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Micro-fiction 065 – Tragic Beauty (Echoes series)

A beautiful woman, and a shade face each other in the cellar. What is the dark secret that led them there?


Tragic Beauty

My head hurts so much, as I watch her weep. She must be the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Sitting in the corner, on a simple stool she’s dressed in a tight black skirt and jacket, her curves emboldened by their restraint, her legs crossed and curled around each other like the roots of a shapely tree. It’s her tears though that draw me in, framed by the smooth, sharp line of her jaw, gentle cheekbones and the wide wings of her mascara. She is an inkwell of sadness in a pool of light: the pale skin of her hands plunged into the shadows rising up from the rough ground.

From the darkness I try to summon words of comfort, but they refuse to leave me, perhaps too shy to perform before such beautiful sadness; instead they dance within, emerging as a stifled choke, and fall as ashes from my dead mouth.

We face each other, this beauty and I. She in the bright light, whilst I haunt the shadows. I don’t know how long we’ve been here, perhaps a few minutes, or weeks? My memories are so broken I can’t remember her name or my own, anything about myself at all. And I daren’t emerge from the dark for fear of frightening this perfect woman, who would surely recoil at the sight of me. I feel disgusted by myself for reasons I simply can’t comprehend.

She doesn’t know I’m back here, so I content myself with listening to the sounds that emerge from her taut, coiled form. Occasionally she sighs, sometimes she catches her breath as she fights with her tears. But throughout she also murmurs. At first I thought they were prayers or incantations, undecipherable, muted, but eventually I tune in to the patterns of her breathing and my ears decipher two voices within.

“Did this really have to happen now?”

“Why would it not?”

“But it’s not right, not fair.”

“Nothing is fair in this life. What makes you so special?”

“That’s not what I said, you always twist my words.”

“But it is what you meant. You always hide your intentions, everyone thinks you’re so wonderful.”

“No, they don’t, and obviously I’m not.”

“Oh, no indeed, behind that facade there’s so much more going on than everyone thinks.”

“That’s not true. And you do know it.”

“But you hide so much, all your little secrets, waking up so early to put on your make up, style your hair.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that!”

“But two hours before him? What’s wrong with you.”

“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to look your best.”

“But if you love someone you should be able to relax and let down your guard.”

“But I do, I wear scruffy clothes, jeans, I change less often at weekends.”

“Come on, we both know you spend all week planning what to wear, what to impress him with.”

“I just want to make him happy.”

“Instead you make yourself miserable.”

“That’s not true, I’m always happy when he’s happy.”

“You mean when he compliments you, when he notices you.”

“It’s not like that.”

“But it is, and such a good way of deflecting him, distracting him.”

“No!”

“You forget, I know. And when you go to bed, so beautifully made up, your third makeover in the day, the night-time look, and as you lie on your back, scared of falling asleep on your side and staining the pillow with your mascara.”

“No!”

“I’m there at five in the morning when you wake yourself up and slide from the bed. When you look at yourself in the mirror, scared he might wake up and see you like that.”

“Stoppit, Stoppit!”

“You know it’s true.”

“Why do you torment me so?”

“Because you can’t even admit the truth to yourself.”

“Why should I, I don’t like to dwell. Always moving forward, always coping.”

“Just like the time he hit you.”

“He didn’t, the door, it just––“

“I’m not the doctor, you can’t lie to me. I was there.”

“I slipped. That’s what I remember.”

“And the next time? The bruising on your arms?”

“He just doesn’t know his own strength.”

“Do you love him that much?”

“Of course!”

“So much that you lie to yourself? Each time he hurts you, so many times?”

“Yes, yes, why do you keep asking me, badgering me?”

“Because something has to shake you out of this, to see it for what it is.”

“I love him. That’s all there is to it. And he’s always sorry when something happens.”

“Of course he is. He knows you love him. This house, it’s yours, and your mother’s money is bankrolling his business, of course he’s sorry.”

“He loves me. Always has. Always tells me.”

“After he hurts you. After he questions whether you love him, when he accuses you of looking at other people.”

“It’s not like that, he just doesn’t think I need to work, or go out. We have enough money, he says I shouldn’t have to work.”

“Is that what you think? When did you last have friends around? When did you mother last visit?”

“We saw her last month.”

“Yes, in the front garden, when he saw you talking to someone and shouted at you to come back inside.”

“He didn’t know it was my mother. He doesn’t think we should talk to strangers.”

“Or he didn’t want anyone to see your bruises under that wide hat.”

“It was bright.”

“Only because you hadn’t been out of the house for weeks. And what did your mother do?”

“She gave me some lovely white flowers, and told me what to do with them. Just in case.”

“And what did she ask you?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Of course you can, it was about children, babies.”

“Oh, she’s always talking about that, parents do.”

“But she asked you a specific question.”

“Oh I suppose so.”

“Which was?”

“She said I should think about what would happen if I brought a child into the house. How he would react.”

“And––“

“That I should think of the safety of the child.”

“And––“

“Could I bear to bring a child into this house!”

“That’s right. And it wasn’t about the house was it?”

The woman stops talking to herself. Her entire body shakes. I look at her from the shadows as we are disturbed by the creak of a door above, and footsteps.

“Be careful ma’am.” The policeman’s loud boots descend into the cellar. He looks back up, holding out his arms as a larger, older woman follows him down, her black dress catching at the wood on the bannisters, her eyes full of trepidation.

“Are you really sure you want to do this?”

“Officer, I am determined. I wish to see my daughter.”

“Well, here we are.” The officer moves a little further in to the cellar, leaving room for the older lady to stand at the foot of the stairs. He looks past her, back up to three others who wait at the open door to the kitchen, dressed in their white scrubs, peering back down at him. He takes off his hat and gestures to the figure of a woman, slumped in a chair in the opposite corner of the cellar, the light from a small window falling on her beautiful, peaceful face. The older lady is overcome, she can barely see through her tears.

The officer points to the male figure on the ground close by the base of the uneasy stairs, its limbs turned awkwardly, its head face down with a wide patch of blood, spilled, long dried, onto the ground.

“Well ma’am, it looks like she poisoned him, pushed him down the stairs, sat there waiting until he died, then took the same poison herself. Hemlock we think.”

“My darling,” the older woman, her mother, sobs. “So there really was no other way out.”

“It would’ve been a hard tale to tell.” The officer turns her gently, and nods to the team upstairs. “We should go now ma’am. There’s nothing more to see.”

Halfway up the steps the mother of the dead woman looks back for a moment and stares directly into the shadows of the cellar as if locating remnants of the dead man’s soul, “Damn you! I hope you rot down here for eternity.”

[End]

Part of a new series of micro-fiction stories, released as These Fantastic Worlds SF & Fantasy Fiction Podcast on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, and Stitcher, Vurbl and more. Also on this blog, These Fantastic Worlds.

Text, image, audio © 2021 Jake Jackson, thesefantasticworlds.com. Thanks to Frances Bodiam and Elise Wells,  Logic ProX, Sound Studio, the Twisted Wave Recorder App, and Scrivener.


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