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.”