100 Things 22/100: Bonnie and Good
Title: Bonnie and Good
Fandom: Original Fiction
Series: Monday’s Child
Rating: Gen
Word Count: 1,280
Prompt: Dark Bingo Fill: “Mindswap”
Mondays child is fair of face,
Tuesdays child is full of grace,
Wednesdays child is full of woe,
Thursdays child has far to go,
Fridays child is loving and giving,
Saturdays child works hard for his living,
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.
“It’s not fair! You never do what I want; you only do what Gay wants to do!” Gay heard the strident and most un-dulcet tones of her younger sister as she made her way up the walk to the porch. She wondered what had set her off this time, what toy or treat or entertainment Blithe had asked mama for and been denied.
She heard the wailing start, as it always did when Blithe didn’t get her way. She was the most vexing child. Gay lifted the hem of her skirt and slowly climbed the stairway, carefully avoiding the bad step and the splintered railing where her sister had kicked the slats in during another tantrum.
Blithe seemed to operate under the assumption that her elder sister was spoiled and pampered. She complained that Gay had pocket money from her job and she didn’t because she had to go to school for another five years to get a diploma, as Mama insisted.
It was dusk; Gay had stayed extra long at Mr. Philpot’s to earn an extra ten cents by finishing all the unfinished piecework the others had left on their machines. She glanced up and caught the twinkle of a star. “I wish there was a way to make my sister see.” Then perhaps the child wouldn’t be so hateful towards their poor, widowed mother, and to Gay. There just wasn’t the money to do all the things Blithe seemed to feel were her due, they were barely scraping by now, with Papa passed on from the influenza.
The old screen door slammed behind her as she made her way into the house.
~*~
“Gay, wake up!”
“No. It’s Sunday, I don’t have to work today, I’m sleeping late before church,” Gay grumbled and pulled the blanket up over her ears.
Her sister, as usual, was not taking no for an answer. “You have to wake up. Something has happened!”
“Is it mother?” Gay was awake in an instant, sitting up and pushing at the long hair that had fallen into her face.
Hands pushed the hair away from her eyes. She was startled to see her own face looking back at her. “Blithe? What…?”
“I don’t know!” Blithe wailed in Gay’s voice. Then she began to sob, which irritated her because she hated hearing it coming from her own face. She grasped her sister by the shoulders and gave her a shake. “Stop it. Just stop it. Do you want to get us both into trouble?”
“Trouble?” the sobs abated and Blithe stepped aside as Gay got out of the bed and ran to the mirror. She was wearing Blithe’s body. Somehow in the night, they had switched places.
She spun around and waggled a finger at Blithe’s nose, having to reach up to do so because she was now so much shorter. “We cannot say anything to anyone about this!”
“Why? How can we get help if we don’t ask? We have to see the Reverend; we’ll talk to him after services, he’ll know what to do, he’s very smart.”
“And find ourselves accused of witchcraft or heresy!” Gay hissed. “This has to be magic, Blithe! We cannot say anything.”
Blithe’s lower lip began to tremble; it truly was unseemly on Gay’s nearly grown up face. “We could go to a doctor?”
“They will say we are hysterical. Do you know what they do with hysterical females that have mad ideas? They lock them away in the madhouse. If you say anything to anyone, Blithe, they will take us away from Mama and we will never see her again.”
Her younger sister walked over to the bed and sat down heavily on the edge, grabbing up the pillow and hugging it tightly. “What do we do, Gay?”
Crossing the room, Gay climbed up beside her and took her hand, giving it a comforting squeeze. “We’ll just have to pretend to be each other, until we can figure out how this happened and how to undo it. I will go to the library in town tomorrow after I finish work… oh, wait, I cannot go to the factory, not like this. You’ll have to go to the factory tomorrow and be me.”
“I can’t do that!”
“Sure you can. Just go to Jenny when you get there and ask to do the hemming for the day. You know how to run a hem on the treadle machine. Just do as you are told and it will be fine.”
Blithe nodded reluctantly. “What will you do?”
“I’ll go to school and then I’ll walk to town to use the library.” And I’ll enjoy every minute of it, Gay thought to herself. She yearned for the bygone days of her youth when Papa was alive and they had not been so destitute.
“Gay! Blithe! Get ready for church,” their mother called up the stairs in a weary voice. She did have to work today, cooking and serving dinner or maybe doing laundry for the rich folks up on the hill. Gay didn’t know which ones, it was always changing, mama took what work she could find.
~*~
Gay didn’t find anything in the school library. She sat on the porch swing after school with a book about magic that she had found in the downtown library. She was so engrossed in the stories that she didn’t hear Blithe come up the stairs.
“You do that every day?” Blithe asked in a quiet voice as she sat on the swing beside Gay.
“Hems? Sometimes. I do sleeves and collars a lot too. My cutting isn’t the best, so they never let me near the patterns. How did everything go for you today?”
“It was worse than school. I don’t think anyone noticed anything different. I tried to be quiet and keep my head down over the machine like you said to. I said hello to Jenny and to Adelaide. I shared my lunch with Ingrid because she gave me a piece of cake. I’m so tired. My back hurts. Does your back always hurt like this?”
Ingrid’s mother must have made streusel; she always shared it with Gay. “By the end of the day, yes, it does. Mama’s hurts worse, I’m sure. She scrubs floors at the hospital all day you know.”
“I know she works at the hospital, I guess I never really thought about what she did there all day.”
When Mama came home a short time later, Blithe met her at on the walkway and carried the groceries up to the kitchen. There were no temper tantrums or complaints that day, for the first day in a long time.
Gay found a story in the book about wishing on stars and it made her remember how she had been looking at the first star to come out and had made a wish for her sister to understand better. It seemed that somehow, Gay’s wish had come true.
It was too dark that night, and there were too many stars were out by the time she finished reading the story and had put out the gaslight in the sitting room, so she could not wish again.
She would wish them back tomorrow.
Or maybe she would wait for a few days, and make the wish after Blithe had really learned to appreciate her youth and lack of responsibilities.
There was a new work order down at the factory and Blithe’s class had a field trip to the pond to study tadpoles, Gay thought perhaps that would be very interesting to look at tadpoles.
The End Originally posted at http://rinkafic.dreamwidth.org/