unraveled

the butchered spring

It's the spring in Cervaux that is most enchanting. The snow melts into pearly droplets of water, and races down the mountains. Leaves fly back to the spots they vacated in autumn and the sky is painted blue. Everything is chirping - the birds, the women who sell oranges in town, the crickets, the village choir. The air is tainted emerald and sticky. The lake is once again a mother to its bathing children, and a lover to its bathing women. Lovebells bloom in bright pink bursts and asters shine with their butter yellow core and a corona of soft purple. Boys make assortments of lilacs and ivy to give to the pretty girls on Yurk Street with a blush and untied shoelaces. Graves dug beneath winter snow are remembered, and the graveyard becomes a sober assortment of flowers on stone. Sunlight filters through the air and arching tree branches let it through in beams of heaven, a haven incarnate, an eternal arch of nature. The smell of bloom is laden in the air and the mighty snow and winter sins are forgotten in desperate prayer and gratitude for better days. The foxes turn red, and in that they are magical for they change fur every season. They crouch in bloodstained fur under the Nellop Caves, digesting little girls. The earth steals back its colors and brown mud and cobblestones streets are painted with chalk. Each step either on a symbol, or a heart, or a laughing face. Everyday is a beautiful and worthy day to die on and so was a Tuesday, the very day the Butcher's wife died, or so they say, for they never found a corpse. Some say the looters from Ferin took her, some say she drowned in the lake, some say a bird flew away with her in its talons. I say the bird has better luck biting its own beak than moving the wife, much less lifting her.

Giggles escaped behind beer glasses at that. It was easy to make the girls laugh. The boy didn't tell them that Nia could replace just a few words in that sentence and make it so wicked that they would cry. With them, Nia talked in flecks of dust and hid her true mind that spinned storms, and crackled lightning.

After a day of work in the kitchens at the tavern, the boy sat backstage listening to her tell stories the way she did from the start of time. A bottle in his hand and a cushion at his back became the only part of the day he looked forward to. What a pathetic life, he thought. He tuned back into the story to check whether he missed his lighting cue and tuned out again knowing that it was a few sentences away. The boy thought about the butcher's wife and her knives, with blades sharp enough to make assassins shy away. He thought about how one morning he'd heard boys talk about the mysterious vanishing of the plump woman who could end debates with one glance of her cold eyes. He remembered sitting in cold mud, the boys surrounding him, one of the bigger, meaner, more-of-an-asshole boys named Calix insulting him or at least trying to - "tell me you delinquent ass, did you kill her? Or did you just look at her and she killed herself?" and the other boys laughing, throwing rocks at him. They had amazing skills in turning absolutely anything to hand-crafted curses for him, at least that's what he thought they were meant to be. Their lack of skill was hardly secretive. He remembered laying there long after they were gone, gazing at the canopy above, his bruises burning, and giggling. Giggling at the way one of the boys had tripped over himself while finding a rock or at the poorly-crafted sentences that were meant to hurt or their mothers running after them, warning them to stay away from the people who lived on Ferin street. He laughed at how they used swear words to show their authority and anger. How the boy's lack of response only made their voices louder and higher. He laughed at how they'd aimed for the wrong parts of the story to make an insult - the conspiracy of a murder and not how her actual vanishing. The best insults were always the truth. When he'd finished laughing away the hurt, he got up and thanked the gods and stealers above that he'd kept his mouth shut and his hands to his sides. He took another swig from his bottle and blinked back to reality. He reached for the lever, guilty for missing his cue but it was already down and the stage was covered in hues of red as bright as blood. The boy looked around for someone who might have picked up the cue but no one was there. He celebrated this unconscious awareness with another swig. He got up, brushing off his cargo pants and stretched his arms above his head, yawning. He looked out of the wing and saw his bottle rolling its way onto the stage, the sound chasing its own tail as it stopped a quarter way to where Nia was, though no one was looking at her. All sights were fixed on to the mysterious bottle. In an attempt to get it back before Nia saw it and banned him from the theatres, the boy laid down on his stomach and reached out his hands as far as they could go without emerging from the wing. His fingertips brushed the glass surface, but that only made the bottle roll further.

Nia still didn't look, giving undiluted attention to the words spilling from her mouth, her gaze rigidly fixed on a tiny window above the audience on the opposite wall. The boy heard a few of the girls sitting near the wings giggle, he grinned at them trying his best to make this look like a part of the act. Eventually the bottle was too far to be approached by his arms only and he got up into a crawl, emerging from the wing into the red of the stage, wooden splinters digging in his palms as he crawled to the bottle. Nia would have been able to see him if she'd just tilted her head slightly but her gaze was still fixed on the window above. Some members from the audience gasped in shock and amusement as his hands once again touched the bottle and it rolled further away, the sound enveloping itself. He looked out from the stage meeting gazes of bearded men and pigtailed girls all looking at him. He grinned again and shook his body in desperate attempts of showing this as part of the act, though Nia was not at all talking about a man on all fours running after a bottle instead to his inconvenience she was talking about how during the winter in Cervaux the men of town burned trees and the women sang. Her voice had a distant gait to it, as if she were moving farther and farther away from here with each word she spoke.

The boy gave up and stood walking to the bottle where he once again kicked it causing it to roll further out of reach. Exasperated and annoyed by this he kicked the bottle into the wing in front of him and turned towards the audience. With a final bow, he followed his bottle into the dark. Nia was still talking, undistracted though he was sure there was absolutely no chance that she hadn't noticed that. Now with his bottle empty, he chose to get drunk instead on the details of the theatre in honor of his last time here. Calling this tavern a theatre, was an insult to theatres for it was a tavern. There wasn't much behind the wings other than a door that opened outside and the boy's sodden body. So he leaned on his elbow, and poked his head out, a cat looking for a mouse, not to eat but to play with. It was a sticky little room, and home to all - young, old, short, big, stout. There was a stage that took up the length of one of the walls and was bracketed with two wings created solely by placing black pieces of wood that blocked the audience. There was a stool in the middle of the stage which was where Nia sat. Beer cups and roasted peanuts were center-pieces on each little table around which people sat huddled together. Here, and now, everyone forgot their differences. There was not much screaming or thumping, and the occasional mutter was rarely occasional. A mother held her babe in her bosom and rocked it to sleep, ears strained to Nia's voice, while an old man caressed his young wife's rear as she sat on his lap, ears strained to the ancient voice of stories. The tavern stunk of dirty bodies, and alcohol burps. Unimpressed by the mice, the cat fell back on his cushion and left the tavern to visit the world of his dreams. 

Love,
Cora. ✮