return me to the ground (imedla/maggie)

[clover ❁]

magedalena clarke 

she sits with her legs hanging over the windowsill, leaning against the peeled-paint frame. she is often this way, half-inside, half-outside, properly committed to nowhere in particular. she likes the view of the churchyard; the trees, in their unruly rows. sometimes, a crow comes and pecks at the fruit and she screams at it, petulantly, until it flies away.¹ 

in her lap sits her sewing; a needle and thread, a carefully chosen grey colour, to match the fabric. and then, the fabric itself: a tiny mouse, sweet limbs spread out, its skin split right down it’s stomach.² maggie tends to it like a child playing at mothering, her hands slow and soft. she had removed all the badness from inside of it, whatever curse had gotten in there, and replaced all of those silly, biological parts with stuffing from a childhood teddy of imelda’s, which she had found in a box in the attic. she had also made a tiny, pink heart out of fabric cut from one of her mother’s dresses, and slipped it inside.³ 

while she stitched, she sang the mouse a song. she didn’t know many songs, only those they had taught her in school, back when she went more often than she skipped.⁴ she pieced together part of a melody, improvised forgotten words as she went. 

oh, sweet fragile thing, 
oh, oh, oh
you will live forever, now
god will bring you home

when it was done, she said a prayer over his body and kissed him on his little whiskered face. she intended to leave him on imelda’s pillow, between the books on her bookshelf, inside her cereal box at breakfast. that would teach her not to put out poison for the rodents. maggie didn’t see why they deserved the fruit, but the creatures didn’t. after all, they were gods children, too.⁵

. . .

1. when she screams, her mother, who is sleeping, turns in her bed and curses her.

2. she found the mouse the previous day, in the cellar. it had not been dead yet, only close. it’s breath was laboured, its heartbeat slow. maggie had offered it crumbs of her dinner, and stroked its little head, and written a list of things that if she did them just right, the mouse would survive. on the list were nine things, and she did her very best, but when she awoke in the morning, the mouse was still and cold.

3. the dress was right at the back of her mother’s closet. she had not worn it since before their father had died, and maggie was certain that ma would not miss it.

4. when she did go to school these days, she found that instead of songs and painting, they wanted her to learn trigonometry and the patterns of tides she would never see, and chart the history of a war that did not matter to her. it was better to stay home. 

5. maggie slipped the mouse into her pocket, and climbed down from the windowsill. 

[sucy 🌷]

I M E L D A

The garden is wet. It's summer now, but with the shade from the trees the dew on the grass never fully dries. Imelda feels soggy all over all day. She's used to it by now. The soles of her feet squelch in her boots with every step, breaking the silence of the church grounds. For that, she's thankful. The silence is far from tranquil like one might expect. It's a tense stillness that sits over the land, ready to snap at any moment. If she steps on it, softly softly, then she tests its strength. She gets the feel for the air in their little ecosystem as she works. 

Today the air is heavy, and the tension is stretched thin. Imelda keeps an ear out for a yell or a screech or the crunch of bone as she works. She loads up the basket fruit by fruit, bit by bit, and steps on the rotting ones on the ground as she passes them. She steps on them hard. Everything is wet, everything explodes underfoot. When the weather picks up (though she doesn't know why she's waiting for it, when nothing changes beneath their leafy ceiling) she'll go about the garden barefoot. Destroying her mother's dreams beneath her feet is satisfying. It cheers her up to the point that Imelda nearly starts whistling.

Nearly. She needs to stay alert. 

With a full basket, Imelda heads back to the church. Maggie is there, dropping to the ground from the windowsill. Imelda waves at her. 

"Maggie," not Lena, "come and help me bring these downstairs. I need you to hold the doors for me."

Please, Maggie, she adds in her head. It's no big commitment. A minute of her time at most is all Imelda needs.

