Ripples of grief

Chapter 7

The fog through which the slender petal had glided, words intangible despite the paper that drifted before so many, began to retreat. A blooming, dancing fire burned in the distance, its furious tremors of heat that echoed over every branch of hope, watching it drown in the vapour of what had once been a great wound upon the paper; upon the serpent beneath the rose. Watching the residue gather into clumps of tendrils, crimson and searching for something – anything. It was the remains of a great wound seared into the ground, bleeding as it was dug – and that blood fed those flowers. Fed the thorns they bit and scratched with rabidly; she knew they would linger, despite the clearing storm – they were a food for the starving vipers in the shadows, glimmering with crimson temptations beyond the divine; beyond heaven; beyond hell. A bait. They revealed vile, bloodied fangs, bones scattered around them, and they seemed not to notice, seething within as they saw the great lake of scarlet blood left behind after all was done. They crawled from the shadows with desperation as strong as foreboding, and their scales glimmered with that same blood, no longer spotless and midnight-tinted – the rose withered and they knew to pluck it from that ground upon which it lay, choking in the yellow tendrils of vapour. And pour into its mouth past grotesque fangs that protruded from gums that swelled that crimson left behind. It was a throbbing wound in the walls as the pulse beat once again, before faltering. And the roots reached out. Yawned. Awakening. Breathing. The wilted ferns of beauty began to tremble, perhaps in the wind. She was delusional. It was just a rose in a vase. But she saw those jaws, they cackled as the sacrifice came toward them. And a great roar erupted. Silence. From the spot where the crow's beak had tossed it, an apparition of an uncanny face, it had leapt up, its gaze expectant. But there were threads that even after years could not be stitched painstakingly back into place, and there still lay a wound upon the serpent. Where so many thorns had been tossed aside in perishing agony that the ocean still lay, desolate and empty, memories torn to shreds by a careless beak that glimmered with that blood it fed to the serpentine stalk of the great rose, stirring the roots and spreading cracks like disease.

She sat upon the perch, scattered with bones that jutted out of the fabric, unable to be moulded back into place – she could almost picture that nightmare once again, his silhouette wandering into oblivion, the rose's prey falling under the spell of those fangs and not turning back as its beak – a crow's delicate dagger – pierced the skin of the viper, watching it recoil. She could see the shadows return to the corners; where regretted words and solemn memories lay engraved in the cracks. Its prey simply glanced back, before fading into the remains of the page like a simple apparition, hidden behind a veil like a corpse, grotesque and hidden away in some distant tomb of hopes and dreams. A fire lit under a match, twilight shadows glinting like silhouettes of fallen angels – it held menace in its glare – menace that it would hold in its palm as it brought the shadows out across the ceiling, simply watching them slither desperately toward the scar of blood. It knew, and so did she as she plucked from the windowsill the newspaper, serpents moving across it swift as shadows, that the stitches could never be plucked from the furniture and the scars healed, that the crimson would always lie, even if hidden in the crevices where the shadows could disguise its bloody complexion. Floods of poppies would never repay the great metal undead that had fought and fought but failed. It knew as it was overthrown, and the flames that danced upon the horizon pierced its light, the pulse fading into oblivion – it knew that some stitches could not be resewn, not even by the most graceful hand. The serpents had been retreating into the shadows, onto the newspapers, dread settling, leaving newspapers and letters tossed upon the windowsill in a frantic melody of grief with a pulse swift to choke you. They seemed more joyful, colour radiating into the room until her glance met the dread of that date – 1916 – that word – the melancholy of remorse for a grief caused by those fangs – Somme. What a strange thing. Just another step and all that attempt to repair would be for nothing. If they just retreated before the blood could be poured into the flower's mouth and the pulse could begin to race, perhaps the crow would never have left to abandon the rose as it perished.