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deathbyvalentine · 7 years

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My Entry for my Creative Writing Portfolio.

There were places in the world with a long memory. Places where even the soil has blood; where the landscape has a pulse. These places could leave a mark. Nobody got out unscathed, if they got out at all. Farms who were worked by the same family, generation after generation, members never venturing further than their own rolling fields. Towns that sat squatly between towns almost identical to each other, hot and bored. Houses, half-ruined, impossible to tell from a glance if they had occupants or not. Until a curtain twitched. The churches were the worst of all, God carried like a disease passed through guilt and preaching.The people who had grown up in these places, they wore it like a bleeding heart on their sleeve, even if they moved. Even if they escaped.

Rose, well, you could smell the southern heat on her a mile off. It was in the way her fingers twitched constantly; the way her eyes never quite met yours, the way her smile was always a little too late.

One of those small towns had claimed her sister, and she had only just managed to avoid it claiming her. She lived in a city now, and she liked it immensely. She liked the constant rush of traffic, the grey of the concrete buildings and the shimmer of the highrise offices made of glass. She liked the anonymity, how even the barista she bought a coffee from (black, too much sugar) every morning didn’t remember her name. She liked that her boyfriend wore a suit like thousands of other workers, and his hands were never calloused. She liked that he didn’t remind her of a father, or a boy she grew up with. He did not wear the scars of a small town and he couldn’t recognise hers, couldn’t point to them on a map. Did she love him? As much as she felt she could love anyone perhaps. It wasn’t deep love. It wasn’t the type of love you would kill or die for. It was the type of love you would marry or divorce for. And indeed, on her finger she wore an engagement ring, and sometimes she marvelled at the very normality of it, at the proof it provided that she was both lovable enough and sensible enough to marry.

The phone rang early on Saturday afternoon. The sound was shrill and Rose looked up from her book, startled. One of the few quirks that her fiance found endearing rather than bewildering was her insistence on having a landline rather than just a cellphone. She liked the idea of putting down roots, of grounding her life in wires and electricity. She liked how very rarely it rang.

Rose picked up the phone, and held it to her ear. There was a crackle on the line, the sound a little distant. A pause, and then -

“Hey Rose. It’s been a while. Like… Half a decade a while.” The voice was familiar, warm, and completely unwelcome. Rose pressed the phone closer to her ear, twisted the wire around her fingers over and over again.

“Elsie?”

“That’s right sweetcheeks.” Elsie breathed out, amused, and Rose could hear her shifting on the end of the line. “Bet you never thought you’d hear from me again.”

“Yes, well, no, I mean - “

“Don’t worry about it. I didn’t want to call you either. But I had to.”

“Oh Gods, you’re not dying are you?” Rose’s mind, as usual, went to the worst possible conclusion, flashing through scenes of sterile hospital rooms and beeping monitors.

“Fuck no. You wish. No, actually, it’s about something else.” There was a long pause, and something heavy settled on Rose’s stomach. She didn’t want to hear what came next. She wanted to hang up now, and go back to her book of comforting fairy tales, and forget all about Elsie. But she didn’t. She stayed. “It’s- It’s Vanessa’s grave. It’s been moved. We think it’s empty again.”

What do you call a body that doesn’t know it’s dead?

Her name was Vanessa, and once, she had been shining. It was customary for the older sibling to be the inspiration, the object of envy, but it was never that way for Rose. Vanessa was her younger sibling, and she was perfect. Rose loved her as much as she envied her; adored her as much as she hated herself. Vanessa had the attention of all that stumbled across her, for better or worse. When she had gotten sick, her bedroom had been like a saint’s tomb, constantly filled with flowers and fruit, the girl herself looking like something from a Pre-Raphaelite painting in her deathbed.

Rose had not wanted her to die. Rose held her tight and wiped sweat from her feverish skin. Rose spooned soup into her rapidly diminishing body. Rose stopped her from biting her tongue when the fits came. And Rose went to a crossroads, burying a box of blood and bone and library dust, willing to make a deal with any being that came across it. It hadn’t worked. She had died while Rose was at school. The entire town had came to the funeral, the small whitewashed building filled until it smelt of sweat and linen. She had been buried in the churchyard with some saccharine verse inscribed on an angel-clad headstone. Rose could only remember the ordeal in flashes of sensation and scent. The smell of old perfume: the touch of an old lady's hand to hers: the sun burning the back of her neck.

She remembered the third night after the funeral clearly though. How she had left her window open hoping to tempt in a breeze from the static night. How she had been unable to sleep, the sheets of her bed tangling around her legs like vines. How she had finally given up, and sat up, glancing out her window to see her sister standing on the lawn, bathed in moonlight. How her and Elsie had buried her again, this time with coins slipped into her mouth and into her palms, coaxing the girl back into her coffin. They had left bricks on top of her coffin, and spat into their handshake, swearing not to tell anyone. Not ever.

It was very almost a beautiful day. The sky was a searing blue. The fields a blinding yellow blur as she drove past them. The day would fade with spectacular blood-reds and desperate oranges. It never died quietly around here; it went out in a riot of aggressive colour. For now, the sky remained stubbornly bright.

