original fiction: MARIGOLD
MARIGOLD
original. rated pg-13. 2983 words.
do not look so fearful: every family has its ghost.
notes: for the first challenge at inrevelations, and for worthless_hope. hope you enjoy this!
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
(Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot)
The girl would not forgive her mother.
The mother would not forgive her daughter.
Their ghosts will not be pardoned.
-
The big old oak tree in the front lawn, next to the wrought iron gate’s entrance and the three stone steps, was dead when they arrived.
“I used to climb that,” Angelica said. “When I was younger. I used to climb that tree.”
“Oh,” her daughter said. She shielded her eyes and looked upward. The dead branches were angry claws backlit against the sun. The girl did not think happy memories could ever be associated with such a beast. “Oh,” she repeated.
Angelica pointed at a spot of ground just next to the tree.
“I broke my arm there,” she said. “I was about your age. No. Probably younger. Maybe 14, 13, instead.”
The girl smiled without teeth. The front gate opened with a whine and the dead tree beckoned.
“Come, Betsy,” the mother said from three steps ahead.
The girl followed. The gate shut behind her.
The house’s name was Marigold.
-
Inside the house a bell rang at the woman and her daughter’s approach.
A maid opened the door. Her footsteps had echoed in the empty foyer, up the winding staircase to the ceiling above.
There was a vase of white lilies set down on the center table. There was a portrait of a woman on the wall. The sun had faded the colors and her face was now a cracking pale yellow.
The maid bowed slight at the waist to Angelica and the girl.
“They are waiting,” the maid said.
Angelica set her shoulders back and placed a hand on her daughter’s back.
“Yes,” she said, “I imagine they are.”
-
In the first room off the foyer there was a boy.
Angelica left her daughter with the boy. She did not say a word to either but instead nodded her head and then walked out.
Her mother shut the door. Betsy studied the boy.
The boy had a wide mouth and an angry jaw. His face was all lines and sharp blue, the eyes that never seemed to blink, and his lower lip overwhelmed the bottom hemisphere. He had a man’s height but his limbs still hung too long, oversized - arms and legs stretched all bone and muscle, waiting for time and perhaps experience to fill him out.
Betsy crossed her arms over her chest and looked at him. The boy refused to meet her eye.
“So you’re my brother.”
He did not blink and finally caught her eye.
“My name is Harry.”
“But you are my brother.”
He paused as though to consider the thought.
“Half of me is,” he said.
She had stared at him then.
Her eyes were blue too. Her eyes were blue and the same.
Her smile was tight-lipped and not returned by Harry.
-
Angelica was the last of her children to arrive.
Angelica had been the first of her children to leave.
If Mother had possessed a certain degree of humor and irony, she might have appreciated this.
Beatrice had arrived first, her husband in tow.
He had grown a beard since Mother had seen him last. He looked all the more the wayward lout than when she had married him five years ago.
Amelia came on the afternoon train.
And now Angelica.
“I have gathered you here,” the old woman said, “to watch me die.”
Her daughters did not blink.
-
“You look nothing like me,” Harry had said from across the room.
“Liar, liar,” Betsy triumphed.
-
At the dinner table no one spoke. They ate the roast and the greens and the wine glasses were dutifully refilled as they were swiftly emptied down open throats.
Leonard was the first to break the silence. He started with just a cough, a small self-conscious thing, and then used words.
“How have you been?” he asked Amelia. The question might have been directed to the table at large, but Leonard only looked to Amelia. She sat across the table from him. She paused with her fork halfway to her lips. There was nothing on it. Beatrice sat to the right of her husband and did not acknowledge the question he asked. She drank her wine.
“Good,” Amelia answered. There was a small nod of her head to accompany the word.
“She couldn’t keep her baby alive,” Mother said after a beat.
Amelia placed her fork down next to her plate and stared straight ahead. Her eyes bored into Leonard’s; he did not look away.
“Mother,” Angelica admonished.
“I blame the drugs,” Mother said, offhand.
Amelia sat there, her shoulders braced and her back straight.
“You couldn’t keep your children alive either.”
Mother took a sip of her wine. She smiled with stained teeth.
“Lies,” she said. “You’re all here, aren’t you.”
Angelica ducked her head and Amelia glared at their mother.
Beatrice drank her wine.
