Ripples of grief

Chapter 4

She listened to the water ripple with the rain as it began to pour, a storm never quite far and never quite near. Just footsteps. Footsteps of that soldier that wanders. Dry mouth. An arid land of dreary seas. And those poppies in the water of soul that flowed in a torrent of moonlight – those flowers tossed down as a reminder that that heartbeat may be slow but only ever dormant; its slow rhythm always lurks. She felt the lingering tremors of the thunder on her skin, as if it were the sheet over the dead that wavered in the breath of death; the crimson soaking through to form flowers – blunt daggers. A sea of shattered dreams lay below as the sheets of blunt knives and lost hope began to leap gracefully in a rhythm of dull melancholy. A cold that scorched the dry, dry skin of the soldier as they walked through a field of poppies, a web of blood leading only to disaster. Victims writhed and squirmed away from the web, but that pulse began to quicken, white feathers falling in the wind and cascading down and down and down. The sea began to tremble. And yet the pulse was steady. An arid land with mere, silent footfalls as a melody – the glinting of those black tendrils, scales singing songs of mournful joy by moonlight. She knew it was simply a storm. And yet it heard her. It spoke. She was a silhouette to the moon, beaming down upon the mass of entrails; simply clinging onto a strand of the web of poppies, unable to let it out of her desperate clutches. It saw her silhouette, tossing a white feather down into the abyss and mocking those who fuelled the ever-steadier pace of war, and lifted for a moment the strand of a thread she clung to; her gaze glimpsed a single black tendril, and it followed it – a momentum comparable to the dull ticking of a pendulum; a clock always ticking. Faster, it whispered, faster, faster, faster. Now breathe. She turned and whimpered, watching fog cloud the dreamy promises of a hope found only in innocence and joy. Even poppies have thorns – even serpentine tendrils of grace and innocence that flow in a river still may feel like shattered glass upon weak skin, dry and begging. They shattered into smaller pieces upon her palms, and she saw the poppies rise in writhing battlefield. Toward the canvas.

A pulse swifter to grasp the serpent's tongue, so graceful yet so woeful, settled upon the canvas, a looming threat of a ravenous crow to pluck the villages. A spoken word that could cast the world into ruin or despair. That heartbeat, the drum of war. Footsteps; letters written late at night while the sinister, cruel fog crept over to simply watch the insidious shadows suffer. A single crack in the placid mask upon the canvas and that was all it took for the vines to reach out arms of desperation and retrieve nothing in return. And become a grotesque monstrosity; briefly illuminated anguish flashed before her eyes as she looked into the water. They wore down the smiles to mere shreds of happiness – until only paper remained and the gazes were never returned with a joyous smile. That pulse still lingered, growing faster and throbbing in desperation and mistrust as the men caught in that dreadful web began to glare into the eyes of their own people, sympathy dancing in sparse numbers within. The water trembled incessantly – as she slept upon the wooden petal the serpents could so easily choke her. And yet they didn't, instead choosing to lay its teeth above the flesh of those poor silhouettes of soldiers and their wives. Tainted water bled from the worn edges of torn canvas, and she saw the crimson with morbid disgust – despite knowing that that it knew so much about her. It was not uncanny; it was a disease. One from the cracks and edges that seethed in that eternal pulse of war – that eternal tempo of grief that never quite went away from its victims. They clung on as the poppies rose to the top of the ocean, making it hard to breathe among the dirt. A cold grave of water and bones – carcasses beside and above. Corpses for company. Corpses that bled tainted water in a vile froth – like blood. But from a wound of a blunt knife – the ravine of deep scarlet that chokes out life slowly. She heard the pulse of war now, fading. Yet swift as the reaper's scythe as the dirt and the sea bury those perished silhouettes; caught in a web and unable to escape as the serpents drown them out.

The writhing beasts toss her aside like a puppet, and she is cast into the shattered dreams, choking out vile crimson while the eye of the moon watches, blinks, its pupil thin as the tear that falls, poisoning the ground it falls upon with sorrow – the ripples of the grief that once was.

