Sister Solitude

        Solitude stands by the window in her silk sheath, slender, self posessed. There are stars in the southern sky dimming and brightening; little glimmers of happiness sending their message of unity and continuity from miles away. They always give her comfort. 

It is midnight at the Oasis and her sisters, Joy, Hope, Exuberance and Tranquility, gather under the thinest arc of bright moonlight. They dance around the courtyard fountain made magic in the silver spray. 

She feels the stabbing thorn of jealousy, as she always does, when she sees their ease in one another’s company. It is an emotion hidden in her darkest cave of longing, and dangerously close to her heart. If the thorn pierced her there, would she bleed? Would she survive? 

Hope looks up and sees Solitude at the window, beckons for her sister to come and join them. It is in her nature; but Solitude will not go, that is in her’s. 

Who is she to pretend she is one of them? Maybe the answer is blowing in the wind, but she may never hear it for the wind is constantly galavanting around the earth.

End or Beginning?

         

         Eleanor stood at the grave side, her best dress, a thing of shreds and patches sprigged with forget-me-nots, silhouetted against the mound of soft loamy earth. What was she to do now? She had sat by her father’s bedside for a month past, ladling spoonfuls of hope and broth in to his weakening body every chance she got, but even the spoonful of sugar was not enough in the end. His breath had become ragged and his voice had croaked out its last blessing to her:

“Be happy, child. I will be with you at every sunrise.”

There were no neighbours here since the clearing. The community that had once been so vibrant was long gone. She had wept silent tears as she prepared his broken body for burial. It had taken three days for her to dig the grave and her hands were blistered and raw.

There was no preacher anymore, so she mimicked the ceremony she had heard  performed over her mother and her sisters many years before.

“God be with you, father, on your final journey. Ashes to ashes. Rust to dust. Rest at peace with our maker.”

She went inside and fortified her sorrow with a dram or two of his whiskey and then went out at the setting sun to raise a glass to her father. The cracked cart-wheel that had caused his injuries slumped against the side of the house cowering in an attitude of guilt. Sudden anger welled from the pit of her stomach until she could no longer contain it. She picked up flints from the ground and hurled them at the wheel, a new flint for each word.

“Aaaargh! Why! You..Useless…Broken!”

Eleanor slumped on the ground, utterly spent, planting the forget-me-nots at her knees in the mud. There would be no rescue. She must pull herself up and move on. A crofters life was hard, but nigh on impossible to manage alone. 

The next morning she bundled the few precious belongings they had owned into a sheepskin, picked up the fire irons and cooking pot, a knife, wooden bowl and spoon, and put them into the fishing boat. She put the half sack of oats and a hunk of cheese into a basket and put the two remaining chickens in a wicker cage. She pushed the boat off from the gravel sound into the deeper water, the cold water biting at her skin, then climbed in wondering what lay ahead.

She kept time with the oars as her father had taught her all those years ago.

“Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream,” 

As she pulled further away from the shore she watched the contours of the only land she had ever known fold themselves into the mist of memory.

Isolation

            Peony stares at the writing on the wall, her mind turning over and over, tracing the shapes that swirl, until they all blur into a sea of snakes and angry daggers. It should make sense: nothing was meant to be clearer than the writing on the wall, she’d heard people say. This may as well have been sanskrit, hieroglyphics, arabic, mandarin, for all she could understand. How had it come to this? Lying in a sterile room surrounded by monitors, punctured by tubes and wires, studying the ceiling as  it comes in and out of focus.

Ocelot stands in the shadows. He was always more comfortable there, Peony realises.

“Hearts are meant to be broken, Peony, didn’t you know? Cupid will only loose his bow after the arrow heads are tipped with fatal poison.”

“You played with my heart like it was a cheap toy. It was doomed to break in your hands.” 

         She has every right to be bitter. The lights on the monitors continue their irregular dance and Peony closes her eyes to hide her distress.

“How could you be so cruel?” Was she expecting an answer? There had never been much give with the take.  “I thought what we had was truth, a shining crystal of purity but then you left. The aching became an illness: unrequited love and a broken heart.” 

Still he stood, a brooding force in the corner of the room. She tried for tenderness.

“At the beginning you gave me a copper locket with an iron key, do you remember? And with it came a belief in love that thrummed with vibrating positivity.”

“Its all just kisses in the dark,” Ocelot sneers. “Don’t tell me you really believed that a locket meant love. You are like a blind child.”

“So you will leave me here to die alone, wire entwined, hands clasped?”

“What did you expect? A bowl of peonies, cyclamen on Sundays grown in a hot house?  I was never one to offer a hardy love, content to snuffle about in a corner like an echidna? I thought you understood. We were nothing more than happenstance. You were… convenient.”

The door ‘swushed’ like waves on the shore as Ocelot reversed into the ongoing tide of life beyond the isolation room revealing a flash of Romalie and Persimmon from ‘Manchester Makeover’ on the ward television.

“And so the thief of love steals away into the bitterest night.”