-
Mother had three children.
She had fifteen years and then her husband died. She did not cry but she did wear black for not only the remaining half of that year, but each and every successive year she wandered the halls of that great old house. The black collected on her, a shroud about her small, bony figure. The black collected on her, literally at times, as a veil. She peaked out at the world from behind it, cold and gray, suspicious eyes. The same eyes that used to look upon her husband. Cold and gray. Suspicious.
She had Angelica first. She also lost Angelica first. She ran off - first one man, and when that failed her, another. Harry’s father. Betsy’s father. Then no one. A born again virgin, Jesus’s mother. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, pure as the day is long.
Beatrice was next. Beatrice married a smart British man Mother despised. They moved to London one year after their wedding, just as Mother had feared.
Last was Amelia. “My greatest disappointment,” Mother often said. She moved to Berlin while the wall still stood and married Karl, a communist and a playwright. When Karl was arrested Amelia came back, but not to the old house, not to Marigold. She stayed in New York and ate at her trust fund. She divorced Karl. Karl remained in prison. Amelia married another writer. Amelia divorced him too. She had been living with a writer of screenplays when her mother called.
“You need to come home,” Mother said.
“Fuck you,” Amelia said. She hung up the phone and took another valium. The next morning she took the noon train down to Charleston and smoked an entire pack of cigarettes during the ride.
“My name’s Jasper and you look like the perfect little lady for a simple man like me,” a stranger said to her in the sparse dining car.
Amelia had ordered a Bloody Mary and she lit another cigarette. After the Bloody Mary, after he smoked a cigarette he bummed off of her, they had sex in the small bathroom in the car behind them. She cracked her knee against the sink and did not come.
“Ten years ago,” Amelia said and Jasper caught his breath. She pressed her damp forehead to the mirror. “Ten years ago I was going to be an actress.”
Jasper had laughed and smacked her on the ass. And then he left.
-
Father died and Mother did not cry.
I remember, I remember! Amelia used to chirp as Angelica would weave vicious lies:
Daddy died and Mummy cried! Daddy’s dead; she lost her head!
Liar, liar! Beatrice would wail.
She killed him dead, behind the shed!
I remember! I remember!
But that was before.
Angelica was ten; Amelia was near six.
Beatrice floated somewhere in the middle.
-
Later:
“You had a child?” Leonard asked.
Amelia lit a cigarette. The back porch was dark and there was a gentle red-orange glow around her mouth as she inhaled.
“Almost,” was her answer.
Leonard stared at her. Amelia pressed a hand flat against her lower abdomen. Her exhale of breath was lost in a cloud of smoke.
“Was it mine?” he forgot to ask.
-
“He is a bad, bad man,” Angelica told Beatrice.
-
“Who the hell is Leonard?” Karl asked. He held a letter in his hand.
“No one,” she answered.
“Liar,” he said. Karl threw the note at her, as best as a man can throw paper against the weight of air, and it fell to the kitchen floor behind her.
It had been then, six in the evening with the television on, a German-language news program, that she had decided she no longer cared for Karl.
He was arrested the next morning.
She boarded a flight to New York.
-
Beatrice was a careful child. She was a coward.
“I just want you to be happy,” she told Leonard.
She did not really mean it.
-
Leonard met Amelia for the first time the same day he met the rest of the family for the first time. It was Beatrice’s birthday.
The cake was smeared thick with pink buttercream frosting that stained teeth. Beatrice smiled and laughed and swallowed a large forkful.
Her younger sister rose from the table without a word and walked to the backdoor, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in her hand.
Later, but not by much, when Beatrice asked Leonard why he followed he had no answer.
“I wanted a smoke too,” he had told Beatrice with a shrug. He kissed her on the cheek and Beatrice had frowned.
“You know I don’t like that,” she said.
“I know,” he said, and in his head he called it the best answer possible.
On the back porch Amelia had been silhouetted against the overgrown bushes along the rail. Her face had been impossible to make out in the dark night air, but his eyes followed the lighted arc of her cigarette as it was first pressed against her lips and then drawn down to her side as she exhaled.
“Would you like one?” she asked him. Amelia over-pronounced each of the words. She said them the way Leonard imagined Greta Garbo would have said them.
“Yes,” had been his answer. “Yes I would.”
