literature

The Queen

Deviation Actions

LeodeIslaScilly's avatar
Published:
135 Views

Literature Text

We see her emerging from a fleshy cavern, a womb, and into frenzied chaos, a murky bath, an anxious birth.  The young mother is crying, both out of joy and of pain, but primarily of overwhelming relief.  Black hair sizzles to a boil in the hot water.  A midwife asks for the father’s name, and choking on her own tongue, the mother eeks out the name.  A womb is an ocean, a song, a soft hum.  The baby is both today and tomorrow, and if she ever doubts herself, just tell her to remember this.
Reincarnation: understand it and be grateful.
After the most laborious experience of her young life, mother is too exhausted to think up a name after the dark diva confirms the child’s female gender.  And so the father names her Angela, noticing the porcelain angel that watches the scene closely, guarding the weak child, easing her into the world of Burnt Flats.
Doctor Virginia crudely and robotically jots down the name in the notebook which sits on her right thigh so as to make space for the squalling infant on her left.  The father stands in the center of the bathroom, curling his toes in the shag rug, unsure of his place in the scene.
And now the mother has passed out in the tub, long, dark curls steaming in the pot, severed umbilical cord still slithering in the bath.  The father is nauseous, feeling faint, and abandons Madonna and child to gather his emotions on the bed, in his sleep.  
Now Doctor Virginia disposes of the animate cord, and tosses the placenta out the window.  She wraps Angela in swaddling clothes, unplugs the bathtub, and when Mother wakes up, escorts her to her lover in bed.  She lies baby to sleep in the cardboard box adjacent to the bed, and leaves the young couple to the nuisance.  
Rewind a few days more now, and we see a young boy.  Luke Monroe is nine years old.  He and his friends meet in the field to play marbles every afternoon, and today is sunny.  It’s the season for it.  Grey grass rolls like waves in the inland, dry wind.  Today, six boys bring their marbles.  They have pulled up the grass in large enough an area to play, and beaten the life out of it.  Now, they draw large circles in the dirt.
“Simon stop! You  always make the circles crooked!” moans Luke, against the armageddon of lopsidedness, and grabs the stick out of Simon’s hand.  Simon wails.
“Look what you did!” says Noah, “Now he’s cryin’ and ain’t gonna play!”
“Not my fault he can’t draw a circle.”
“Don’t think you’re so good!” says David, and as a response to such deep degradation Luke hurls his marbles at David’s head.  Now Davidis sobbing, and bleeding on the dirt.  David, the smallest, is the one most often the target of Luke’s unfocused and impromptu rage.  The other two boys are already running away.  
“Stop it!” says Noah, “I bet you couldn't even draw no perfect circle right!”
“I bet you I can!”  And in fury the fiery boy takes thee stick violently in his hand, and begins drawing concentric circles on the malleable sand.  
Simon gets up and says with meek confidence, “I don’t want to play with you anymore.”
“Just ‘cause you can’t draw circles right?”
“You’re a bully,” says Simon, and that keyword “bully” would send Luke into another fit of anger, but as soon as the word rolled off of Simon’s tongue, Luke feels a sharp pain in the back of his head.  He turns to see that David, still bleeding from his forehead, has his arm up, ready to throw another marble back at him.  His small fight looks so scary, even to Luke, and is so unprecedented, that Luke’s legs liquify as he runs towards the grove of charred trees visible on the horizon, instead of back to Burnt Flats of which the boys are currently on the outskirts.  
They do not run after him.
When David returns home, his mother is livid to see him bleeding, so he tells her what has happened, to alleviate her of a pale complexion.  And Luke Monroe’s mother comes asking as to his whereabouts after the sun has sunk below the earth for the night, after which he should have been home.  Mother tells Mother where he was last seen.  Scurrying away from consequences he sought solitude in the charred grove in which to pout.  Stale rice boils over in the pot and the Mother’s eyes go cold.  Fear trickles down her spine as the two women run together out of town and over to the grove.  It is the darkness of 400 midnights.  Black, cloudy, eerily breathy,buoyant in the night, they run out of breath trudging through the tall grass, flat wasteland, a ghost of a mother’s worst nightmare.  Luke should have come home.  He should be home but he is nowhere to be seen.  
But the fiery moon reveals itself in time to put the spotlight on an image.  It is an image I cannot stop seeing in spiders.  
It is ashy charcoal, few strong trunks stand up from the aftermath of a long-ago fire.  It is a chaotic night, a deafeningly silent roar.  Both women stand still as their eyes focus on Luke’s mangled corpse, half-buried in debris.  Bloody bones, broken skin, the shame of a pale life trickling from too many lacerations, too many wounds, a face, barely recognizable in the moonlight, was never there at all.
Anguished screams can be heard all the way back in town.  A few concerned lights come on in the windows.  But nobody will ever find out who or what killed Luke Monroe.  For a while at least.
Days later, Luke’s mother is still too comatosely grief-stricken to attend the birth of her first granddaughter, Angela.  She never recovered from her loss; her son was a hope, a bipolar one, but a hope.  New grandmother will stay in bed for 15 years, never saying a word to Angela, bitter for such a female replacement.  Always superstitious, the middle-aged woman always associated her son’s death with her granddaughter’s birth, viewing a changeling, an unmuted omen, shameless wake of death, a mysterious, mangled, unprecedented death, viewing this child as more than a coincidental accident, but as a murderer.
And so Angela Monroe grew up with two young, neglectful parents in the town of Burnt Flats.  She was an only child, with no one to talk to until she first went to school as a mute.  Her brain sizzled in the classroom, soaking in subjects, knowledge that flew miles above her head. that she flew high to catch, albeit against her energy.
© 2014 - 2024 LeodeIslaScilly
Comments0
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In