Widow's WalkA Chapter by A Shared Narrative A princess in exile waits for her itinerant prince. Their romance had been a fairy tale from the very beginning, after her prince had found her on the beach. A rapid courtship ensued, and they were married on a boat. Her prince had bought this house for her when they saw it from the boat on their wedding.
When did the fairy tale end? Why did it end? A vinyl record in the study scratched and skipped, over and over, the result of her smacking the thing out of irritation at one of the prince’s evasions before he left this afternoon. The sound was enough to irritate her more, but she was in a seething mood, and being angry felt productive. She took a pearl from the shell tray on the coffee table and ground it between her teeth, savoring the powder and texture it created; a reminder of her past life before he found her on that beach.
He’d been with some other woman. She knew it. She could prove it. That never stopped him from ducking her questions, or professing his love to her time and again. His touch and his kisses always took her breath away, and any protests she had died in her throat when he apologized like that. She’d watched him and loved him in her own mind before she’d even met him, and even the smallest look or smile was understood to be his reciprocation of that love.
The worst part wasn’t how she kept getting fooled by that same trick, over and over. The worst part was that he probably believed his own words. He thought he still loved her, and yet had a mistress. Somehow he could reconcile it. He could even reconcile how he had been spending more and more time with this other woman. She couldn’t anymore, not since her prince had turned his wife into his concubine.
The vinyl mantra kept reciting itself in the study, and echoed faintly through the wood-and-glass palace that overhung the ocean. It kept echoing inside her head, constantly reminding her of a memory she may or may not have imagined. A memory from her time before her prince had lifted her from the waters of that beach to the palace that had turned to prison.
She had never felt more separated from the water than she did here, despite it being just yards beneath her feet. She never felt more wretched and separated from anything than when he had left this morning. To go back to his other princess.
Leaning against the railing, a white-knuckled grip of fear and fury brought her back to the present. The sounds of the ocean crashing below had overcome the faint and echoing record playing in her head, and in the study. It was now the natural and inexorable crashing of the waves against the cliffs, that primal force and fury, that brought her a moment of clarity and decision. She ran her tongue over her teeth, sucking air through them, as a wild grin split her lips.
Squeezing the railing one last time, she pushed herself upright, and turning her back to the ocean, its force and fury now behind her, propelling her through the open glass doors into the open-concept kitchen. She would unleash her inexorable force and fury upon him when he came through that door next.
She pulled the largest knife out of the kitchen island’s knife block. She hadn’t spoken to her sister in some time, but the idea to send a special thank you to her sister crossed her mind. The knife block had been a wedding gift from her sister, to start a new life with her prince. Now, that same knife block that was there when she started her new life would be there to help return it to her. She wasn’t going to be a victim to this prince. She wouldn’t be his second, his pet, his anything. She still had years left on her life, and she was going to reclaim them before her prince and his new princess stole them from her.
That four-word meditation continued to scratch and repeat in the study. She laughed as she sat on the couch, weighing the knife in her hand. It had gone from a depressing reinforcement to a wicked foreshadowing of what was going to happen.
Minutes went by. Hours passed. Her anger did not blunt or subside, but it had become quiet and smoldering. She fueled it by taking more pearls at regular intervals from the shell dish on the coffee table, crushing them to powder between her teeth. Pearls and hate were a proper diet for any princess, mermaid, or siren. There were few better things to whet an even greater appetite when one was expecting to lure a man to their death, after all.
Even the hottest geothermal vents beneath the sea, where it boils even in the coldest depths of the ocean, have their heat dissipated and carried away with the same currents that would eventually crash upon the shores. And so it went with the princess. The desire to kill fades quickly without anything to fuel it, like the presence of a target. When the energy from that is expended, a person is left emptier and hungrier than they were before, as they come crashing down without that adrenaline high.
Four words haunted an uneasy and fitful sleep for her. Four words played and programmed themselves back into her dreams, no longer a death threat to her prince, but a lamentation for herself.
She woke up on the couch in the dark. Like a reflex, she reached to the coffee table to reclaim her weapon, or something to fill her stomach. Catching the lip of the shell, she flipped it and scattered her pearls everywhere across the wooden floor. It struck the ground and broke into several pieces between the couch and the coffee table. She came instantly alert, but not awake, and tried to instantly get up to clean up what was broken. Slivers and shards of shell pierced and tore at her feet as she put enough weight down to turn large sections of broken shell into a thousand shards and slivers.
She swore violently and immediately took her seat again. Reaching over to turn on the light, she lifted each foot in turn to examine them. None of the pieces of shell and glass had turned into small enough slivers to be a real invisible danger to her, but the big pieces that did cut the solves of her feet left multiple bleeding wounds that did nothing but hurt. Like everything else in her life since meeting her prince, everything did nothing but hurt, and this was just the latest in a long line of things.
After all, she couldn’t have been lucky enough to have stepped on a piece of glass big enough to pierce her foot, find a vein, and let her bleed out quietly across his precious beach castle prison house. No, she had to have a dozen different cuts that just made every step painful, and didn’t even prevent her from walking. God knows that he was probably out worshipping his other princess’ feet, instead of bandaging hers. That only happened because she couldn’t stay awake and mad long enough to bury the knife in his black and cheating heart. She couldn’t stay mad at him for betraying her love like that. How did she even deserve to be his princess anyway, if she couldn’t be constant enough in her emotions to stay angry about that?