ELEGANT

[clover ❁]

magedalena clarke 

maggie is not helpful. there is a child within her that pouts its lip and stomps its foot whenever she is asked to help. before her father died, she didn't mind; she would run and fetch him new baskets for fruit, or a shovel, or haul buckets of water merrily for him, always hanging out for his praise. now, helping has gone from a game to a cornerstone of their survival, and maggie resents it. when they ask, she feels herself shrivelling up into a tiny heap. she puts up a resistance. it is not really a resistance against the good, honest work of her mother and sister, but a resistance against accepting that the parameters of her life have changed.¹

she thinks that imelda is brilliant. not that she'd ever say it. she is thankful for her patience, her solemn strength. she gives her something to rally against, something secure that will stay.²  it isn't long after her feet hit the floor that her sister, who has been out gathering fruit,³ returns to the church. 

"maggie," she says⁴. maggie's face scrunches up into a ball. she feels it coming before it hits her. the request, always, the asking. so sweetly, as though it is nothing at all. "come and help me bring these downstairs. i need you to hold the doors for me."

there it is. maggie feels clawing fingers around her throat. she chews at the skin on the inside of her cheek to stop herself from screaming. she does not - cannot - accept her sister's request. she remembers that her sister has wronged her. 

"you-" she whispers, face twisted with anguish. "-you've been putting out poison again, haven't you?"⁵

she feels the small weight of the dead thing in her pocket. 

thou must not kill thou must not kill thou must not kill - everybody knows that this is essential, a simple rule protecting the earth's children from the most vile of sins. is it so hard to follow? 

maggie wonders if her big sister will go to hell for this, or if it is possible, still, to save her.⁶






1. when they say 'lend us a hand, maggie, won't you, dear', she hears father has left us and you are no longer a sweet child anymore, you must face the harsh truth of it; the weight of us making it through the winter lays heavily on your back, now, girl and she runs from this, because it hurts her and she cannot carry it. 

2. she trusts her sister to stay. but then, she trusted her father to stay, and now he is buried in the cemetery under a tombstone she has never seen. 

3. it sickens her the way imelda works, as though she has a debt to pay to god. 

4. imelda has worked so hard to re-carve magdelena's name into her mouth, maggie, she always says, just as maggie demanded. she has erased lena just as maggie asked her to. she does a better job than their mother, who often forgets, and does not seem to understand how hearing the name her father once called her cuts deep into her flesh.

5. despite her resolve to be angry, her bottom lip trembles and her voice quivers, thick with emotion. she was never good at hiding from herself. 

6. she has saved her a thousand times before, and she intends to keep on saving her until they die. she cannot imagine going to heaven all alone. 

[sucy 🌷]

I M E L D A

When Maggie's face crumples up, Imelda nearly stops in the middle of her sentence. With that look alone, she knows she's fighting a losing battle here. But she finishes her request nonetheless. She owes that much to Maggie. She'll never give up on her, on including her, on pulling her in, no matter how difficult her sister makes it to try. Imelda smiles, an awful, wavering thing that's liquid on her face. It's so much effort to keep it in place.

You, says Maggie, with the pain of the world on her face, and Imelda believes she really does feel it all, pinching at each and every nerve, you've been putting out poison again, haven't you? 

And really, she'd like to say no. If she could, Imelda would drop her basket and let the fruit within roll and scatter across the grass. Then she'd run to her sister, gather her up in her arms, and-- well, from there, she isn't sure what she'd do. Comfort her, insist that no, there's no poison anywhere in the garden. The poison is in Maggie's head, in her heart. They just have to bleed it out. Or maybe she'd pick her up, use her newly formed muscles to drag her kicking and screaming to the far end of the cemetery to their father's grave.

She doesn't want to hurt her. Imelda's just so tired of grieving alone.

Of course, she doesn't do any of that. All of her energy is spent keeping that smile from shaking. Tears are rising in Maggie's eyes, threatening already to spill. Imelda can't cry too -- not her, the pillar that she is.

Stone statue Imelda shakes her head.

"Maggie... it's to protect the trees. You know that. It's the same stuff we used to put out all the time," back when father was still here to do it, "so..." 

She's floundering, useless fish out of water. More than anything Imelda wants to throw her own tantrum, and kick and scream at their mother. Why is she the one dealing with all of this? 

"So please, won't you lend me a hand?"

ELEGANT