Perusal
Author's Note
"I write poems to burn by firelight
...
For I sing songs until the break of dawn."
~Noel's Lament
The lazy afternoon haze of the small town, the absolute silence and unbearable heat and orange glow and floor that burned. Light-footed youngling scurrying from one corner to another in the verandah, imagining a world of her own.
The children cried in the walls of the darkened rooms, heard from houses away, never silenced. They tore at the paint and sucked the remains from their nailbeds, exposing the blue surface beneath. They wandered in search of spirits, some presence, someone to conquer and console.
The eldest imagined herself the queen of their little citadel, ordering gusts of wind and reptilian eyes that watched unnoticed. The rest chased each other to fits while she imagined herself a sorceress. Cruel lies and tears she shed years later, all in a week's work. The rotten child, first of the family.
Some thought she would be the obedient, submissive girl they raised. Your silver anklets are locked in the safe, they said. When you are of age, we will see them worn.
Bring the waters. The holy waters will tame her spirits and temper. Seven rivers there were, milk and honey baths, and pastels. To silence her, they'd scream and she would take it all in. Their noise would be her silence. She receded further, and further, and further into the confines of her mind.
Some say she stretched it too far.
They took her for a simpleton, the giggling chubby child. The chuckling, bubbly kind.
And now she sits in darkened rooms rarely lit with wilting flames. Reddish hues emanating from candles left long unused. She sits with vacancy in her eyes and a peculiar, wry smile.
“I feel pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood, before misfortune had tainted my mind, and changed its bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self.”
~Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
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