The beasts glared at her with contempt, saying nothing, leaving only placid, emotionless gazes as the strings were torn away and the cruel sorrow remained as a lingering remnant of those whimpering cries of a child as the agony fades and gives way to that sinister curtain – those beasts knew nothing but the crackle of gunshots. The growling of distant hounds, mechanical and flailing as their gazes lay heavy on the ground. That was what they knew; and so, with no hesitation they crept closer to her neck as her withered, weary form lay part-conscious upon the surface, breath rasping and choked out like a secret, sworn to be behind bars until head hits contemptuous ground. She trembled in a distant melody of hope, her pulse stirring with that gunshot still, the rocking of a cot keeping her corpse from halting a constant dance of – with a jolt she stirred, the fog seeming to seep into the wounds those teeth had cast onto her weary form, never caring about a scratch upon stoic metal, sleeping and undead. She was a tear in the fabric of their flesh, and they did not care to instil upon her cruel ravines of scarlet rivers and sinister paths like veins – they could simply cast her upon the ground carelessly, as if the crib had fallen, tossing the child upon a cold stone floor among silhouettes of light. It was found in the cracks, in the blades of menacing branches that sprout from a strike of thunder, an idea of sheer cruelty and menace. Within was a path; she scanned it for light but there was only the insidious moonlight – footsteps fled across from the gleaming fang of the viper. A disease spreads, and so do shadows from a wound, and stains from those veins that extend – within darkness lies a simple assortment of flowers and footsteps. Lures laid out for her. She stepped upon it as she gazed upon the blades of glinting trunks, wrinkles of a story carved into their flesh; just as the vipers had slashed into hers among the turmoil of the writhing waves; and they too held veils before her, vines from trees and shadows from vines. They tossed darkness over her as she wandered the labyrinthine path, stumbling and rambling on as the veils were cast before her, the brush of their leaves against her skin as gentle as a blanket placed over a sleeping corpse, cruelly delicate and kind as the tears were muffled and faded away into nothing.

Another gunshot in the distance, leaving a trembling ripple over the ground as if waves of lives were cast into light before fading to mere corpses; shadows upon the ground. There was no residue of those lights, simply darkness after the flash of sure-footed rage. Then a deep silence. One no one would remember. She took steps into the dark, finding the shadows cast fainter, quivering in her weary form as she cowered from the crimson tint over the shadows she walked among, casting blame over her hands as red as scarlet blood. Another flash, and a residue began to linger like grief as life fades. Fallen soldiers began to fall from the leaves, remnants of those last few voices of cruelty and kindness, warmth and abandonment – distant gunshots fading as the carcasses fell and were buried beneath the ground, cast behind veils of vines and timber blades of a cot. Wind choked through those blades, deadly secrets fluttering past. But the residue still lingered. Those blades were weak. They could only gaze upon those who smiled and let the vipers choke out light, leaving them with no flame to return to. They were weak, trembling and quivering against the sharp wound of blood and the stench sour in their mouth; then it seemed to fall. And linger for a moment – before the stories spilled into the wind. Behind her a blade seemed to fall with grace, a guillotine before the accused as they lie, ready to perish before it. Echoes across the crowd. Mourners and jeering voices that cry into the darkness, piercing, acrimonious words that cast dread into those who hear them through the veils of grief; some shivered in silence while others whispered – whispered those stories in the wind like the echo of a scream, distorted and anguish-ridden. Scars never painted accurately enough upon a canvas. There were vipers buried within the faded canvas and they seemed to echo, trembling slightly as they cast veils, knotting themselves together and leaving serpents to ripple as a shadow of what once was – they bled into the night as they wrapped around the neck of the crow, casting in their scale-coated flesh wounds that choked out deep crimson. And yet that was just a grim pulse of war. A reminder of the fangs of the viper that sank with the sound of three, deafening gunshots.

She heard the cries. They were uncanny – and yet they were so easily drowned out by the choking vines that were but a glimmering silhouette. They were so easily buried like the sinister corpses beneath the dirt, memories cast behind a screen of darkness that was a labyrinthine task to navigate. There was no petal; even as she glanced behind her the thorns, blades of glinting wood, gleamed in the night. But nowhere to be seen among the glowing stars upon the ground was the withered, damp petal. The boat that had carried her across the squirming cot of serpents was devoured, nowhere to be seen. She was left to the forest, full of dimly glimmering stars.