Among the salt-licked tombstones and the blood-red roses, my mother's fragile sanity shatters and she is slowly driven to madness. My mother believes I, her only living child, is a ghost haunting her. But I am flesh and blood...am I not?
A bereft mo...
The day Maggie came all the bluebirds flew backward into the sea. I watched them from the window of the tower as they plunged into the hungry maw of the waves, never to be seen again.
Maggie came into the world covered from head to toe in blood. The nurse-maid swaddled her, wrapped her tiny, silent body in a blanket that was fast turning crimson. I could not help but think the nurse stupid when I told her the baby should have been wrapped in black, she just looked at me as though it was I who was mad.
Maggie watched me as I held her. Her long lashes were dotted with minuscule pearls of blood. Her tiny body was streaked with afterbirth making her look like some newly hatched little bird. I placed my hand over her heart, willed it to stop. Maggie's orbs were the blue of the deepest skies, ones that could draw you in and permit you to dream of things that would never come true. I knew that she had stolen the color from the sky and inked it in her eyes. Maggie had come, sucked away the yellow of the sun, the green of the grass, the rose on my cheeks. Yet, I wept for the bluebirds Maggie had stolen away more than the fact that the sky would forever stay a steely gray.
I tried to love Maggie. For twelve years I fed her and brushed her long black hair, but I could not feel for her the way a mother should feel for her child. I sewed her simple gray stockings and long, black dresses with pockets where she hid polished stones she found on the shores of the sea and gave them to me. The stones were gray and when she turned her back I tossed every single one of them out of the window and into the waves.
I could not bear to give Maggie another color to have but black and gray. She had taken so much from me already. Every single hue that had once given me a reason to live was gone. Mourning hues suited Maggie just fine.
When Maggie was sixteen, I watched her walk out into the garden where thorns and thistles had over-taken the rosebushes I had planted so many years ago. I still mourned the loss of my garden, for the beautiful lavenders and pinks of my bell-flowers and carnations. I wept for the red; the deep blood red of my roses whose heads now hung like weeping women who spent their days watching the ground waiting for the day that they were buried deep under the dirt, blossoms, leaves and all. Maggie seemed to enjoy the sharp spikes littering the garden. She reached out to them, her fingers caught in their burrs and drew blood that painted the ugliness of the garden with a red I so desired.
By candle-light, my moonlight daughter recited haunted verses, invoking phantoms. They came to waltz on the stone walls of the tower that whispered of a million sins.
Some say the mad should be locked in asylums and not in towers given to them by Lords. There is no one here to judge you but the stones jutting from the walls. Even God turns a blind eye to the wretched. The path I had taken had led me through a winding labyrinth of insanity that ushered me deeper and deeper into darkness, into the pulsing pain that I sought to find in its core.
When the sea crashed over the rocks, I watched Maggie wander among the three tombstones, trailing her finger over her name that had been etched in each of the salt-licked stones. I thought of plucking her eyes out and feeding them to the sea, mixing the blue with the saltiness of the water. I thought of gangly arms floating in the waves, little minnows swimming between her teeth.
When I lifted the knife, Maggie saw it shine in the rays of the moonlight. Her slender arms fluttered like broken wings as she tumbled to the ground. Her black hair fanned before her as she lay among my grieving roses. When the storm came and thunder crashed overhead, I saw the magpies flee from her soul, flying after the bluebirds she once helped usher away.
Blood dripped from the knife as I sat among the thorns and watched the sky, waiting, waiting...waiting for the maggies to fly away and the bluebirds to return.
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This is my entry for the fright 's 'Gothic Gloom'. Thanks to those of you who've taken the time to read this! I hope you have enjoyed this story. :)
