Wonderland End

Chapter 2

Beatrix had just changed into her nightgown. She put her hair into thick braids and headed towards the washroom.

The sink was filled with warm water, foaming with delicate rose-scented soap that coated the washroom and doorway with its floral perfume. Beatrix sighed as she stood over the sink. She rolled up her sleeves, dipping her hand into the foam. She felt around at the sink's walls and eventually gripped the bit of fabric she was looking for. As she pulled it out, she couldn't help but cringe at its soaked texture, dripping with thick, heavy drops of water. Beatrix squeezed it and smoothed it out on her left hand. It was her cream satin glove, the one she had worn to dinner with the Doyle family earlier this evening. In between the thumb and index finger was a thin but unmistakable stripe of blood. Beatrix winced, dipped the glove back into the water and rubbed the fabric between her hands. The stain didn't budge. She rubbed the glove all the more harshly. Her hands burned. But she rubbed. She rubbed as though she wanted to tear the delicate satin into a thousand pieces.

Beatrix's wrist ached. The water splashed and soap splattered onto the mirror as she despondently tossed the glove back into the sink. She sank to the floor, pressed her knees against her chest and buried her head in them. Beatrix felt a painful force building up in her lungs that quickly manifested into a fit of violent coughing that sent more blood streaking along her lips and chin. Her eyes were blurry with tears. Her chest throbbed.

Beatrix had always been a rather small girl. However in recent years she had become progressively thinner and more brittle, to the point that she looked sickly and constantly on the verge of collapse. Though not yet as much as her mother did on her deathbed. In her last year of life, Anne Linkworth was little more than a skeleton with skin stretched over it, rotting away in bed or a chair, hacking up blood, barely capable of eating but still enjoyed a good cigarette once in a while. Little brought her joy when her daughter wasn't visiting her in the sanatorium. Their meetings always had to take place outside and in an open space. They would sit by one another, gazing into the distance, talking as though to the sky and the trees far away. Usually Anne found it easier to do that way. It felt too difficult to face her daughter and all the regrets at this time in particular.

"Oh, Trixie," she said one day, "You really are the best thing that's ever happened to me, you know that?"

She didn't turn to look at Trixie. She just took another whiff from her cigarette. Anne had never said this to her before. The phrase "Oh, Trixie" was generally followed by something along the lines of "What a foolish little girl you are" or "You never listen, never learn, do you?" Only when she said words like these would she look her daughter in the eye.

Beatrix herself held many painful regrets. Her mother was a cold and distant individual. Her father told her once, "Listen Trixie, she's brittle. She's not nearly as strong as you may think she is. She loves you like I do. She just can't show it. It's not her heart that's made of stone, it's her chest"

But by 1914 the stone wall that was her chest had collapsed leaving her heart and bleeding, rotting lungs in the vast open. Anne Linkworth was being eaten alive by a merciless beast the doctors referred to as tuberculosis.

At this point Beatrix felt a terrible, agonising remorse that seemed to devour her as viciously as her mother's disease. She spent her childhood distancing herself from her mother because of her frigid outer shell, too blind to notice the love that burned deep inside

Her father was a man who didn't blame nor judge. He loved Beatrix and Anne with an iron hard passion. Beatrix spent the majority of her childhood around him, helping him with his little artistic, often eccentric projects. Running wild and staying as true to herself as can be. Only with him did Beatrix feel free of the necessity of having to adorn herself with a hard mask that reeked of cold, rigid reticence. Upon receiving the news of his death, however, it ceased to be a mask, and took on the role of her constant outward appearance.