e last read The Thirty-Ninth Chapter, in which a baby was born into the swamp. If you have recently joined us, start with The Prologue.
In the morning, she set an old copper kettle to boil. It was dented and worn, its patina tarnished, but it was perhaps the most beautiful thing the woman owned, and she treasured the heirloom as though it were fine china. As steam rose from its spout, she lifted it from the stove and poured it into the basin, kettle by kettle filling it with warmth, and imbibing the room with steam.
By the time she had finished drawing her bath more than an hour had passed and the elapsed kettles of boiling water had layered over one another with a contented heat. The woman disrobed, draping her robe to the side so that she might sink into the waters, slowly warming her limbs until even her fingers and toes settled into that divine soup. The waters were a salve, a warmth she sunk into. Her breath drew in the warm, wet air and was nourished by it. Her muscles could not cling to their burdens any longer and were released from them. Even her heart sighed of its anguish, at last released of the memories it clung to, so that it might beat free, her body at last filled with wellness and peacefulness and contentedness.
A slow sigh fell from her lips as she allowed herself to surrender to the beauty of the moment. The hours repose she passed in adoration of the kettle, the fog that pressed against the windowpanes, the rose-colored garments that awaited her when she dried, the tortoiseshell comb she would brush through her long tresses. She was no longer a woman of mourning, but a woman of happiness. And though she could feel that she would always be marked by her past, she would no more be burdened by it. Her darkness now existed only in the crypts of cathedrals, buried beneath a most beautiful spire, a living testament to life's more beautiful moments.
Once her limbs threatened to drift away from their lightness, the woman stepped from the tub and dried. Her robe of silk fell lullfully across the carpets as she settled into a gilded chair. How beautiful, she thought, as she looked upon herself in the mirror, for the first time seeing the skin that had been her mother's, the happiness that had been her father's. She placed her fingertips at her cheeks and upon her lips. She was a vision, and all the room around her a still life. A vignette of the many lives she'd lived.
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