Deprivation- The Feast and the Famine

Chapter 23- A Bite and a Kiss

Eudora’s hand thrust up toward the ceiling and moved in the stream of light as if it was swimming.  In the constant darkness of hell, where even the torches seemed to flicker and fail,  this burst of light seemed painfully bright.  Claudia shielded her eyes and peered at Eudora’s dancing fingers through the cracks of her own.

The hand seemed made of light, and the brightness faded until it was ripples of water around Eudora’s glowing white hand.  Claudia wondered if the water/light from the ceiling would clean the dried blood and dirt from under Eudora’s nails.  Perhaps all their sins would fall away, and the light Eudora cast would burst outward.  She would cleanse hell, and the entire dungeon would be bright.  The stones would warm and the air clear.

Normally, this room was dark enough to hide in. They had come to hide not from the dungeon but from themselves. Eudora was in a strange mood and sometimes it helped to go where the dungeon hid in a curtain of velvet blackness.

But now in the light everything altered. They lay atop a bed with a rich brocade coverlet stained in places with old blood. Clothes shed on the floor so that the soft sheets of the bed could caress flesh. Claudia did not glance at her limbs. She retained barely enough skin to cover her bones but wondered as always of Eudora’s loveliness. A queen trapped in hell reaching upwards to heaven’s light.

Eudora lowered her hand as the light flickered away.  Whatever mistake of God’s had allowed light to enter their world had been corrected.  The darkness that followed felt more complete than before.  

Claudia went to Eudora and set her head on the other woman’s shoulder.  The feel of Eudora was soothing, and Claudia slipped closer. Tentatively she kissed the golden shoulder, now black in the unlit room.

Eudora laughed.  It was a dry, cracked sound, as dark and raw as the room around them.  Then when the laugh dried and turned to dust, Eudora pulled away.  “Hush, hush, pretty, pretty.”

Claudia had not spoken, not uttered a sound.  For a moment, she thought Eudora had missed the point.  That Eudora was speaking nonsense.  But of course it was not Eudora who was at fault.  “It hurt my eyes.  I thought maybe…”

“This castle does not fall.  This world does not crumble.  It is stronger than stone, stronger than a scream, stronger than a soul.  My soul could not escape it.”

Claudia shifted back, and something sharp jabbed into the heel of her foot. A trickle of blood liberated from the dry flesh fell to the stone floor beside the bed.  It is eating me, Claudia thought.  No, it has eaten me already, now I am being digested.

“T’was not heaven or hell.  Certainly not a caress. We are not real anyhow.  We are only ideas of misery.  A twisted nightmare with our bodies left behind to rot.”

“We’re just flesh in its gut,” Claudia replied. She reached out, and her fingers caught on Eudora’s arm. This time Eudora allowed the embrace to continue. Unseen in the darkness Claudia slid forward and curled up against Eudora.

“A song, a song,” Eudora said, her china blue eyes shut briefly, and all light left the room.  They could not open soon enough for Claudia’s taste.  “Memories stir in me now, like reflections I cannot recognize through the ripples.”

“Memories,” Claudia said.  She could not think of them.  She knew they were there lurking behind a veil thin as paper and thicker than a wall of brick.  Half seen a hand lurked, freed from its body glittering rings all that remained to it. The fingers lay over other memories even more painful to touch. Yet, she did not and could not see them.  Not even ripples stirred in the pond.  

There had been someone.  A flash of black hair and a smile darted before her eyes too fast to see, but slow enough to know she wished to see no more.  Yes, there had been someone.  Had there been others once?  Other people who mattered?

“Memories, my pretty one, are steel.”  Her hand slid over the little bag at her side.  Claudia’s hand fit itself over Eudora’s and their fingers twined together.  “They are blood and tears, nothing more.”

Claudia saw the bag even in the impossibly dim light.  It had been there all along.  It sat on Eudora’s hip always.  Were there answers there?  Could answers exist in so small a space?  Did answers take up room?  “Is the truth there?”

Eudora’s hand tightened on the pouch.  Her eyes narrowed, and her perfect cherub mouth formed something almost like a snarl.  “Truth, no, only lies.  Only lies live.  Truth dies and dwindles becomes nothing.”

“I want only lies.”

“It is all you will find.”

Another flash in her mind.  Another truth she couldn’t see moved behind the brick wall of paper.  “There was noise.  Lots and lots of noise.  It is too loud to think of it.”

“Light stirs the waters inside,” Eudora said.  “We must return to the dark.  Come away in case it bites us again.”

This time, Eudora reached out and touched Claudia.  How strange to be lead back into the heart of hell when at the precipice of something else. Eudora’s lips were strangely soft. The kiss had a taste of dry blood flaked off from dry lips.

They lay down together in the bed, clinging in the dark. For a short time, Claudia could almost remember and almost forget. She managed neither.

“I never lay with a man in a bed,” Claudia said.

“They are no different in a bed than anywhere else, Pretty Pretty.”

Claudia stood her body suddenly chilled and retrieved her dress from the stone ground. Her heel stung where hell had begun to consume her.  The stones licked her feet as she slipped back into her gown.  Poor stones are thirsty too.  She did not resent it the blood it took from her.  It was little enough.

Eudora’s form was composed of smoke where she sat on the bed, and there was no room for other fancies.  If she didn’t pay close attention, Eudora might dissipate. Disappear and leave nothing but the strange little bag of lies.  Claudia didn’t want the lies in that bag.  

The bag hid its secret well.  It was so small and so faded from darkness and neglect that it could have been anything.  Claudia would wear it at her hip if Eudora dissipated.  She would keep that lie with her.  It meant so much to the angel caged in hell that it was a lie worth protecting.  

“I’ll protect it,” Claudia said.

“Do not tempt the dark.  It does not care for the promises little girls make. Chews us up and wishes us dead.”

And what do the promises little girls make stand for. We are little liars all.

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