Rosemary and Rue | Whispers the O’er-Fraught Heart and Bids It Break

A blank slate for whoever was dominant in the room.

Polite society and happy endings do not live here. Only the heavy stillness, the shadows, and the rot in the ribcage and the floorboards. Nothingness. Proceed with caution.

Father, can you hear me? Please stay, don’t go please…

Look at me — father, look at me! Open your eyes please…

You can’t leave me alone, not like this…

Why, why, why? Why does it have to be like this!

No, no, no! Please…

Photo by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash

The panic had calcified into a frantic, mechanical survival instinct; he knew that he could not go back to prison. The cold-blooded murderer in him was replaced by a cold-eyed schemer.

He started moving, fast.

While Lia was still wallowing in the wreckage of her grief, Duroy began to trash the room. The heavy oak table was overturned, drawers ripped away from their tracks, and porcelain was shattered, methodically.

All these to stage a robbery gone wrong.

His emotions were switched off to save his own skin. He then coerced her into a pact of silence which she neither accepted nor refused because there was nothing left inside her to react.

In her state of total, paralyzed shock, she had dissolved into a void of dissociation. She was suggestible, a blank slate for whoever was dominant in the room.

Duroy had simply uttered lies into existence, twisting and reframing what had actually happened. Also deleting whatever that would incriminate him and her mind was too broken to start an argument.

Once the stage was set, he vanished into the shadows before the dawn could find him. Because for his alibi, he was never here in the first place.

She was left all alone in this house that now smelled of iron and dust. A ransacked house and her unbreathing father were all that remained of her world now.

A poisonous secret began pulsing through her. Irreversible guilt devoured her from within. A secret that lived in the blood, would eventually corrupt her every breath.

She withered away the instant her father died.

Day in, day out, she drifted into an anchorless depression. The dark fog settled over her soul as she retreated into an inviolate place, unreachable and impenetrable.

All you need is a single, irrevocable tragedy to undo a person entirely.

Meanwhile, the world outside never stopped chasing shiny days and planning vacation, ducking indoors when it rained — entirely unaffected by what happened in the house with the wisteria-colored door.

It was simply not their problem. Just as society dines and makes merry while a little match girl freezes on the street, the world moves on; misery and pain are only ever felt by the one wearing the bruises.

Her husband never granted her the divorce. To show an unfelt sorrow is an easy task for a cold man; he stayed to support her, though it was a performance rather than a marriage, reluctantly tethered to her grief.

They never truly mended the ruptured fissures of their marriage; instead, they became parallel ghosts haunting the same halls.

Just as it was before the tragedy, he came and went as he pleased with a freezing indifference that left her trapped in a quiet house — a funeral waiting for its mourner.

He offered her the charity of his presence: a dark, cold cloak of duty without a hint of warmth in it.

…to be continued.

Rosemary and Rue Part I Where Our Wills and Fates Do Contrary Run Part II The Canker Galls the Infants of the Spring Part III His Goods, His Chattel, His Anything Part IV Will of Wisp ‘neath the Wistful Tree Part V Wing’d Cupid Painted Blind Part VI Love That Glides Ten Times Faster Than the Sun’s Beams Part VII Love Reason’s Without Reason Part VIII A Man of Many Shadows Part IX A Thing of Nothing Part X Fall’n into the Sear, the Yellow Leaf Part XI Bounded in a Nutshell Part XII A Dagger of the Mind Part XIII Black Night O’ershade Thy Day Part XIV Whispers the O’er-Fraught Heart and Bids It Break Part XV

©Britt H. aka Mika

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Previously published on Substack