Their fingers had brushed when she handed him one and then the lighter. There had been the bright flash of teeth as she smiled into the night, as she smiled at him, and maybe she had known then. Maybe not. Leonard thought maybe she did, and maybe that meant he knew too. Their fingers had brushed and he had wanted to slip his hand beneath her chin and kiss her.
He lit his cigarette and breathed in deep.
“How long have you been with that man?” he asked her.
She had smiled again.
“Timothy?” she asked. Leonard only shrugged. Maybe his name was Timothy; he did not know. She shrugged this time. “Not long,” she said.
Leonard watched her carefully. Amelia watched him too.
“Mother can’t stand him.”
“That why you bring him ‘round?”
She mocked his accent. “Yes that’s why I bring him ‘round.”
“Be nice,” he teased. “Do you love him?” he asked for no clear intention.
“Not anymore,” she said and took a long draw from her cigarette.
“Not anymore?” he had echoed.
“I’m always falling in love,” Amelia said.
“I fall in love with everybody,” she said.
“I hate myself,” she had wailed, her voice overly dramatic and scornful, almost playful.
And then she had laughed. Maybe it was then that he knew.
It did not matter. Leonard married Beatrice that fall and at the wedding Amelia wore pink, a bridesmaid.
“I hate myself,” she had hissed in his ear at the reception.
He let his fingers trail down the nape of her neck to the middle of her bare back.
And that was that.
-
Mother killed Father.
“Have you tended to the children?” he asked.
His wife had raised the axe.
Angelica was thirteen.
“But Daddy killed her first,” she explained to her sisters.
“Daddy killed her first.”
-
In London, Amelia met her sister for tea. It was autumn.
That evening, she met her sister’s husband for a drink.
They had one drink each and then retired to her hotel room. They fucked against the window; her bare back left a smudge against the glass.
“Amelia, Amelia, Amelia,” Leonard panted.
Amelia had to shut her eyes.
That night in bed she asked:
“Why did you marry her?”
It was the closest Amelia ever came to begging.
Leonard pretended not to hear her.
She returned to Karl the next day.
-
“Have you tended to the children?” the old woman asked. Angels adorned the headboard of the bed, and on either side of her head twin cherubs threatened with their pointed arrows.
Her daughter rearranged the pleats of her skirt. She did not rise from the chair next to the bed.
“They are not children any longer,” she said. “You know that.”
“All God’s children,” Mother said.
Angelica watched the blackened window without interest, pretended her mother was not there. Her fingers pulled at the creases in her skirt. She sat.
-
Beatrice had always known. Why she chose that day of all days to confront her younger sister is known to the house alone.
“That was a long time ago,” Amelia said. She said it like a consolation.
“Liar, liar,” Beatrice wailed.
Leonard remained silent by the window. It was cracked open and he smoked, careful with the cigarette.
“Do you love him?” Beatrice asked.
Amelia shrugged.
“I love everybody.”
Beatrice asked nothing of her husband. He blew smoke through his lips and then out the open window.
Amelia walked out the open door.
She hitched a ride with a stranger.
“My name is Billy,” he said. “And you look like the perfect little lady for a simple man like me.”
Amelia shut the door.
-
Mother raised the axe.
The girls watched.
-
In the bathroom, on the counter, Beatrice laid the razor flat.
She looked at it for a moment.
She looked at her own reflection in the mirror before her.
She looked nothing like her sister. Nothing at all. And perhaps that was the worst part. Would it have been easier if Amelia resembled her? Would that make this any easier?
Perhaps, Beatrice thought.
Perhaps.
“There are no real women in this family,” Beatrice said.
The metal warmed beneath her fingers.
Beatrice was a careful child - a coward.
-
Mummy killed Daddy.
Angelica left five years later and she did not go far. Georgia, and she met a man with a pick-up truck and crates full of oranges.
“Florida,” he told her, and “Florida,” she repeated.
“Florida,” they said together and she climbed into the passenger side of his truck.
She married him in an orange grove and months later he gave her a son.
He spoke of the sea and he taught her how to tie ropes in knots.
Mummy killed Daddy, she thought, and she had looked at her son.
She took the truck and drove north.
Harry grew up among the oranges, the seaweed and the urchins.
-
Beatrice’s blood went drip, drip, drip.
