Friday Flash: The Power of the Butterfly

This is another Wendig Challenge, a title pulled from a random title generator. The title I actually got was "The Secret of the Butterfly," but by the time I was 4 paragraphs in, I had to make one small change. Thus, in 993 words, I give you....

The Power of the Butterfly

The great rambling house creaked and groaned with age, even on a calm day. On a windy day, it swayed, and made almost as much noise as the wind in the tall trees that surrounded it. Yet to Kiela, the last living member of the household, the noises of the ancient building spoke with a well-loved voice, and she felt no fear when the house rocked her to sleep. It was her home.

Her home, they said, for however much longer she could keep the wolf from the door and the door on the hinges. For forces of entropy and capitalism raced to steal from her the refuge she had kept so long, and which would win was not at all certain. A third force struggled against both and itself: the force of age, a great age that yet would not grow old and die, but instead grew weary of itself.

For Kiela had been an old woman in the house for longer than any could remember, and yet none thought to wonder at her life. The young might call her “witch,” but the old kept silent on what they knew, or thought they knew.

Only a few knew that Kiela had been a slave in that house, a century and more back when slavery was still permitted in the province. A slave accorded rights no other, slave or master, might wield, for she had a gift that would not be gainsaid, and so she outlived everything.

Most thought her gift was healing, and so she wielded it. Many a woman survived a difficult birth because Kiela attended her, and many a child failed to die of a dreaded illness. Only Kiela herself knew what power she bore: the power of the butterfly, a power that went far beyond healing.

And what might be the power of the butterfly? Kiela herself could not answer that question exactly, though it was a power that had left her alive beyond count of years, and beyond the reach of the family that had once believed they owned her, body and soul. Time had shown what that owning amounted to: nothing. They were dust and ashes, and she lived on in the house that spoke to her with the wind.

And now, when Kiela and the house alike might with a sigh of rest and relief have gone down to dust themselves, the power of the butterfly would not allow it. And so the doors clung to rusted hinges, and Kiela peered from windows but would not emerge into the sunlight. And the wealthy landholders waited for both to die, unaware that they were not the first generation of wealth to so wait.

For many years now, Kiela had found she could not leave the house in the day. Only at night, when butterflies slept, could she slip out, to roam the forest for edible herbs, or to lay the snares that captured small animals to clean and cook. At first it hadn’t been much of a burden. She had long since lost the desire to go about among people who knew nothing of her or her time. And they had their own medicine folk now, and no need of her healing.

And, just perhaps, she felt that she no longer had the strength of that healing in her.

In fact, Kiela knew that if she were to simply walk on into the darkness, far enough from the house, she would be free. Free at last to lie down and die. Yet such is the human desire for life, that always, before dawn, before the limits of the forest, she turned back, and reentered the womb. The house.

The cocoon.

For was that not the secret of the butterfly? That it spun itself a cocoon as a crawling thing, and emerged with wings? And in the cocoon, died and was reborn.

As Kiela believed she was. She slept, and awoke no older, and the house held her, nursemaid and prison-guard. And the weight of those unfelt years began to crumple her.

A time came when Kiela did not venture forth in the night. She ceased to eat. And yet the Power held her to life. She looked out the windows at the new houses being built nearly to the bounds of her garden, long since taken by weeds and fast-growing scrubby trees, and wrung her hands. Those hands which had aged to a fine mass of veins and parchment-skin, and then aged no further.

And she said in a whisper only the flies on the window might hear, “I have existed too long. I must go.” And still the power of the butterflies held her, and she could not open the front door nor go out. That day she did not settle to her lace-making—hundreds, thousands of yards of lace of all widths filled basket on basket in neat rolls—but wandered the house, seeking within and without her escape. And finally in the late afternoon, she found herself in the conservatory.

This garden she had tended all these years, after the gardens had gone. The plants were watered and pruned, and bowls of sweet water placed about for the bright-winged creatures that she served in return for their power. And now, in a moment of loathing, she wished to smash the plants, the bowls, the rippled glass of the ancient windows that warmed the room.

She did none of that. But as the sun sank below the horizon and a frozen wind began to blow icy flakes across the glass, she moved as though against a strong stream to the door that led into the outdoor gardens, forced it open, and lay down across the threshold.

A young worker on the houses found her in the morning, but soon all the townsfolk crowded about, to marvel at the ancient corpse, and at the butterflies, frozen to death, as was Kiela.

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©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2015

Flash Fiction Friday: Twisted Love

NOTE: THIS WEEK'S STORY IS NOT FOR CHILDREN

Chuck Wendig gave us a skimpy prompt this week, just the title, or plot (however you chose to look on it), "Twisted Love."  I chose to use it for both and then decided to write this as an homage to L.M. Montgomery.  For any who know Montgomery only as the author of Anne of Green Gables, Montgomery wrote a great many short stories, and many of them were gothic in nature.  A startling number dealt in greater and lesser depth (as did her novels) with the ways in which love can be twisted and poisoned.  So here, in a story I think Montgomery would recognize, is

Twisted Love

When she was very small, Lena had wondered why she alone among the children at the little school in Seaside lived in darkness.  Not just physical darkness, though she envied the other children the candles and lamps that allowed them to read after nightfall.  But Lena felt from an early age that she lived in a sort of spiritual darkness, not as the preacher would see it, but one which left her feeling as though all light had been shut out of her life.

