Memories are Living Things
Memories are living things.
Memories float and dip along the current of our minds like flotsam, shifting, taking on different colours and shapes depending on who’s doing the remembering and when.
You can build a forest with full of trees that make you want to lean against their boughs happily feeling the subtle warmth of the day filtering through the leaves. Where there are clearings dusted with jewel-bright wildflowers, fragrant and sweet like a favourite perfume. A forest made of memories that sustain, give joy and pride. Sun-coloured memories.
Or. You can build a cage. A thing of twisted wires and rusty blood-drenched thorns that pins you to the spot, smelling of iron and decay where you lay fixed like a butterfly behind glass.
Memories. They’re powerful.
Shadows slipped into a cave deep in the most peculiarly shaped hills. Thick, gnarled trees hugged the many close together humps of the strange place, light struggled to penetrate the canopy and fog lay forever close to that leafy rooftop. Still the sleeping girl in the cave could tell lighter shadows from deeper ones and the deepening gloom roused her.
She sat up, massaging her jaw, it was stiff from the day of sleeping on hard stone and years of disuse. Or months maybe, the girl couldn’t really remember how long it had been since she’d spoken to anyone, even to herself. She’d learned the price of words and the safety of silence.
She got up and walked over to the back of the cave where the drip, drip, drip of water filtering through the limestone slipped off stalactites creating two small pools. Here she washed the mahogany skin of her face and body; cleanliness had always been important to her, and she would not allow anything anyone did to change that.
As usual, her fingers lingered on the lumpy scarred flesh of her side; a snaking swath that climbed down from her ribs to her knee on her left side as though a part of her had melted. It wasn’t fire that had created that, no it was something else entirely. She moved her fingers gingerly up and down the waxy skin though it no longer hurt.
Memory gripped her and her hands curled into claws, like one of the stealthy big cats that lurked in the hills, but with none of the softness.
She closed her eyes tightly. This was the last night she’d spend in the cave. The last night in the forest. The last night in the hills.
The shadow that woke the sleeping woman flowed on until it reached a town on the edge of the humped back hills. There the shadow was broken into pieces by the gas lanterns standing sentinel around the town.
In a tavern, a group of men drank from pewter tankards, the ale showing the blood in their faces as they laughed and talked more and more loudly.
The tavern owner’s wife came bustling over to the table, the tops of her breasts shaded red, showing above her too tight bodice. She still thought she was a woman of twenty, not one who was losing count of the summers she’d seen.
“It’s fixin’ to be a fine celebration tomorrow, Mayor Cromwell!” she said, smiling at the five men guzzling her ale, her blue eyes sparkling beside the crow’s feet.
“Aye Mistress Porter. A finer day you’ll never have seen in Allman’s Town! Victories must be remembered for all their glory!”
“You’ll ‘av no fight from me, Mayor. My heart still swells with pride when I think about what you lads all did,” she nodded to each man, still beaming.
“It was a victory for not just us, but for the Crown and decency. We’ll never let the sacrifices of our men go unremembered.”
Mistress Porter waddled away.
The whole of Allman’s Town was looking forward to the first Rising Day celebration to commemorate the day they freed the town from sin.
Mayor Cromwell still couldn’t believe the people of the area had thought it acceptable to share their space with unpeople. He and his men had taught them the error of their ways and driven the savages out, killed their leader, dragged her body into the trees to rot.
He smiled with a deep sense of satisfaction at the memory. When he got back to the mother country, they’d welcome him with pride; once cast out as a criminal, he’d come home a hero, a spreader of their truth.
A scream cut the night. Mayor Cromwell looked around sluggishly, the ale sitting heavy on his brain. Mistress Porter and her husband rushed to the door.
“The lights by the border are out,” the tavern owner called over his shoulder.
The men in the tavern rushed out. Mayor Cromwell moved surprisingly fast despite his bulk, running to the small guard post that marked the start of the town. There, soaking the ground as his heart pumped a tattoo was the watchman, his throat open to the night.
A woman stepped out of the guard post. A woman with mahogany skin, eyes rimmed with coal, wearing a cloth tied around her chest, exposing her scarred side to the world.
“I’m not that little girl you left there to die anymore,” she said, her command of the foreigner’s tongue fluid.
“Memories of hate have rebuilt me.”
When the former leader of the tribe that had once called the town home raised her arm, threw back her head and screamed, hundreds of dark shapes emerged from the trees.
© Stephanie Koathes. All rights reserved.
