, seeming to shatter the low ceiling as if it were a broken angel, making the glass rise and up, trails of smoke as life is snatched away in a ragged breath. Their calls were hidden in the flowers tossed onto a grave, more a beg for forgiveness than the respect they were said to be, that deep down truth whispered in a murmur of life in the air of a cemetery and graveyard; I'm sorry... Those words seemed to penetrate the breaths of the fabric as the wind blew through, the curtains simply the harsh tongue and night-like feathers of the crow that picked at dead corpses. Plucked skin from their flesh and peeled it away layer by layer. At first those calls were distant, and she wandered through, the stairs looming before her in a moment of hysteria and desperation, a step toward joy that would just be picked at by the crows of her yellow skin and grey, stormy eyes – her skin littered now with those buboes that had cursed her sister; that had claimed her mother with their black and red vipers for trails of blood, and their wooden gazes turning to stone, a haze of fog passing over the sky and clouding the future ahead with the deathly stench of madness. And then the crows had left their perches on the fields of war and cocked their heads with mere interest, before stepping forth, hopping through the air like mournful phantoms of children skipping through the dark. And their wings had spread. They were extended into the icy cold night, almost frozen in time, held in the hand of melancholia itself, and the fleeting shadows of mournful joy fluttered up into the sky with crooked grace, bones gaunt and skintight. They had set their stares upon her vile complexion, the wind whispering her name and letters passed down through pigeons who died but passed it still toward that crow, who mocked her wandering footfall with cackling laughter, and glared into the glinting windows of shadowed clouds; their sharp eyes pierced the fog, seeing the life within the dying eyes and the hollow grace within the staggering madman.

Those tears of the mourning widow slowly halted. It was not slow, it was not fast and fleeting, fluttering past like the moments of smiles and glinting teeth; it was a slow swinging pendulum as the shadow of the crow's wing was cast over the forests of such a dreary place, and the rain poured onto those leaves, who etched their scars onto her, an echo of times past – that pecking at the walls, it echoed in a dreary pace, that of a madman muttering crazed ideas and murmuring then turning to loud, wild shouts that called into the abyss for the sight of someone. Then as the silence oppressed them, relenting only during their ragged, wavering breaths. The panting of sheer exhaustion as she wandered down the stairs, her hysterics and visions whirling before moulding back into the realities they were. That they were. That they were. That they were. But soon the crows would hear the threads begin to fray and know their meal was prepared, and once again the concealed truths emerged, the clouds choked of their booming voices and reduced simply to a child's wailing. The truth that the crow's wing was just as much as a murmur of brooding cloud, a light white feather among the sea of midnight black – midnight dark as the juxtaposition between day and night, between stars and those towering, oppressive shadows. And the sky cleared to them, revealing that fog they could never flee. They smiled sweetly staggering like the madman whose sanity they had preyed upon, stealing away its threads for themselves. And those threads were just the bait for a trap, a trap that she was caught in. A trap she brought upon herself. Crows only morph into doves when their souls are forgiven, she thought. And hers could not be. Hers was accursed. Those threads would fray within the walls as they pecked at them as long as she resided here. Those walls loomed, and they held no nooks. They were a canvas for death to paint on. For cackling to echo within the shadows of, holding the sheets over the eyes of a widow who halted her weeping and stood, phlegmatic to the rest of the world. They loomed above, hollow, and yet there lay truths in every memory that should be.

The paintbrush was lain upon the paper as she wandered down a straight hallway, stumbling wearily with lack of sleep, and stood so close to that dreaded room. Its blood was crimson, the doves stepping away, sorrowful as the child forever guilty, and woeful as the good wife, weeping to keep going through a tangle of glinting chains around her finger, around her neck, around her chest. And those corpses of what should be, they tore gashes in the stone and scorched the skin of the forest with the entrails that burnt their mark into the sky. There lay before her a wall so cold her skin cried out at the cruel iciness off its surface around the crater left by that single brushstroke. That crow pecking still at the stone, its eyes weary and its movement jagged. But its tear with seams that held threads by the skin of a tooth was simply that, and the world seemed just to laugh. To turn their heads and never so much as glance over.