She would leave the room like she always did. Quietly but pointed, her black hair fading into the night. She would often wait barely a block before turning on her heels and dancing to some inaudible melody. Some uncomposed waltz carried in from the harbour. She followed the trail of streetlamps as they wound out of town, a broken string of pearls extending into the skirts. Nobody knew where she slept, nor when. If. You were just as likely to catch her skipping stones into the Bay before dawn as you were poaching flowers from the churchyard in the evening.
She knew things. She was more familiar with the town and its history than anybody was comfortable with. More than the women three times her age who had been here when their fathers were still busy clearing the roads into the town proper. She spoke, when she spoke, with language that hadn’t been popular since the confederacy. She referred to neighbouring towns by names that had barely survived into dusty ledgers, though not ever with enough detail to suggest that she had visited them.
When strangers engaged her in conversation, both polite and otherwise, she was never quite forthright about her ties. She had parents, and a family to be sure. But when it got right down to it, she seemed to always gesture a little too far Northward when she talked about where she was from. In fact her eyes would draw a gaze upward beyond the hills, up into the night sky (these things were oft discussed in the night time, as these things oft are). Her knowledge of the local stars was hardly what one would consider studied, but it was just familiar enough that it kept anyone from pressing her at length.
Nobody had ever recalled her growing up anywhere within tell, and yet she had always seemed to be a fixture. No birth, no childhood memories, nothing to indicate that she had ever come up anywhere at all. By all accounts she had come up right out of the ground. And for a woman like that… for a girl like that to ever meet an end as strange and as inexplicable as the one she had, well, fitting just didn’t fit.
In a strange but warm act of local propriety, the town held a small and simple memorial the day after she was found. It was quiet and proper and all around as rather a nice memorial as one could ask for, if not permeated with just enough awkwardness by those present to illustrate perfectly the impact she had had on the sleepy town. As if to return her from whence she came (and in doing so perhaps return the town to the upright and cozy way it had been before her arrival, remembered or not) two once-time woodsmen were asked to carry her remains out of town and into the hills beyond the bluff, and give her an unmarked but respectful burial somewhere where nobody would ever find her. Whether or not it was done, neither the woodsmen nor the girl’s body were ever seen nor heard of again.
And things perhaps returned to the way they had always been. Odd for the fact that it had been so long that nobody was prepared for what that way really was. For anyone to have known better, it didn’t take long to start to feel like there was something missing in the town’s collective identity after all. Not that anybody would ever dare acknowledge it.
To this day, nobody in that town will ever completely acknowledge that the girl ever existed at all, treating her mention more like a hazy dream than a piece of the town’s history. And be it by shame or fear or honest to God age-worn uncertainty, nobody ever takes a walk through the hills beyond town without looking sidelong down at the ground through the valley, where a certain type of dark-pedaled flower has begun to grow in the years since our story has made its rounds. Lacking any real name, the flower is referred to only as Nightrose, and though it’s kept out of the town proper by superstition as much as by local mandate, the northwinds perpetually blanket the entire valley in a very faint but what can only be described as unfamiliar sweetness.
No comments:
Post a Comment