Like A Lamb To The Slaughter

Felicity rocked from side to side, hugging her arms tight about her shoulders.

“Something is lost, something is found, something is lost, something is found.” She repeated the mantra over and over, exhausted with the enormity of keeping the world in balance.

She stared upwards at the lonely lantern swinging from a wire high above, flickering with its urgent anxiety. She knew there was a message hidden in the tempo of it’s waxing and waning. If only she could slow it down enough to decipher it. People were blind to the secrets all about them, waiting to be interpreted. Didn’t they understand? It was dangerous to ignore them, they were the guardians of humanity. You ignored them at your peril.

When she first heard the voices as a child, she would wake up in the night and her father came and stroked her back, rocking her in his arms just like she rocked herself now. He would try to calm her.

“Shut your eyes and think of somewhere, somewhere cold and caked in snow.” And as she sat in the circle of his security she would feel calm descend. They sat together as the snow in her mind fell slowly, feather soft, and gently muffle all the voices. The ice gradually numbed every thought into oblivion and then she could sleep. 

But that was before her father had been taken ill, before the voices she had ignored for so long took her father and made her listen. 

They had laid him to rest high in the mountains where the birds are keepers of our secrets. The lake lay blue below the hill and time stretched out like elastic along the horizon at dawn, so if she looked close enough, Felicity thought she could see the future.

How she longed to be in that clear air again, to see the curvature of the earth and the crowning of the clouds and the splutter of outraged water being flung against rocks in the stream. Her sister had tired of going with her, of talking her back down the path. Eventually she refused to go, refused to let Harold drive her. 

“I need the car, Felicity, even if I can do without my husband. There’s a place where people go to dance the night away in the neighbouring town, young people like you and I. Come on, come with me. I don’t want to be stuck in the past. He’s gone. You have to let him go.”

She never understood. It was not Father’s voice she had listened to on the wind, in the stream-song, in the creaking of the aspens. Something was lost and needed to be found. The voices were insistent. Once she was unable to go up the mountain she had to retreat into her room, lock herself away, just to hear the voice at all, over the hubbub of the world. 

An intervention, that’s what they had called it. She had not eaten for days and the doctor, seeing her sister’s distress, had decided it was in Felicity’s best interest to stay at the asylum for a spell. She had been sedated and led like a lamb to slaughter. The voices hadn’t told her about that. Or had she just not listened hard enough? 

That was twelve years ago. Her sister didn’t visit now. It was too upsetting. ‘

“For her or you?” one of the voices asked.

“Ssh,” said Felicity. “I’m listening.” And the snowdrops stirred in the frosted earth.