by Rance » Sun Dec 07, 2014 10:01 am
Taken.
Gloria relied upon the doorjamb for her balance. Her bare feet were turned inward, as though the ankles had been hobbled or suffered some listless palsy. Her mouth worked open, closed, open again, gumming on words and explanations hidden behind the mud of mandrake and poppy.
"They have to -- to feed her. They have to bathe her," she told Noura, a complacent and hollow excuse. Then: "Is something wrong with her, Noura? She's beautiful, isn't she? She'll be beautiful, won't she?"
Unblinking eyes gazed at her friend for some kind of logic, a reason. Her sweat-dampened palm clutched at her gown-skirt and kneaded it, wringing it so tightly, so compactly in her shuddering fist that the fabric rode up across the coarse, black hairs on her legs and danced across her shaking knees. Her spine scraped against the door's hinges; like an infant herself, having forgotten in that moment how to balance or walk, she relied on the wall for support.
Why was she taken from you?
"I don't know, I don't know."
Aimlessly, she turned. She stumbled back into the candlelit chamber. Gloria fond the clay wash-basin that, with almost religious dedication, she'd used to anoint and clean her lone hand every hour of every day since the baby was born. Now, her breasts ached for a need to be used; she'd washed, washed, washed over and over again, hadn't she, hadn't she, turned the water black with her Jernoan perspiration and filth--
Taken.
(In the night, she'd been listening -- she heard coughs, wheezes, wet, hacking eruptions of illness beyond her walls, sneezing, moaning, whispers of comfort to other patients. But a cry? An infant's peal? Never a one.)
"Noura," the girl whispered in the room--
When she looked down to her own reflection in the vessel of water, Gloria Wynsee gritted her befouled teeth. She gripped the basin around its lip, lifted it to a pinnacle, then brought it crashing down, down upon the nightstand, with the intent to fracture, shatter, destroy the too-familiar pottery.