A Requiem for the Unwritten

[unwrittenreverie]

Pearl woke in the darkness, and, for a moment, couldn't quite place what had roused her. She eyed the nightstand in the direction of the baby monitor, but it sat dormant, with no demanding cries. Even Ozzie's breaths, right beside her, seemed hushed. No owl hooted its hunting calls outside. It was too still, too quiet, and too dark with the new moon in the sky.

The conviction of wrongness lanced through her like electricity surging with a flipped switch. The back of her brain droned on about autonomic response and epinephrine in a rolling catalog, but her feet had already hit the floor and taken her through the door to the nursery.

Nothing. Two babies slept in the warm glow of the nightlight. Nichole's lips puckered as if she dreamed of eating. For a moment, Pearl wondered if she's so tired she's hallucinating. Over three years of never sleeping through the night, the stress of work, and relationships and it's all added up, or rather down, and left her in the red.

She’d imagined it. She gasped and shook her head, no, she refused to lose her mind! She thought she might just need some water, and meant to get some from the kitchen, but in the hallway she saw light under Teuila and Keona's door. Not the dim incandescence of the nightlight, but a preternatural blue gleamed in the silence.

She swung the door open on hinges that forgot to creak and found DeeDee grappling with fastening Teuila into a baby carrier. Pearl shouted and stormed into the room. Her voice and steps made no sound. Her hands, already turning into claws, reached to snatch her daughter from the witch, but with a wave of DeeDee's hand and a mouthed phrase the floorboards turned to vines that held her in place, barely out of reach.

The plant tightened on Pearl's ankles and crawled like constrictors up her legs. Within two breaths, she could no longer reach for the child that twisted and extended her own arms because every instinct within her turned her talons on the choking tendrils at her throat. Airway. Breathing. Circulation. Air. She needed air.

She couldn't smell her daughters' fear when she couldn't inhale. She could only watch the witch sprinkle Teuila with dust and see the toddler go limp. She  couldn't scream, and if she could, the cursed silence would devour her cries. The creepers around her neck grew thicker as quickly as her claws could cut them and she'd made no headway, even when they almost helpfully pinned her wrists in place.

DeeDee easily fastened Teuila into the baby carrier now that the little girl no longer fought back. She dropped a creamy folded parchment into the crib and met Pearl's eyes. She mouthed words, they might have been a message or another spell, the younger woman couldn't tell. Her temples ached and her vision swam. Respiratory acidosis, her brain uselessly supplied, and her head lolled slightly to the side, unconscious. If not for the vines twined around her, she'd have fallen to the floor.

Only Keona, forgotten and howling soundlessly while she rattled the bars of her crib saw her grandmother open a yawning portal to a starlit forest. DeeDee stepped through, carrying the little witchling, and the portal narrowed and disappeared behind her.

When the portal closed, the vines shrank back into nothing but traitorous floorboards and noise returned to the room with a pop. The thud when Pearl's body hit the floor and Keona's keening became audible sliced through Ozzie's sleep.

He shifted before he'd darted through the bedroom door toward the source of the bedlam. He checked first on his wife, out cold, with only her hands changed, and her wrists and neck covered in purple bruises, but breathing. He scooped Keona up and stripped her, but couldn't find a single injury. She clung to him and burrowed her face into his neck. He found Teuila's crib, empty, save for a piece of paper.

Still carrying Keona, he dashed to the nursery and found the twins awake and crying. Luckily, his second born's fists clenched in his pajamas supported her while he quickly inspected Natia and Nichole. They didn't seem hurt either, just startled and hungry. He called for an ambulance, the police, and Dad, and tried to calm at least one baby while he waited on help.

Cal and Arista arrived first, having run across the intersection in their night clothes, followed shortly by the police and paramedics. The detective read DeeDee's note before handing it to another officer to pack away as evidence.

Son,

I regret that I have found no other option to keep your father, and thus you and yours, safely in Moonlight Falls. Remind him of my warning, and that the future of all the town's werewolves hangs in the balance if he fails to keep Darius's plans from fruition. Do not fear for your daughter, she will be secure with me until the proper conditions have been met. Trust that I will not risk my witchling for any prize. 

Your mother, D.W.

She signed with a large, illegible flourish and had lined the margins with various symbols. Ozzie wanted to tear it to shreds in lieu of her face as much as he wished he'd woken up sooner to protect his wife and daughter. If he hadn't already shifted, the rage and guilt would have driven him to chaos. His parents took the girls home with them and he rode with Pearl in the ambulance to the hospital. He told himself that as soon as his wife was safe, he would go after DeeDee. He'd bring Teuila back, and the world would lose a witch.

[kas-e]

I love how slowly mountain towns wake up because after living at the beach for a long time I am permanently tuned to be up early, and there is nothing more satisfying to me then walking around a town or city when the rest of the people are fast asleep.  I'm currently in Salt Lake City, living in the valley on the south side, and this place is no exception, it wakes up incredibly quiet, still, and with the almost-unnoticeable speed of a sloth.  There is no sound like the near silence that hits an American city at about 4am, but here that same strange hollow sound extends through until the sun comes up in every season except for summer.  That window, that predawn calm when the human energies are at rest is the magic time for the artist and writer.  I can't count the amount of times I stayed up through the night, and I would purge my soul using chemicals and parties and people and smoke to arrive at the golden four corners of time, 4am.  With all of the social bullshit exhausted and extracted, and my brain often in a semi delusional strung out haze, I found it easier find that deep groove which allowed me to transcribe my thoughts in their purest and most organic form.  That was then, now I've learned that it takes far less self destruction to work my mind into that groove of unapologetic truth, intellectual nakedness, and a state of melodic flow in my prose.  

I'm a country boy at heart, my backyard growing up bordered a working farm, Mr. Charlie's farm to be exact, and it was about 10 miles of rolling hills and woodlands and raw nature in the countryside of the eastern US that I endlessly explored alone, and with the help of my childhood friends.  These woods taught me how to be alone, they showed me the brilliance of beauty on cool summer mornings where the mist hovered in the valleys as the sun broke the horizon.  Just as important, they taught me about fear and death and love and sex, they showed me the pecking order of a community and shone a bright light on the fact that such social organization had little effect on my psyche.  They showed me all the things that nature can show a boy, and eased me into the realm of manhood.  I sat with my first love staring out over these rolling hills, hand in hand with the electricity of love pinging off of every inch of my insides, and there was also a time that I sat in the exact same spot with the barrel of a loaded gun resting on my temple mere inches from rolling tears, as I fought the demons and contemplated if the pain was worth pushing through, and at that moment my poor mother walked around the corner to come face to face with her 15 year old son on the shaky brink of suicide.  

[writingdotcoffee]

“A writer is a world trapped in a person.”

— Victor Hugo