Leonard stood at the door of the bathroom and lit a cigarette.
He sighed.
-
The children played.
A bottle of cognac and Betsy fit her lips around it neatly and swallowed.
A pipe that belonged to a dead man; Harry choked on his first inhale.
Each other:
Harry’s father had taken to the sea. Harry grew up along its shore. His fingers and hands were marked rough by the salt and the breeze - dry and cracked, callouses worn deep. They were rough against the skin of Betsy’s wrist.
Betsy, with skinny, shaky legs, that of a newborn colt, held his face with two hands. Her fingers brushed against the swell of each cheekbone and she laughed.
And then she kissed him.
-
“Your father was a bad man,” Angelica told her daughter, once.
“Why?” Betsy had asked, breathless. “What did he do?”
The young girl had envisioned a tyrant of men. She could see a great figure of terror that rode through the forest and lopped off the heads of the innocent. She saw a dark man with a gun, and in her mind she could hear as the shots rang out and the fallen cried. She imagined her mother, helpless in his clutches as he had leered over her, a cape fluttering behind him in the wind.
“He was a very bad man,” her mother said.
“Why? Where is he?”
Angelica had paused. She had folded her hands in her lap. Neat lace cuffs covered the back of her hands. Her fingers were bare of adornment or accessory.
“He is dead.”
“Why?” Betsy asked for a third time.
Angelica’s face had been stern. Her mouth was poised like that of a bird’s, ready to peck and snap.
“Because, my dear, some men are meant to get their due.”
Her fingers strayed at the crucifix around her throat.
She pulled.
-
In a bed watched by the angels, Mother took her final breath.
She said nothing.
She confessed nothing.
Marigold stood empty.
-
Betsy’s fingers grasped the handle of her suitcase. Harry’s fingers did the same.
“Harry?” Betsy said.
“Yeah…” he drawled.
They joined hands then, their fingers entwined tight together. Sweat pooled in the miniscule space between their damp palms.
Angelica stood on the porch and watched her son and daughter walk away. The dead tree rose up.
The girl shut the gate behind her.
“Have you tended to the children?” Mother had asked.
The gate shut behind her.
Angelica tied a rope in a knot.
-
fin.
original. rated pg-13. 2983 words.
do not look so fearful: every family has its ghost.
notes: for the first challenge at inrevelations, and for worthless_hope. hope you enjoy this!
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
(Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot)
The girl would not forgive her mother.
The mother would not forgive her daughter.
Their ghosts will not be pardoned.
-
The big old oak tree in the front lawn, next to the wrought iron gate’s entrance and the three stone steps, was dead when they arrived.
“I used to climb that,” Angelica said. “When I was younger. I used to climb that tree.”
“Oh,” her daughter said. She shielded her eyes and looked upward. The dead branches were angry claws backlit against the sun. The girl did not think happy memories could ever be associated with such a beast. “Oh,” she repeated.
Angelica pointed at a spot of ground just next to the tree.
“I broke my arm there,” she said. “I was about your age. No. Probably younger. Maybe 14, 13, instead.”
The girl smiled without teeth. The front gate opened with a whine and the dead tree beckoned.
“Come, Betsy,” the mother said from three steps ahead.
The girl followed. The gate shut behind her.
The house’s name was Marigold.
-
Inside the house a bell rang at the woman and her daughter’s approach.
A maid opened the door. Her footsteps had echoed in the empty foyer, up the winding staircase to the ceiling above.
There was a vase of white lilies set down on the center table. There was a portrait of a woman on the wall. The sun had faded the colors and her face was now a cracking pale yellow.
The maid bowed slight at the waist to Angelica and the girl.
“They are waiting,” the maid said.
Angelica set her shoulders back and placed a hand on her daughter’s back.
“Yes,” she said, “I imagine they are.”
-
In the first room off the foyer there was a boy.
Angelica left her daughter with the boy. She did not say a word to either but instead nodded her head and then walked out.
Her mother shut the door. Betsy studied the boy.
The boy had a wide mouth and an angry jaw. His face was all lines and sharp blue, the eyes that never seemed to blink, and his lower lip overwhelmed the bottom hemisphere. He had a man’s height but his limbs still hung too long, oversized - arms and legs stretched all bone and muscle, waiting for time and perhaps experience to fill him out.
