FOR THE SINS OF THE MOTHER

A dark tale of sin and regret and final punishment

FOR THE SINS OF THE MOTHER

The gnarled and grizzled hag, with lank locks grey as a hare's belly straggling past her knobbly shoulders, paused at the grave of Anna.

"My poor girl," she whispered to herself. "My poor, dear girl."

She waited in her own silence as if for something to happen, until she fancied she heard a tiny voice from the depths of the Earth breathing a barely audible reply

"Mother, you killed me," it said, and she shivered. She always shivered when she remembered the night, the worst of her life, when she had grabbed the child from its cot and silenced it with a burst of the kind of violence she had always known lurked deep within her. Yes, she had squeezed that tiny neck all right, and been rewarded by silence. Wonderful, wonderful silence.

"My poor, dear girl," she repeated. "And you think you suffered."

"I can still feel, though my flesh be dust and my sinews little more than stringy threads, the harshness of your fingers tightening round my neck," breathed the soil and the stones. "I knew you wanted me dead. The truth lay on me like a ghastly shroud. That was your love for me, your mother's love."

"I suffered too," choked the hag, "I was the one they locked away, the innocent one they scorned, the young woman who grew old like the stones and the bars of her wretched cell were old, as the wild ones tore at me with their sharpened nails, and abused me."

"Abused you?" whispered the voice of the Earth. "How abused you, when it was me who lay in this cold, cold death? How were you innocent when the guilt was scratched deep in your scarred face by those who so rightfully hated you? And why are you standing there now, wasting my long sleep with your self-pitying nonsense?"

"You cried so loud, and me so weary!" snapped the hag, and she spat on the grave, the moisture of her vomit splashing on the worn stone at the head where her baby lay so long in rest. "I couldn't stand it any longer!" she howled, suddenly loud.

"My guilt," sighed the voice from grave. "To be a child and cry: so dread a guilt, so ruinous, so worthy of the punishment doled out by her righteous mother, so deserving of an eternity making a close and intimate acquaintance with so many worms!"

"What about my eternity?" snapped the hag. "Why, if I were facing you in life, if I could reach out and touch your living flesh, then I would teach you such a lesson! I would take that scrawny neck of yours, my ungrateful child, and squeeze the life out of it as quick as thinking!"

"Ever the considerate mother," mocked the voice.

"You weren't the one incarcerated for so many years for being herself!" shouted the hag. "You weren't the smart young thing in a sexy short skirt and sporting long, long legs, wearing the latest fashions in the finest materials, who was turned, day by day and week by week, into an object of hatred until even the prison mice spat on me for my sins! Yet all I did, child, the only sin I committed, was to be myself!"

There was silence from the grave, a chilling silence, and it lasted for the turning of a whole hour, and for that hour the decrepit hag stood there, tears streaming down her cheeks and anguish biting into her heart. She knew her guilt, all right, and she also knew her pain. And it was so long an hour for all that knowing. The sun knew, and dipped towards the west. An old owl knew, and hooted sardonically. The church clock knew, and tolled like the voice of doom.

Then, like a shock from the green Earth, when the silence hurt more than any silence should, the voice whispered like a breath of venom.

"Then let me be myself, mother, too," it hissed, and for a moment the world was still, and then there was rattling as though from some subterranean hell, and barely visible in the waning day, yet still quite clearly there all the same, a tiny finger reached through the turf, a tiny bony finger, and it reached through the still air towards its weeping mother.

And somewhere, echoing and hollow and a thousand dimensions away, a cracked bell tolled.