The love of my life knew the ways of her forebears. I met her beyond the wastelands in a blue-green field, lit by night. Her soft-muzzled horse champed between bracken and she sat on the rickety steps of her vardo, smoking a clay pipe, so the air was a vapour of sage and violets.
She laid her hands on my crooked spine and melted the bones, muttering incantations that made citrine sparks fizz from her fingers as she re-aligned and moulded. For the first time, I could stand tall. She led me inside the arced canopy of her home and lay me down on muffling feathers, letting her dark-warm hair fall on my breasts like a wooded glade.
She said love was freedom, but she stayed awhile. She taught me how to forage sorrel and sour scented garlic. Chanterelle mushrooms trumpeted our passion as she fed me dew mellowed cloudberries, plump with promise.
I asked her to live with me, between abandoned brick walls and curtained windows, but she declined. Her home was the ever-yielding road, meandering stars, a following breeze.
How could I let her go?
She left with a sigh, the narrow blade still wet in my hand as her sun-tended skin faded to pearl.
I turned her horse loose on the moor and nestled her, still beautiful, on the vardo’s feather-bed. Her malachite eyes gazed sadly, admonishing, as a match flared the tinder of dried grass and pine cones.
Rigor mortis set in the next day, limbs stiffening to birch, my fingers curved claws. I’m house-bound in a wheeled chair, my spine kinked and helixed.
At night, cold wind seeps through the window frames, billowing the curtains with incendiary sighs of wild violets and smouldering sage.
Mairead Robinson is a writer and teacher, currently living in the South West of the UK. She drinks too much coffee, which seems to fuel a need to write stories. Most recent publications can be found in Ellipsis Zine, Full House Literary and the Pure Slush Lifespan collection. She can also be found on Twitter @judasspoon
photo by Paulina H., Dejan Zakic and Pawel Czerwinski (via unsplash)
Crow & Cross Keys 