Betsy crossed her arms over her chest and looked at him. The boy refused to meet her eye.
“So you’re my brother.”
He did not blink and finally caught her eye.
“My name is Harry.”
“But you are my brother.”
He paused as though to consider the thought.
“Half of me is,” he said.
She had stared at him then.
Her eyes were blue too. Her eyes were blue and the same.
Her smile was tight-lipped and not returned by Harry.
-
Angelica was the last of her children to arrive.
Angelica had been the first of her children to leave.
If Mother had possessed a certain degree of humor and irony, she might have appreciated this.
Beatrice had arrived first, her husband in tow.
He had grown a beard since Mother had seen him last. He looked all the more the wayward lout than when she had married him five years ago.
Amelia came on the afternoon train.
And now Angelica.
“I have gathered you here,” the old woman said, “to watch me die.”
Her daughters did not blink.
-
“You look nothing like me,” Harry had said from across the room.
“Liar, liar,” Betsy triumphed.
-
At the dinner table no one spoke. They ate the roast and the greens and the wine glasses were dutifully refilled as they were swiftly emptied down open throats.
Leonard was the first to break the silence. He started with just a cough, a small self-conscious thing, and then used words.
“How have you been?” he asked Amelia. The question might have been directed to the table at large, but Leonard only looked to Amelia. She sat across the table from him. She paused with her fork halfway to her lips. There was nothing on it. Beatrice sat to the right of her husband and did not acknowledge the question he asked. She drank her wine.
“Good,” Amelia answered. There was a small nod of her head to accompany the word.
“She couldn’t keep her baby alive,” Mother said after a beat.
Amelia placed her fork down next to her plate and stared straight ahead. Her eyes bored into Leonard’s; he did not look away.
“Mother,” Angelica admonished.
“I blame the drugs,” Mother said, offhand.
Amelia sat there, her shoulders braced and her back straight.
“You couldn’t keep your children alive either.”
Mother took a sip of her wine. She smiled with stained teeth.
“Lies,” she said. “You’re all here, aren’t you.”
Angelica ducked her head and Amelia glared at their mother.
Beatrice drank her wine.
-
Mother had three children.
She had fifteen years and then her husband died. She did not cry but she did wear black for not only the remaining half of that year, but each and every successive year she wandered the halls of that great old house. The black collected on her, a shroud about her small, bony figure. The black collected on her, literally at times, as a veil. She peaked out at the world from behind it, cold and gray, suspicious eyes. The same eyes that used to look upon her husband. Cold and gray. Suspicious.
She had Angelica first. She also lost Angelica first. She ran off - first one man, and when that failed her, another. Harry’s father. Betsy’s father. Then no one. A born again virgin, Jesus’s mother. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, pure as the day is long.
Beatrice was next. Beatrice married a smart British man Mother despised. They moved to London one year after their wedding, just as Mother had feared.
Last was Amelia. “My greatest disappointment,” Mother often said. She moved to Berlin while the wall still stood and married Karl, a communist and a playwright. When Karl was arrested Amelia came back, but not to the old house, not to Marigold. She stayed in New York and ate at her trust fund. She divorced Karl. Karl remained in prison. Amelia married another writer. Amelia divorced him too. She had been living with a writer of screenplays when her mother called.
“You need to come home,” Mother said.
“Fuck you,” Amelia said. She hung up the phone and took another valium. The next morning she took the noon train down to Charleston and smoked an entire pack of cigarettes during the ride.
“My name’s Jasper and you look like the perfect little lady for a simple man like me,” a stranger said to her in the sparse dining car.
Amelia had ordered a Bloody Mary and she lit another cigarette. After the Bloody Mary, after he smoked a cigarette he bummed off of her, they had sex in the small bathroom in the car behind them. She cracked her knee against the sink and did not come.
“Ten years ago,” Amelia said and Jasper caught his breath. She pressed her damp forehead to the mirror. “Ten years ago I was going to be an actress.”
Jasper had laughed and smacked her on the ass. And then he left.
-
Father died and Mother did not cry.
I remember, I remember! Amelia used to chirp as Angelica would weave vicious lies:
Daddy died and Mummy cried! Daddy’s dead; she lost her head!
Liar, liar! Beatrice would wail.
She killed him dead, behind the shed!
I remember! I remember!
