Chapter Thirty-One #2
The woman lays there until he is finished, and only once he's fallen asleep does she finally move.
Only once she's alone in the washtub does she let her tears fall and wonder if this is what love is meant to be.
Lonely meals while her husband is away or working.
Days all but trapped in an attic that begins to feel more and more like a cage.
Nights where the only pleasure found is his, and she is left with nothing but an empty shell—used and bruised and forgotten, her hopes and happiness scooped out and left to shrivel in the sunlight like a wilting rose.
It was not always like this, she doesn't think. The first year or so of marriage was blissful and sweet. Full of bashful flirtations and lingering kisses, moments where they couldn't keep their hands off each other or their eyes from meeting across a crowded room.
Now she is lucky if her husband will look at her at all.
Now he leads her into galas and dinners and parties, dressed in the most expensive of fineries, only to leave her alone and floundering near the wall.
Out of the way. Unseen and unheard until he pulls her to a piano to play or sing.
As if she is no more than a new music box to show off and boast about whenever he likes, no matter how little she wishes to perform.
She is convinced it is driving her mad.
There are days when her husband is locked away in his office and she swears the floors begin to move, bowing beneath her feet like wet sand on the beach.
There are moments when the flowers in the wallpaper begin to sway with the breeze, nights when she’s sure there are vines creeping under her covers like grasping hands.
This house which once belonged to her family now feels like a tomb waiting to be filled.
One night, she awoke on the shore beneath her cliff in nothing but her négligée, her own evening gown plunged in the shallow waters, and her hands raw from scrubbing.
She knew what it meant. Her mother had taught her as a child what it meant when they visited sickbeds in the village and sang for them.
“Don’t you think it would be nice to greet Death in something clean and fresh?
” her mother would say when the girl asked why they washed the clothes of the dying.
“We sing to ease their suffering, but we do this to bring them comfort. To show them that there is someone who still cares for them, even as our father takes them away.”
Now she washes her own clothes in the salty water, because there is no one left to do it for her. She never remembers walking down to the rocky shores, and sometimes she does not wake until Walden finds her there hours later, false worry in his eyes and scolding words on his lips.
She finds herself lonely and melancholy in this life she once dreamed of, yearning for something else, wondering when it is that Death will come for her as he’s promised each night she wakes in the ocean’s embrace.
“My Kolfina, always an odd duck,” Walden says each time he finds her soaked and shivering in the morning tide. “Whatever am I to do with you, hm?”
An odd duck, that's what he calls her. Too often, too demeaning.
He says it when he grows tired of her babbling about her newest composition.
He says it when he finds her pretending to sleep in her writing chair to avoid his bed.
He says it to his friends when she gets lost in her mind at gatherings, and to strangers at the shops when she cannot think of an answer quick enough.
And people listen.
She has always been strange, she knows that. She does not laugh when she is meant to laugh, does not cry when she is meant to cry. Crowds make her nervous, but silence is too loud.
Perhaps that’s why she loves her music so much.
It's a way for her to fill the silence without all the noise of a busy room.
A way for her to let her mind wander without fear of people thinking her simple.
With music, she can pour the emotions she struggles to show into every frantic crescendo and drawn-out coda.
She can scream and whisper and cry with every song she sings, every note she plays, and people will call her an inspiration and a marvel, not odd or mad.
In music, she has always found her freedom, yet day by day she feels him steal even that from her.
She wonders how long it will be before she has nothing left to take.
She is here beside me on the ocean floor. The woman from my dreams, from my reflection, with her big hazel eyes and her pretty blonde hair.
She is not so pretty now. The fish have chewed away at her skin, leaving holes in her cheeks and her shoulders and her lips, carving away at her until the dull bone beneath the muscle is exposed.
One of those doe-like eyes is missing completely, replaced instead by something I cannot make out crawling in the dark cavern of her skull.
She watches me as we decay together. I wonder what she sees.
