Rosemary and Rue | Black Night O'ershade Thy Day

He suddenly froze mid-madness and looked around.

I couldn’t know what he was looking at, but I could certainly tell that he was searching for something.

I thought he was going to kill me when I saw he snatch the sword from above the hearth —I cowered and braced myself.

But no. He stood straining, still looking around, and just as suddenly, he lunged at the curtain.

Photo by Alexandre Boucey on Unsplash

There was a dull resistance, but he forced the entire weight of his being forward as he drove the blade through the thick curtain. He pushed until the hilt of the sword met the fabric with a sick wet slide, impaling his enemy.

Then he pulled the blade back with a violent jerk, the macerated, sucking release freeing the steel. Blood was oozing.

First came a pained grunt, choked away in a bloody, bubbling sibilance. Then, an awful guttural sigh, as if the man’s remaining life were funneled right through the sundered flesh.

Tangled in the curtain that had now turned into his shroud, the figure slumped toward the floorboard with a heavy, sodden thud. His face was revealed—perfectly dead and excruciatingly familiar.

The scales had dropped from Duroy’s eyes. His delirium broke in an instant, the drug-induced fog burned away by the sight of the bloody carnage. Like the night creatures at daylight, the cold reality scalded his senses.

There was no rival nor hidden ambush.

One ought to be blown about in winds, roasted in sulphur, washed in the steep-down gulfs of liquid fire for this crime.

O, what a rash and bloody deed is this!

For there was only this old man. He was the father of his first love—a man he had slain and silenced in his own madness before the old man could even utter a word.

He looked upon the ruin blankly, the drug-fueled fire in his eyes fading into the cold ash of what he had done.

The grotesque murder weapon in his hand suddenly felt impossibly heavy as it slid away from his grip, landing with a thudded clatter on the floorboard.

As her father’s life drained away, so did the strength in her. Her legs buckled. Her body hit the floorboards, a heap of limp limbs.

Her throat tore away with a scream that shattered the quiet in an instant. The reality left her reeling, rupturing her inside out.

A single thrust hath taken off the rose from the fair forehead of an innocent love and set a blister there.

The room turned cold from her shock, as if a sudden winter were seizing her lungs.

She stared wide-eyed at her father’s dead mask, her chest raging and ragged in bouts of wheezing.

She couldn't get up and she had to crawl toward him, dragging herself with her arms, fingernails clawing into the seams of the floorboards, whatever she could do to wedge herself forward, inching toward the lifeless body.

Howl. Howl. Howl.

She wailed and she wailed while she clawed at the fabric until she got hold of her father, but he breathed no more. Blood blended in so perfectly into the crimsonness of the curtain.

The house had now turned into a silent accomplice, covering up the slaughter.

Between the desperate wailing and the hitching gasps in her bouts of crying, she was breaking apart and trying to pull herself back together in the same breath.

She hunched over him in a jagged heap of grief, her posture unnatural and utterly ruined.

She shook the body frantically. As if that act itself could force his soul back into its vessel.

Her croaked wail reverberated through the house that it felt like the walls too were groaning.

Cradling her father, she rocked back and forth.

Darkened curdled blood covered her hands. Her father’s blood and her own blood from her ripped, bloodied nails. She bellowed at him repeatedly.

“Thou’lt come no more,” she wept against his hair. “Never, never, never, never, never.”

He was never going to answer her. There was no way in this life he would ever wake up, no matter how much she begged, or how hard she cried.

A pair of lost souls, one breathing and the other unbreathing, forever separated—only silence and death sat with them now.

Daily Prompts for FreeWriters

©Britt H.

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