Ripples of grief

Chapter 5

Within the lights she heard the glint of smiles, and it all began to rush through her mind. The paranoia of every footstep was just that pulse – the one focus. The one voice. The one serpentine thought that could choke her or leave her to her misery; In flowers there was a love blooming, or hissing smoke from the candle as the past loves gather around a stone to gaze upon the buried corpse of the one they had known. As she wandered, the forest knew – perhaps this was a grave, blooming, vibrant flowers glowering with uncanny nostalgia that lurked where it knew struck anguish. It knew her – these serpentine tendrils with leaves to catch agony in its palm were so innocent, and yet they seemed to writhe in anguish, a dull, ineffable dance of smoke – they were not the distant first love torn so painfully apart but the moment as the flowers are tossed upon the ground, letting the smoke trail toward a begging sky with viridian stalks sprouting into looming figures of green. They were serpents; hissing and striking the innocent with claws of ice that would never thaw. She shivered, letting her hand fall with trembling dread toward the amber skin of a beauty somewhat... Uncanny. It spoke as if it were a friend, but with compassion slithering down its serpentine viper's scales like wax down a melting candle. Or like ink down the page it lit with blinding sharpness, ebbing and flowing with inconstant dread, knowing each word was delicate, an art that could be so beautiful, and yet turned to ash the dreams it held for you. It could choke every wandering soul out on that field as the reflection of her bedraggled complexion drifted past in a torrent of sinister whispers – it swirled around as if the scales were gold, a joy so intermittent. They swirled beyond her grasp as she grasped at the stalk; but it seemed thin, and perhaps the ink was so delicate, a blade that did not want to strike her flesh and draw blood. She held the stalk in her hand. Somehow holding the scales of a viper was comparable to this etching of horrors upon horrors, but it was not the only tendril that could be held. There were many held within, branches of possibilities that held nothing but hopelessness – and she let them whisper mournfully into her ear, moulding her thoughts and contorting whispers into roars from beasts.

They whispered every memory, and yet here it rang out deafeningly, leaving tremors in the sea far behind her. Smiles within the scales of a viper as it lies beneath the petals of a rose. Lingering joy as the residue fades little by little and all begins to cascade down like blood; everything could have been prevented if only a single path had wound from that flower, another serpent bitten into her world and tossed it aside in favour of a desolate place of misery. There had once been hope, but a full knot of those possibilities whirled in a storm of foreboding before her, her reflection slithering past as they whispered in her ear. There had once been hope, but now it was left to a path far behind her of solace and peace, comfort flowing in rivers of joy with no brooding fog lurking above. Hope had been snatched away by the wind, its clutches strong and fierce, whispers cast into the whirling torrent of despair, leaving her with a flower, rasping those stories of lingering joy and smiles before it too was snatched away, and in her hand, she held one of a different kind of compassion, cold and emotionless; it held no dread that one day that constant gunfire would lead to a death. And yet it felt more fitting to have raindrops cascade down that. Felt more comforting to have stories that may have seemed insignificant before. Somewhere within that stream of melancholy was the dull glow of a surreal sorrow that seemed almost kind, almost a comforting hand against her shoulder. A bell. A bell. The shivers seemed to speak a dull, pulsing tongue that squirmed through blades of silhouetted eclipses, and though these serpents were quieter, and they held blunt knives, not shattered glass among a sea of smiles, it was an unsettling calm after, the silence of a funeral – perhaps the wind had clutched at those branches as it blew past, desperately trying to extend its tendrils, choke entrails out of soldiers with the bullets carried in the wind with desperation for something more than a meagre hint; a tainted answer with ink that flowed with a cowering uncertainty. Perhaps they wished they could know why the bell rang in the distance. For the heralding of grief of the most wicked, oppressive kind, or the binding of two hearts. She heard it. She heard her pulse quicken as she chased it, a flash of foreboding in the distance as she did.