Even as a child, Lena knew no one loved her, knew it in her soul and thought about it in that odd way of children who are much alone.  When she was small, she dreamed of telling her mother that she knew she wasn’t loved, and of running away.  She would go deep into the woods, and find a beautiful little cottage of stone and a mother who did love her, and no stepfather.  For while Lena saw that her mother did not love her, she saw even more clearly that her stepfather hated her.

It was only slowly, as she grew, that Lena learned, piece by piece from things overheard and things said in anger, why she was unloved.

Once, a girl named Hannah Stewart had been the belle of her small town, happy, pretty and young, and given to flirting with all the boys.  She took nothing seriously, and didn’t need to, for her older sister Madeleine, who stood in the place of her own dead mother, did the thinking and worrying for her.  They had no mother, and their father was too caught up in his work to bother about them, so they were everything to each other, and loved one another dearly, despite Hannah’s feeling that Madeleine was too serious, and Madeleine’s sure knowledge that Hannah’s lightness would lead to trouble.

And it did.  Pretty, flighty Hannah found when she was but eighteen that she had gone too far, and when pressed could not even say which of several boys might be the baby’s father.  Madeleine despaired over Hannah’s depravity; Lena, learning of it as she entered her teens, knew in her heart that Hannah had refused confession, rather than been unsure of the father.  She had chosen to protect someone, and Lena hoped that it was she, but greatly feared it was the unknown father of whom her mother had been thinking.

Madeleine took her little sister away so that none should know her disgrace.  She found a remote cottage, and there nursed and scolded and loved the girl, and stayed by her through a pregnancy that took more from her than it should have.  And when the baby was born, Madeleine knew at once who the father must be.

Saying nothing to her sister, she wrote to Justin Carter and told him he was a father, and must come and marry the baby’s mother.  Hannah knew nothing of this.  She named the baby after her sister, held her for a day, and died.

When Justin arrived, eager to marry the girl he loved, Hannah was dead, and Madeleine had a plan.  In his grief at Hannah’s death—for if he had not been her first choice, she had been his—he agreed to everything.  The child would be his, and would have the best of everything.

Justin and Madeleine were married that very week, and moved to the distant town of Seaside, where no one knew them and all assumed the baby was theirs.  Justin had trained as a lawyer, and took up his work there and, as his new wife had expected, made a good living for the family.

Lena never knew them in the year or two when they had been almost happy, in a mild, dispassionate sort of way.  By the time Lena was two, Justin could no longer deny what he had suspected from the first: that he was not the girl’s father, and that, in fact, her father was the one man he hated.  He had hated Albert Hawkins as a ne’er-do-well and a scoundrel, as well as a rival.  Now that he knew what he had done to his beautiful Hannah, Justin hated him with a deeper passion that poisoned his soul. 

And love betrayed became hatred all around.  Justin could no longer abide the sight of the child, and Madeleine, who blamed Lena for her mother’s death, had never liked her.  Now Justin turned his hate as well on the woman who had tricked him into a loveless marriage, and he could no longer bear either.  All the love that he had borne for Hannah turned to hatred of these two creatures who between them had robbed him of her, and trapped him until death.

He ceased to pretend the child was his, though he said he had married Madeleine in pity when her husband was killed while she was with child.  He never said so, but made it clear to all that he neither loved nor respected her.

So Lena had grown up in an atmosphere of hatred and resentment, and her own impulses to love, spurned at every turn, turned inward.  Gradually she, too, learned to love and trust none but herself.

By the time Lena was fourteen she was in possession of most of the facts of her own life, for Justin was wont to fling them at her as weapons when she displeased him.

She returned from school one spring day to find both Madeleine and Justin stuck down with some kind of fierce fever and cough, too weak to rise.  When they called out to her to help them, she stood in the doorway and looked on them with a hard face.

“Why?”

“For the love of God and your parents,” cried Madeleine, forgetting that Lena had never known love.

“What parents?” Lena asked.  She felt strange, and knowledge of what she was about to do washed over her.

“Why, we are your parents, child,” said Justin.  “Under the law.” 

Lena gave a short, harsh laugh, for it was like him to be both honest and brutal.  “Oh, under the law.”  Her face grew still harder.  “I have no parents.”  She looked at Madeleine.  “I tried to love you, and you cast my love back into my face.  You never forgave me for my mother’s death.  Yes,” she said, seeing by Madeleine’s face that she had not known how much Lena knew, “I know who my mother was.  You may have loved her, but you never loved me, even for her sake.  And you,” she turned to Justin, “you were never any kin at all, as you have made clear all these years.  I have neither mother nor father,” for though she had heard the name of Albert Hawkins, she could not feel him to be a parent, though Justin blamed him for her every fault.

Lena looked from one to another of the fever victims.  “I tried to love you, to be what a daughter should, and you flung it back in my face.  I was a little child who only wanted to be loved, and you gave me only your hatred.”

Her face wore a mask now of hatred and fury far beyond her years.  “Now you dare to call on my love to help you?  Well, I know nothing of love, nor family.”  She moved to the bureau and found the stash of money Justin kept there, pocketing it with a final malediction.  “I will take my inheritance and leave you to your bitterness.”

Justin tried to get up, to follow the money as she left the room, but he sank back, unable to rise, overcome by a fit of coughing.

Lena did not weep as she left the house, the only home she had known, and left behind her the two bitter souls to live or die as they would.  She had long since wept out all her tears for the mother-love she had never known.  They had left only a bitter residue, and a pocket full of bank-notes.

 

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©Rebecca M. Douglass 2014