Obscurity, The Seventh Chapter
In which the widow ventures into the swamp for a cure.
e last read The Sixth Chapter, in which we discovered three men with rather nefarious intentions.
The child fell asleep in the ménagère’s arms. She watched his tears run out, his eyelids close, and she placed the palm of her hand against his heart, feeling it beating quietly against her skin. As she did so, her own heart began to ache. As if feeling the sorrows of this small child’s heart, coursing through her own.
This formed in her mind an image. The boy, sitting outside a windowsill, the day warm and humid. He played with rocks in the street and watched people as they walked by, though none seemed to notice him. Every now and then there would be a breath, an exhale heard from the window above him. He would stand on his toes then, peering his eyes over the ledge to look at the woman he loved. The one he called Maman.
She was a warm being—the raft upon which this child would float, safe from the turbulent waters beneath it. She would tell him magical stories about another land, a place where the people lived amongst the wildness and danced along sparkling shores. She told him stories about the beasts that roamed the lands and the monsters that lived beneath the waters. Most of all, she told him of the spirits who kept them safe from such frights.
The boy especially loved the stories about the moon. She was the one who knew the ancestors—those who had gone to the life beyond. She cared for the dead and carried them in her womb. She also cared for those yet to come to it. She held children on her lap and shined her wondrous light down upon them. Every night the boy would cuddle up next to his mother, blow out the candles, and remember that they were always safe so long as they had each other and that the moon looked down on them.
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