Sing Your Sorrows

Sing your sorrows.
2 day ago

Sing your sorrows, little one
Sing them to the sky
Let them go, let them fly
Sing them to the sky

The same hauntingly ethereal tune wandered through the night’s air every evening to Isabelle, tucked up tight in her woollen blankets. The snow fell steadily and silently in the blackness, while her grandmother pottered around seeing to the fire. Isabelle watched with her almond shaped, unfathomable eyes until the fatigue became too much and they drooped, sending her to that other, dreaded realm.Looking at the young girls furrowed, damp brow often became too much for her grandmother, so she busied herself at the other end of their meagre hut, peeling potatoes and pickling enough fruits to see them through the winter.

If they got through the winter.

The promise was almost becoming too much for her…if only her mother would come back…her only daughter…her daughter who she hadn’t seen for more than a decade. Looking once again at the distant diamond like pinpricks of light in the heavens, the old woman clasped her hands one final time before uttering her almost ritualistic prayer.

“Please come back. Not for me, for her.”

_______________________________________

‘Rubbish!’
‘Is not, I spent ages coming up with that one!’ The girl scowled, her pretty freckled face becoming contorted with annoyance. The boy laughed.
‘You’re so full of crap, Atkins. Go back to your fairytales and leave the norms alone.’
The brown haired girl scowled again.
‘Oi, leave her alone Jeremy!’ Shouted one ginger, bespectacled girl, who had been temporarily transfixed by the schoolgirls dulcet tones and overly active imagination. ‘Jealous, are we? We all know who’s got to repeat their English test this lunchtime for getting seventeen percent.’
There was a general sniggering and the boy turned redder than a pillar box.
‘Whatever, Darcy. Least I don’t look like a carrot from behind.’
The girl rolled her eyes; it was a remark she’d gotten used to in all her eleven and a half years.

The storyteller was collecting her things up of the autumnally littered floor. ‘Thanks, Darce.’‘No problem.’ The girl smiled. ‘You know what a bigmouth that Jeremy is. He’s never been able to handle you being the smart one.’Emma blushed. She hated being referred to as “The smart one”. It was, however, an fairly accurate label. She had been transferred to the only school in her county willing to guide her through the cripplingly complicated (or so it seemed to the other children) curriculum that was originally designed for people four years her senior. In all honesty, Emma was quite literally a genius of her generation. Shuttled from one school to another, nothing had challenged her somewhat over active imagination and mind, so much to the extent that she had finished every book in one of the ill-fated school’s library within the first term of the school year.

But this school was different. Being the odd one out would always be a hindrance to Emma, but here she was more accepted than she had ever been before. Granted, most of her friends were eleven whereas she was fourteen, but otherwise it wasn’t too much of a hell hole. Almost bearable, save for the intermittent Jeremy’s who made it their mission for the week (or indeed however long their attention span was) to make her life as difficult as she could. On good days their pitiful psychological ploys were but small stepping stones, but today Emma was tired, for some reason, and had neither the energy nor the inclination to fight back, even if it was only a few sharp witted words to send her pre-teen demons packing.
A wide eyed, blond first year with wonky bunches gazed up at Emma. ‘Tell us more,’ she pleaded ‘Tell us more!’Emma sighed, scooped up the little girl and re-began her tale.

_______________________________________

The old woman remembered the night the moon has shone so bright…it had been the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year of the century. She could feel it in her bones. Her old bones that felt like they had seen centuries of time had been aching, not just from her rheumatism and creaking joints, but something else too. Something different. It had been the night her daughter had left too. Three successive nights of labour had gifted her with a child just a day previously, a beautiful, pale girl who was yet to be named. But as she stared with the deepest love one can find, a mothers love, she realised. She saw the white blond hair, and the large, translucently sapphire eyes, and she knew. She knew that her daughter, her only daughter, was a moon child.And she knew shat she had to do.

_______________________________________

‘Ah.’ Said the smallest girl in her high-pitched, all knowing voice. ‘But what is a moon child?’
‘Well,’ began Emma hesitantly. ‘A moon child, is, I suppose, a child who was born at exactly the right moment, in exactly the right place, and was therefore a gift from the moon.’
‘Ah.’ said the same girl. ‘Ah. But what do they do?’
Emma frowned. It had been a good three or four dozen books since she had read about the fabled lunar children. It had been several days since she had run over the facts in her head while constructing the frame for this story to cling to as it flourished. ‘Well,’ she said at long last, ‘ A moon child is just a normal girl or boy, until their first full moon, when -’ \She was interrupted by her dear friends Jeremy.
‘Werewolves? Moon children, aren’t they werewolves? And here was me thinking you were clever enough to believe in them stories.’ He sneered, his top lip curling in a feral grin.
‘Shut up.’ Chorused several people at once. Everyone was clearly weary of Jeremy’s constant interference.
‘No, never tell anyone to shut up, even if it is Jeremy.’ Reprimanded Emma. ‘He’s got the right to his opinion. And no, Jeremy, believing in fairy stories does not make you stupid, or any less intelligent than you really are. It just means…’
She bit her lip and trailed off.
‘It just means what?’ Queried a curious seven year old.
‘Nothing.’ Said Emma quickly, keen to avoid the subject. ‘Now, where was I…?’
The children merely saw an impatient storyteller eager to restart her tale, but inside, Emma knew it was quite different. No, she didn’t really let herself be taken in by the tales of princesses and curses, fairies, ghouls and beasts, but she longed to go back to the times when those stories were her world, the time when she was protected in a kind of womblike bubble from all the unpleasant realities of the world, longed to retain some of that long lost innocence of hers that vanished as fast as anything ever could the day the ECG machines electronic pulses faded into a black screen. She bit her lip and blinked, still raw from that memory even after eight whole years had passed. That day…so much like any other when it began…

The day her mother had died.