When she opens her mouth to speak, I can see the sand clogging her throat and the seaweed sewn between her teeth. "Don't sink," she tells me in a voice coated in brine, scraping the barnacles that grow in her throat. "Don't sink. Don't sink. Don't sink."
The advice is foolish. I have already sunk, we both have. What use is her warning when we have both made the ocean's floor our home?
Skeletal fingers wrap around my arms, my wrists, my ankles. Seaweed tightens a noose around my throat and a garter around my waist. I can feel them pulling at me, tugging and yanking my limp body as if trying to pull me away from her.
I want to tell her I do not understand, but even here in this strange ocean-death, I cannot find my voice.
"Don't sink," she says again, sobbing the words as she pushes me away. "Don't let him win. Fight back. Swim."
I do not know how to swim, but I see the desperate hope in her one remaining eye, and I hear the song of the ocean's dead calling behind her.
I do not know which way is up or down, but I kick my feet and I thrash my arms against the weeds that bind me.
Piles and piles of skeletal hands lift me up, empty skulls crying out for me, raising me higher and higher until the darkness of the abyss begins to brighten.
I reach up toward that light and the sun's rays reach back. Warm. Welcome. Familiar.
"Do not drown," that voice calls again, and when I look back down, she is there holding me up, her hands around my ankles and a smile on her rotting face. "The ocean gives as much as she takes. She leaves you the gift that he craved. He cannot have it, but if you sink again, he will."
A gift? What gift could the ocean have possibly given me?
"You live," she answers my silent question. The woman crawls up my body until she can wrap her skeletal hands over my cheeks, cradling my jaw as a mother might. "You live. Perhaps not the way others do, but you live all the same. The ocean has given you a second life, a second chance."
But why? What have I done to earn the water's favor?
The woman smiles, lips cracking where sand pours over her tongue. She brushes the hair back from my face, strokes her nose against mine.
"A gift for a gift, little flower. You gave the ocean what you hold most dear. You trusted it with your life, gave it everything you had left for one last chance at freedom.” She smiles gently, the expression crooked on her half-eaten lips.
“You, ferryman for the dying, gifted your heart to Death’s oldest lover.
In return, she has offered you a new one that beats twice as strong. "
I don't remember. My memories are splotchy patches of dying grass beneath my feet, walled off by towering hedges and thorny vines. I reach back for her, wrapping my arms around this rotting thing that I once was. This decayed corpse that is still somehow a part of me.
She returns my embrace easily, lovingly, desperately. She presses her salt-cracked lips to my dirt-smudged cheeks.
"Go to your garden," she tells me. "Follow your path, and you will find your answers.
You will find your truth, and in it, your gift.
" She pulls back to look at me, hands trapping my gaze, fingers digging trenches into my cheeks.
"But remember, flower. Remember not to sink.
Listen for your hearts, for your freedom.
The ocean can only give her gift once. If you choose to follow my descent, we will—both of us—be lost to the ocean's cries. Do you understand?"
I don't, but she does not wait for an answer. She pushes me away, letting the water's current yank me from her grip. I watch as the woman I once knew, once loved, disappears into the ocean's dark embrace once more.
But me—I swim.
I swim and I swim.
And I do not sink.
There is a woman running through my garden in a pretty blue evening gown with trailing ribbons wrapped around her throat.
She darts through the hedges on bare feet, her steps unsteady and her breathing frenzied.
Her curls are a mess of tangles and knots, and tears shimmer as they spill from her hazy eyes and stain her cheeks.
I can feel her terror in my chest, can feel her frantic heart beating against the cage of my ribs. Her tears are salty on my tongue as she runs past me, the pebbled path sharp beneath her feet as I turn to follow.
"Kolfina!"
The man's voice echoes around us like a gunshot. Angry, panicked. His footsteps are too loud, too close. I want to tell the woman to run faster, tell her he's nearly here and we can't let him catch us, but it's too late.
She reaches the end of the maze on accident, finding only the vast open sea and a perilous drop before her. My stomach pitches violently with the waves, the ocean beating like thunderous cries against the cliffside.