The town, when she finally made it within the boundaries, was exactly how she remembered it. Perhaps different storefronts were boarded up, perhaps it was different drunks sitting on benches staring into their clutched paper bags, but the air couldn’t change. Elsie seemed the same too, if taller, a little more filled out. Her dark skin shone with sweat from the oppressive sun. Her curls pulled back from her face to show those eyes that so uncannily mirrored the skies above. It had been their eyes that had brought them together. Hers sky, Rose’s forest. Witches eyes, Elsie had whispered excitedly, voice full of fireworks.

There was something new though, and Rose felt an irrational dislike immediately. He was tall, an easy smile painted across a handsome face, and she knew he would drawl before he even greeted her. Elsie introduced him as a ‘friend’, her arm tucked intimately around his waist, and he introduced himself as ‘Lee’. His father’s name, she knew. Even if he was new to this dynamic, he was not new to this town, and his father was often one of the drunks to be found sitting on the benches. She remembered him from high school, a few years ahead of the girls, bruises blooming like poisonous flowers across his body.

He was unwelcome here, in the space between her and her best friend. It was even more unwelcome when he opened his soft-pink mouth and said her sister’s name with no reverence, no worship.

“So, you’re the famous Rose right of RoseAndVanessa fame? Elsie never shuts up about you. Rose this, Rose that. Like you’re a goddess or something.”

“I’m not a goddess.” She stated, firmly, cutting him off as he opened his mouth again. There were gods in this world, she had seen them. They lived in all the deep dark spaces. They fed off belief and fear. They did not appreciate comparison.

“Well Elsie worships you.” Rose looked at her, and Elsie shrugged, lighting a cigarette and raising it to her lips.

“She shouldn’t.”

He shrugged too, echoing her gesture easily. “Anyway. So we have to sort out a zombie?”

The churchyard was up a hill, covered with sparse trees that allowed the moonlight to seep through. All magic had to be done by moonlight, starlight or candlelight. Even dark magic. In her bag, slung across her shoulders she carried candles, salt, coins, a knife. As they walked, she picked flowers to clasp in her hands - snowdrops, violets, bluebells. All the other early blooming and early dying flowers. Lee carried a shovel across his shoulders. Elsie carried nothing but her cigarettes and her lipstick. Rose crossed herself as she entered the churchyard, and Lee copied her, though Elsie did not.

Sure enough, the soil was loose and disturbed on Vanessa’s grave. She let it run through her fingers, closing her eyes for just a moment. Grief did not go away. It only waited. Then it crashed into you over and over again, in small moments and big, when you least and most expected. For a minute, it robbed her of her breath, her lungs caught in a vice of memory and guilt. And then, it passed, as it always did, and she straightened up, brushing the dirt from her palms. She laid out the items in a semi-circle, crossed her legs and waited, the other two flanking her. Midnight came and went. The real witching hour comes when you have forgotten what time it is, whether it is late or early. And when Rose’s eyes were drooping; when Elsie had laid her head in Lee’s lap, that’s when she felt it. Nothing huge, a touch at the back of the neck, the air a little colder. She opened her eyes, and saw Vanessa at the gate, as expected. Still in the skirt she was buried in, skin still clean and somehow whole. Her eyes were empty of colour, and there was dirt under her nails, the pink polish chipped.

Unexpectedly, there was something with her. A shadowed hand on her shoulder. It seemed to absorb the moonlight, none of its details thrown into relief by the silver. A silhouette is all that remained: one showing wicked curved horns and strong shoulders. The exception, of course were it’s eyes. They glittered like beetles backs, and focused on her. She felt that gaze down to her toes, a hot flush of self-consciousness. Lee spluttered behind her, and Elsie for once was silent.

“What do you wish this time, Rose Peters?” Its voice was not loud, but it carried unnaturally. She walked forward, trying to seem less afraid than she was. She did not want to feed it her fear.

“I wish for you to let my sister rest.”

It mused on this for a long moment. She gazed at it, watching the fluidity of it’s movements, too graceful to be anything approaching human.

“But Rose Peters, was it not you that called on me to stir her from her rest? Did you not appreciate my gift?”

Suddenly, it was in front of her, clutching her chin in a hand that had claws. She knew tomorrow she would wake with bruises decorating her jaw. She kept it’s gaze.

“I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“Ignorance is no excuse.”

“You’re right.”

Another long silence. “If you can give me an acceptable price, I will retrieve my gift, and return your sister to her grave.” It released her chin, and looked around her to her two trembling friends. It glanced at her, as though in disdain. “This is the gift you offer?” It returned to Vanessa.

“My gift is myself.” Her voice was almost carried away on the wind.

“A life for a life. I am not asking you to return her to her grave. I’m asking you to return her to life. In return, I will stay with you. I will be your servant, your devotee.” She was not afraid of it. She would feed it on other things. These gods, they feed on devotion. “I will leave this place and go to wherever you exist. For eternity, if I have to.” Two gasps behind her, that were so easily ignored.

It tilted its head. She was being considered. She held her head high.

“I accept your gift. I will collect in three days time. Say your goodbyes. Your life is over.”

#prose #short story #spilled ink prose #writers on tumblr

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