But that was before.
Angelica was ten; Amelia was near six.
Beatrice floated somewhere in the middle.
-
Later:
“You had a child?” Leonard asked.
Amelia lit a cigarette. The back porch was dark and there was a gentle red-orange glow around her mouth as she inhaled.
“Almost,” was her answer.
Leonard stared at her. Amelia pressed a hand flat against her lower abdomen. Her exhale of breath was lost in a cloud of smoke.
“Was it mine?” he forgot to ask.
-
“He is a bad, bad man,” Angelica told Beatrice.
-
“Who the hell is Leonard?” Karl asked. He held a letter in his hand.
“No one,” she answered.
“Liar,” he said. Karl threw the note at her, as best as a man can throw paper against the weight of air, and it fell to the kitchen floor behind her.
It had been then, six in the evening with the television on, a German-language news program, that she had decided she no longer cared for Karl.
He was arrested the next morning.
She boarded a flight to New York.
-
Beatrice was a careful child. She was a coward.
“I just want you to be happy,” she told Leonard.
She did not really mean it.
-
Leonard met Amelia for the first time the same day he met the rest of the family for the first time. It was Beatrice’s birthday.
The cake was smeared thick with pink buttercream frosting that stained teeth. Beatrice smiled and laughed and swallowed a large forkful.
Her younger sister rose from the table without a word and walked to the backdoor, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in her hand.
Later, but not by much, when Beatrice asked Leonard why he followed he had no answer.
“I wanted a smoke too,” he had told Beatrice with a shrug. He kissed her on the cheek and Beatrice had frowned.
“You know I don’t like that,” she said.
“I know,” he said, and in his head he called it the best answer possible.
On the back porch Amelia had been silhouetted against the overgrown bushes along the rail. Her face had been impossible to make out in the dark night air, but his eyes followed the lighted arc of her cigarette as it was first pressed against her lips and then drawn down to her side as she exhaled.
“Would you like one?” she asked him. Amelia over-pronounced each of the words. She said them the way Leonard imagined Greta Garbo would have said them.
“Yes,” had been his answer. “Yes I would.”
Their fingers had brushed when she handed him one and then the lighter. There had been the bright flash of teeth as she smiled into the night, as she smiled at him, and maybe she had known then. Maybe not. Leonard thought maybe she did, and maybe that meant he knew too. Their fingers had brushed and he had wanted to slip his hand beneath her chin and kiss her.
He lit his cigarette and breathed in deep.
“How long have you been with that man?” he asked her.
She had smiled again.
“Timothy?” she asked. Leonard only shrugged. Maybe his name was Timothy; he did not know. She shrugged this time. “Not long,” she said.
Leonard watched her carefully. Amelia watched him too.
“Mother can’t stand him.”
“That why you bring him ‘round?”
She mocked his accent. “Yes that’s why I bring him ‘round.”
“Be nice,” he teased. “Do you love him?” he asked for no clear intention.
“Not anymore,” she said and took a long draw from her cigarette.
“Not anymore?” he had echoed.
“I’m always falling in love,” Amelia said.
“I fall in love with everybody,” she said.
“I hate myself,” she had wailed, her voice overly dramatic and scornful, almost playful.
And then she had laughed. Maybe it was then that he knew.
It did not matter. Leonard married Beatrice that fall and at the wedding Amelia wore pink, a bridesmaid.
“I hate myself,” she had hissed in his ear at the reception.
He let his fingers trail down the nape of her neck to the middle of her bare back.
And that was that.
-
Mother killed Father.
“Have you tended to the children?” he asked.
His wife had raised the axe.
Angelica was thirteen.
“But Daddy killed her first,” she explained to her sisters.
“Daddy killed her first.”
-
In London, Amelia met her sister for tea. It was autumn.
That evening, she met her sister’s husband for a drink.
They had one drink each and then retired to her hotel room. They fucked against the window; her bare back left a smudge against the glass.
“Amelia, Amelia, Amelia,” Leonard panted.
Amelia had to shut her eyes.
That night in bed she asked:
“Why did you marry her?”
It was the closest Amelia ever came to begging.
Leonard pretended not to hear her.
She returned to Karl the next day.
-
“Have you tended to the children?” the old woman asked. Angels adorned the headboard of the bed, and on either side of her head twin cherubs threatened with their pointed arrows.