She was too tired to do anything about the breakage at this point. She was too tired to do anything. In one last gesture of impotent rage, at herself more than him, she flung the knife across the room, into the kitchen, to hear it clatter to the floor. She wasn’t going to be able to hate him enough to kill him. She wasn’t able to break free and reclaim the years that were supposed to be ahead of her. And now she’d thrown the one thing that could end her pain across a floor covered in broken glass that she’d have to walk across with already cut and bleeding feet.
It was finally enough to drive her to tears. She screamed at the knife, at the record player that never stopped, at the broken shell and all the scattered pearls. She screamed at herself. She just screamed, without words, because a scream was the only thing left in her that she could express.
When that last scream stopped its echo on the bare walls of the minimalist glass and wood of her prison palace, she just shuddered and sighed. There wasn’t even the emotional strength left in her for a proper sob. All that remained was a single conclusion that she felt she knew all along: she had to leave. He had chosen, it wasn’t her, and she didn’t have the strength to see the wrongs righted anymore. She was going to go back to the life before the beach where he found her, before he made her a princess.
She took one of the scattered pearls that managed to stay on the table and put it between her back teeth.
On the end table, by the lamp she had turned on, was a vase full of lilies. They’d never been her favorite flower, but it was something her grandmother had said to him once upon a time that made him think she liked them, and he had always dutifully kept a vase filled with them in the living room for her to watch. Gods, was he not paying attention to her even back then? She laid the lilies out on the table, and then poured the vase water over her feet.
The water was colder than she expected, and she hissed and clenched her jaw, cracking the pearl between her teeth, as she began to chew and grind it down like all the others. If there were any glass fragments still in her feet, she couldn’t see them, but these cuts were mostly the shallow kind: they never seemed to stop bleeding, and they hurt more than if she’d driven a nail through the whole of her foot. If she was going to go anywhere, though, she had to at least make the effort.
As she gingerly got up, it was obvious that her effort had been wasted. Placing weight on her pained feet squeezed small pools of blood from all the cuts, leaving irregular prints with ever ginger step she took towards the front door on her way down to the beach. She was going to go just as she was, in nothing but her chemise. He’d found her in less that day, even if it had been appropriate for a beach, so this would serve just as well. He could have everything, and he could give it to his new princess, when he would probably lock her up in here, too.
The record scratched, and the four words played again. And scratched. And played. And scratched. And played. This time, she realized, it would be for the new princess. Those words no longer applied to her, now that she’d made her choice to leave him behind, and return to her origins without him. And he would know she had gone, because he’d be able to see every bloody step she walked away from this miserable existence with him.
Leaning against the hallway wall and sucking air through her nostrils, she realized just how far a walk back to the beach would be on feet that hurt and bled with every step. She grimaced at the thought of how much more it would hurt once the sand and salt started rubbing their way into her wounds. She sighed and laughed, because even a princess can sometimes only manage to laugh when it hurts, because that’s all the response a body can contain at that point.
Laugh she did, until she ran out of air and had to lean against the wall, shifting her weight back and forth to get any temporary relief from the cuts. If she sat down, she wouldn’t have the strength to leave, ever. But she didn’t know if she had the strength to make it to the beach, until she looked out over the ocean, beyond the open glass doors, beyond the balcony.
Twenty steps was shorter than two thousand.
She began walking.
The pain became less. It always becomes less when you realize your goal isn’t nearly as far away as you thought it was. It’s a reserve that comes only from the relief of knowing you’re in the last mile of your journey. Free from prison is free from prison, and she suddenly found the strength to run.
The blood spreading under her feet with each step wasn’t an impediment. She had all the traction she needed for this short sprint. Dark outlines and shapes left evidence of where she slammed her feet down in that last dash through the house, as she launched herself over the railing and into their open air below it.
Her footsteps stopped fifteen feet before the railing. This had been the longest jump she would ever take.
The sound of her body hitting the water beneath the house didn’t even register against the crashing waves. She couldn’t even hear the sound of all the air forced from her lungs as the impact stole her breath. Water filled her ears, and all she heard was the rushing sound of water filling her ears and her heartbeat, neither of which she’d heard for a very long time. It was her moment to be free and alive again, reclaimed on her own terms.
She smiled to herself, thrilled to be back in her natural environment, to be home again. She took her first breath of life under the sea once more, and filled her lungs with the salty seawater. Her body bucked and seized, protesting the not-oxygen she was trying to force into it, as she vomited out a trailed of bubbles, the last of any air remaining her in body.
She saw that trail of air. Her last trail of air escaping from her, and knew she’d made the right choice for her, and for him. The princess saw the results of her lungs first dissolving into sea foam, and thought it was amazing to watch it boil and bubble as her back try to arch away from the water rushing into it.
She was finally free of her prison, back in the water, back before he found her. She had returned home, and left him trapped behind in that reality with her gone, and another princess he had to face and confess everything to. He loved her, though, and maybe she would survive him instead this time. Maybe not. She almost felt bad for them.
As her eyes closed and cold settled into her flesh, she thought that this must be what it feels like to become one with the ocean, to become sea foam and dissolve into nothing.
(With apologies to H. C. Andersen.) # # # © 2016 A Shared NarrativeAuthor's Note
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Added on May 8, 2016Last Updated on August 5, 2016 Tags: short story, short stories, fiction, fantasy, princess Author
A Shared NarrativeAboutI am mostly an on-demand writer. I respond to prompts and contests as an exercise to compel creativity in different ways. more..Writing
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