The Maggies

The Maggies-Explained

Welcome to 'The Maggies-Explained'. 

A few people have asked me what this short tale is about. I have had a lot of people ask if the girl was demonic or the mother possessed. Well, grab yourself a cup of tea (laced with wine) and have a seat. Let me tell you what this story is really about...

Sometimes, there is a sorrow so deep and dark that finds us, possesses us and takes up residence in what was once our love, our heart, sanity and life.

The day Maggie came, all the blue-birds flew backwards 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. 

-this is a reminder of the past of our MC's life, a recollection of her joy shattering.

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, and she looked at me as though it was I who was mad. 

- Maggie was born alive and healthy yet her mother refused to believed it since none of her other children were born alive, hence she tells the nurse that the baby should be wrapped in black (a mourning hue, that her other children were wrapped in).

Maggie watched me as I held her. Her long lashes were dotted with minuscule pearls of blood. Her tiny body was streaked in 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 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.

-It is not Maggie herself that has stolen the colour from the mother's world, rather the loss off all the children past.

I tried to love Maggie. For twelve years I fed her, 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 our of the window and into the waves.

I could not bare 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 reason to live was gone. Mourning hues suited Maggie just fine.

-Maggie is not given another colour because the MC believes that Maggie is really dead and simply a hallucination. She cannot offer her another colour, or love, since loving Maggie would only crush the mother. 

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 for 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 that came to waltz on the stone walls of the tower that whispered of a million sins.

-By now the MC is going mad...mad...madder still. She keeps seeing the Maggie phantom that has been haunting her for the past 16 years and is losing her mind. All the MC now sees is black, white and grey, she has become colour-blind and things that is because the maggies (magpies) have come and stolen the colour from her life away. The MC has confused magpies with her dead children...all which have been named Margaret. 

Some say the mad should be locked in asylums and not in towers given to them by Lords. But a tower is a tower none-the-less. 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.

-The mother is a Lady, married to a Lord. Yet her husband is often gone and the MC is left alone with a few house keepers/nurse/etc, which stay out of her way. Her loneliness is killing her.

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.

-The tombstones are of children who have been born still. Of all the Margarets that came into the word with no breath. Death and life have become a mangled confusion. 

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 blue-birds she once helped usher away.

-The MC can no longer go on with the phantom Maggie hovering in the garden, in her life. The mother believes if this Margaret, too, is dead, then she needs to be set free. The MC kills Maggie in hope that the bluebirds (her dead children) may return.

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 blue birds to return.  

-The mother waits, and waits, for her beloved children to return to her...but they never do. The blue birds never come back and it is the maggies who stay and hover above her till her dying day. 

So, in a nutshell, the loss of all her other children drove our MC insane. Maggie was just an innocent child, in need of love not death.