#florence marsh

[misquotedghosts-blog]

I can convince small children that I'm a witch.

Florence Marsh

[miss-maggie-jones]

Would you stay if she promised you heaven? Florence + Maggie

Nothing was right. Nothing. She was so paranoid--a trait easily written off by the recent events in Bentley, but it was even worse and more embarrassing in detention when she seemed to be hallucinating. "Who are you? You don't have a slip. You're not supposed to be here, please leave," she said to nothing in the corner. "Miss Jones, nobody's there." A boy said. She looked away from the stranger for a second and in an instant she was gone. Maggie promptly excused herself for a drink of water, her hands shaking the whole time.

"Sit," Louisa Matthews had commanded later on when she came into her office after detention. Like an obedient dog, she sat without hesitation. "I don't know what the hell's come over you, and frankly, I don't care." Maggie watched her closely her heart pounding and her brain automatically reverting to panic mode. "I-I I'm so sorry…please don't fire me. Please, I'm trying…" 

"Oh, save it. I didn't bring you here to grovel, and you're not here to be fired. I brought you here to tell you you'll be taking some time off. At least three weeks. I've already arranged for a substitute."

"I don't understand…" the ice in her stomach began to thaw a little. 

"In four years you have never called in sick, never asked for a vacation, and never asked for a maternity leave. You have enough saved in vacation time to take six weeks if you really want it. But the point is, you are not allowed back here for three weeks."

"You can't… Please, I have to--"

"It's not up for discussion. Go home Miss Jones. You look tired."

She left the school dejected with a box of papers to grade in her time off. 

But by the middle of the first week, she couldn't sleep at night and had no interest in leaving her bed during the day. On the fifth day, she turned to a doctor, looking for the thing that might fix it all.

"Take two before bed. It should be enough to help you sleep for now," the Doctor said. "And I'm prescribing something for your anxiety. The choice to take it is yours, but I think it'll help take the edge off for a little while."

She stood at the sink in her bathroom, staring at the bottle in her hand. That had been…a week ago? Two weeks? A month had gone by and she still couldn't sleep. She felt ill all the time and she was behind on grading. It had come to a point where she was telling her students just to read quietly while she worked half-heartedly on assignments that had been in her hands for ages.

The routine never changed. Wake up, get ready, go to work, leave work as soon as humanly possible, return home, hide in the dark of her bedroom with thoughts so loud she could think of nothing else. 

If the loss of Craig Elliot had cracked her, then the death of Florence Marsh had split her wide open.

Maggie reluctantly shook out two pills, popped them in her mouth like little white candies, and took them down with a cupped palm of water. She splashed a little on her face and the back of her neck before turning the water off, patting her face dry and turning the lights out on her way up to the loft where her bed waited to welcome her like a partner in mourning. 

The cat had gone missing days ago--she really ought to look for him, but she remembered to fill the dish every morning and it was empty at night, so she had to figure at least he was okay wherever he'd skulked off to. The plants were a different story. Completely dead, or about to be. 

She took the walk to her bed and crawled under the blankets, burying her face in her sheets. Pieces of his face had long-since faded from memory, but she could still hear Evan's voice loud and clear at the back of her head. "I told you you were fucking worthless. Why did you even bother getting your teaching license? You thought you could save those kids, huh Meg? You thought you'd be their fairy godmother? Stupid, hopeless bitch. You're nobody's hero."

Maggie grabbed for the trash can by the bedside table and retched into it. She sputtered and dry heaved a few times, sweating and cold. She couldn't catch her breath--sat there choking on the air that was stuck in her throat. Her eyes burned hot and her heart raced in her chest. 

Worthless, stupid, gullible, stupid, hopeless, FUCKING STUPID idiot...

She was going to die. She was most assuredly going to die. Maggie rolled onto her side and tried to catch her breath again, clutching a pillow. 

[miss-maggie-jones]

A Heart So Hollow - Maggie + Florence

She sat with the window leading to the fire escape propped open, rekindling an old and bad habit. She hadn't smoked since she was sixteen--back when she'd just been "Jacob Bray's little sister," and fighting to forge an identity of her own. At that age, she'd partied in the woods on Friday and Saturday nights, slept it off on Sunday and spent the rest of the week grounded, assuming she'd gotten caught. It stopped in the fall of her senior year, but she sometimes missed the kind of life where she was allowed to be faultlessly, guiltlessly reckless. And so Maggie now sat on the drafty window ledge, watching the cigarette burn away between her fingers. She hesitated before taking a long drag off of it and tapping the excess ash out the window.

The night air was cold, but it didn't smell the way it usually did in mid-winter. It was on the cusp of spring. She took another drag from the cigarette and flicked the ash off the end once again. The cat sauntered across the room and stopped in her line of vision, sitting to stare at her for a moment. "I know, I know, 'Fuck you for smoking in the apartment.' You don't own me," she told him with a scowl. The cat gave an unsympathetic, unamused meow before retreating to the coat closet by the door. He wasn't gone long before she heard a racket coming from that direction and he came flying back out again to hide under the bed.

Maggie snubbed the cigarette out on the plate that had become a designated ash tray and went to investigate. The large cello in its case barricaded the entrance. Reluctantly, she hoisted the heavy thing up and out from the back of the coat closet, hauling it to the living room for an inspection to ensure nothing was broken.

Opening the case there was an instant waft of spruce and polish from the last time she'd opened it, which must have been at least a year ago. There was no damage to speak of, but she felt a strange tug in her stomach to take care of it anyway, so she pulled a chair over and pulled it out, tuned the strings one by one until the only sound it would make was a perfectly pitched one. And then she removed the bow, placed her fingers and began a slow, mournful song.