Woman Scorned

Ealga

Wrenching, wreathing, wailing. She sheathes their brittle bones in her stomach. Ealga's barren womb has fatally consumed her, but now it is filling slowly with excavated bones. Dirt borders her fingernails from the dig. Gently, blood strokes down her wedding band, smoothing out its battered surface. The ground is sleek with rainwater, licking at her exposed neck.

Purple ruddy clouds are battered across the sky by the wind that wails along with Ealga. Land plummets into the sea a few short meters from the left side of her now despondent body.  A laborious pant reanimates her image. To her right, land reaches out to join the main Island. It sludges around mottled livestock, churning up rocks revealed like teeth beneath sodden lips,  before meeting the sand of the beach below.  

The villagers rarely populate the headland, fearful of whispers and rumors of its contents below the salty ground.

For as long as any of the villagers can remember, the children that died before they could be blessed were buried on the furthermost point of the headland, which points out into the Atlantic Ocean. Nearly-Mothers would slump whenever the road to the next village veered around to show the headland across from it. Lightly buried lay sons that may have helped to work the land this hard winter, daughters who may have cared for them when two years past they fell into ill health, there lay the babes that may have brought joy into a bleak moment, laughter into a silent day and happiness into a struggling marriage.

The Catholic Church reined over the tiny Island and ensured that only those children who has been blessed by one of their own where buried in the cemetery inland, so the hunched women must continue to walk on around the bay. The villagers never chose to bury their here but necessity for removal from the village, banishment by the church and an inability to remove their bond for their babes led the mothers to this spot time and time again. Until mothers that had been allowed time to grieve returned with polished rocks to brightly circle the dead and mark them as those who might have been.

Eagla's hands are a dirty burgundy with a mix of blood and dirt as she slamed her palm over the inch of exposed bone protruding from her stomach, driving the rest of it in. These are the bones of the un-blessed babies. This one in particular, unbeknownst to Eagla belonged to her cousin who lived only to see the sunrise before he wilted away. Her legs twitch and she sighs softly as the pain and slow throb of loosing blood waft her to unconsciousness, her wish for pregnancy in any form fulfilled.