Her daughter rearranged the pleats of her skirt. She did not rise from the chair next to the bed.
“They are not children any longer,” she said. “You know that.”
“All God’s children,” Mother said.
Angelica watched the blackened window without interest, pretended her mother was not there. Her fingers pulled at the creases in her skirt. She sat.
-
Beatrice had always known. Why she chose that day of all days to confront her younger sister is known to the house alone.
“That was a long time ago,” Amelia said. She said it like a consolation.
“Liar, liar,” Beatrice wailed.
Leonard remained silent by the window. It was cracked open and he smoked, careful with the cigarette.
“Do you love him?” Beatrice asked.
Amelia shrugged.
“I love everybody.”
Beatrice asked nothing of her husband. He blew smoke through his lips and then out the open window.
Amelia walked out the open door.
She hitched a ride with a stranger.
“My name is Billy,” he said. “And you look like the perfect little lady for a simple man like me.”
Amelia shut the door.
-
Mother raised the axe.
The girls watched.
-
In the bathroom, on the counter, Beatrice laid the razor flat.
She looked at it for a moment.
She looked at her own reflection in the mirror before her.
She looked nothing like her sister. Nothing at all. And perhaps that was the worst part. Would it have been easier if Amelia resembled her? Would that make this any easier?
Perhaps, Beatrice thought.
Perhaps.
“There are no real women in this family,” Beatrice said.
The metal warmed beneath her fingers.
Beatrice was a careful child - a coward.
-
Mummy killed Daddy.
Angelica left five years later and she did not go far. Georgia, and she met a man with a pick-up truck and crates full of oranges.
“Florida,” he told her, and “Florida,” she repeated.
“Florida,” they said together and she climbed into the passenger side of his truck.
She married him in an orange grove and months later he gave her a son.
He spoke of the sea and he taught her how to tie ropes in knots.
Mummy killed Daddy, she thought, and she had looked at her son.
She took the truck and drove north.
Harry grew up among the oranges, the seaweed and the urchins.
-
Beatrice’s blood went drip, drip, drip.
Leonard stood at the door of the bathroom and lit a cigarette.
He sighed.
-
The children played.
A bottle of cognac and Betsy fit her lips around it neatly and swallowed.
A pipe that belonged to a dead man; Harry choked on his first inhale.
Each other:
Harry’s father had taken to the sea. Harry grew up along its shore. His fingers and hands were marked rough by the salt and the breeze - dry and cracked, callouses worn deep. They were rough against the skin of Betsy’s wrist.
Betsy, with skinny, shaky legs, that of a newborn colt, held his face with two hands. Her fingers brushed against the swell of each cheekbone and she laughed.
And then she kissed him.
-
“Your father was a bad man,” Angelica told her daughter, once.
“Why?” Betsy had asked, breathless. “What did he do?”
The young girl had envisioned a tyrant of men. She could see a great figure of terror that rode through the forest and lopped off the heads of the innocent. She saw a dark man with a gun, and in her mind she could hear as the shots rang out and the fallen cried. She imagined her mother, helpless in his clutches as he had leered over her, a cape fluttering behind him in the wind.
“He was a very bad man,” her mother said.
“Why? Where is he?”
Angelica had paused. She had folded her hands in her lap. Neat lace cuffs covered the back of her hands. Her fingers were bare of adornment or accessory.
“He is dead.”
“Why?” Betsy asked for a third time.
Angelica’s face had been stern. Her mouth was poised like that of a bird’s, ready to peck and snap.
“Because, my dear, some men are meant to get their due.”
Her fingers strayed at the crucifix around her throat.
She pulled.
-
In a bed watched by the angels, Mother took her final breath.
She said nothing.
She confessed nothing.
Marigold stood empty.
-
Betsy’s fingers grasped the handle of her suitcase. Harry’s fingers did the same.
“Harry?” Betsy said.
“Yeah…” he drawled.
They joined hands then, their fingers entwined tight together. Sweat pooled in the miniscule space between their damp palms.
Angelica stood on the porch and watched her son and daughter walk away. The dead tree rose up.
The girl shut the gate behind her.
“Have you tended to the children?” Mother had asked.
The gate shut behind her.
Angelica tied a rope in a knot.
-
fin.