Promises Unkept

Fleeting Profundity

Could something so fleeting be so profound?

A friendship so brief, that could never loop into a whole story, a tale so incomplete_ that it could never be told without a touch of sorrow, could it command such affections as this one?

Three months and such forceful love? Such fanatical devotion?

Was it possible in a fairy tale, for the fairy to end up dead?

Mrs. Hopkins pressed her handkerchief harder upon her lips as she watched Eden sitting down on the grass by Maggie’s grave with an abandoned expression on the face, her dark eyes watching the soft grave bulge with not complaining rage, not seething grief, but a simply unbearable affection.

As if she could see Maggie’s face from up here. As if she could talk to her from where she sat.

As if Maggie would smile up at her the next moment from where she lay.

Carol and Bella had tried to get Eden to understand the meaning of all this but Mrs. Hopkins asked them to leave her alone.

Eden was beyond them today.

Or perhaps, Mrs. Hopkins knew the knowledge that Eden held.

She knew that Eden knew the meaning of all this. Only, that this pain was so sharp, so severe that it had been veiled into some darker recess of her mind.

She was floating in fantasy.

Mrs. Hopkins shivered every time her eyes met Eden and the unearthly glitter met hers.

“Come girls.” The old lady croaked. “Say your goodbyes. This ends here.”

Carol and Bella pressed their roses on the grave of the darling girl they had known since she was little.

It was hard to believe that the girl who was ever so restless in her own mischief now lay so restfully that no amount of bellowing could wake her up.

The thunder roared in the sky after a sudden flash of lightening, making them all flinch.

It would rain any moment now.

“Carol. Bella. Eden, dear. Come.” Mrs. Hopkins summoned the weeping girls and Eden as they left Magpie’s side and followed Mrs. Hopkins downhill.

In this world so vast, in this maze of my fiction and your reality, it wasn’t going to be very hard to forget Magpie. To let her decay into earth, burn into ashes and fade into dust.

To leave her alone.

But for one person.

For Eden.

Eden stumbled thrice on the way downhill, falling on her hand and knees, her dilated ghostly eyes looking around at the trees and the sky as if it was all unknown to her.

Then she would look at Mrs. Hopkins or Carol or Bella and laugh at her own clumsiness with the same eerie expression. A laughter that died long before reaching her eyes. She would get up, dust her hands and the errant patches of dust off her black gown and set into pace with them as if her world had not been turned upside down just now.

She had maniac edges in her today.

She stood on that perimeter of the world where pain was as substantial as the grass beneath the feet. She had stopped noticing it altogether.

***

The wheezing wind current threw an assault of dry leaves and dust over the remnant funeral returnees as they reached the courtyard of the Manor.

They were about to enter the manor all from service door, when Mrs. Hopkins stopped short, her head slightly extended toward the front arena of the manor.