Last Words
Flora Fiction/Volume 5/May 2024
Last Words
by Maggie Nerz Iribarne
The room was completely still, oblivious to my demise. The fire waned, flickering in the grate. The wind howled on the moor, challenged the sides of the house, the window panes. Judith, also unaware of my passing, slept on the divan. I whispered her last words spoken to me, “Sister, we are running out of time!” She’d studied me with dry, serious eyes. Her hand held the pen above the page, pushing me to finish the book.
I didn’t expect to linger, to have this sense of the room, all the spaces in the house. I could hear the maid Betsy’s soft snores from her cold little bed upstairs. I regretted never giving her an extra shawl. I could feel the emptiness in Father and Bertram’s rooms, the tightly made beds untouched for many years now. My senses exited the house, swept the moors. The purple heather, its insistent ubiquity, its persistent beauty, despite, in spite of recurring storms.
Ah! The expectant, waiting church bells, the hidden stars and sun and moon. Yes, things were much bigger than I imagined, but much smaller too. The rat scurried behind the kitchen cupboard, the broody chicken sat on her egg, the worker bees buzzed, warming their queen.
I approached my sister’s sleeping form. How beautiful and kind she was! The love I felt overwhelmed but did not sadden. I shifted my glance to examine my own body laid out stiff, lifeless on the opposing couch. I marveled at all that wasted time fussing, of smoothing my hair and pinching color into my cheeks, worrying about my scars, my plainness.
I examined the book’s unfinished pages. The story lived on in my presence, my consciousness. I moved the pen, the words colluding, extending and twirling, spinning and swirling. The ending came, brighter than Judith and I imagined! I released our heroine, allowed her joy, new life. She would not be swallowed by grief and heartbreak. She would not wander the moors alone. I couldn’t help myself! I laughed, a deep sound I didn’t recognize as my own. It echoed within my own ears, reverberating down the halls of the house, out of doors.
“Tricia? Tricia!” Judith stirred, rose, crossing the planks to find my corpse. She fell across my chest and sobbed. She was the last of us left and I pitied her.
“Why do we attempt these long stories,” she once asked me, “when we so often take ill, die so young, so quickly?”
“What else are we to do with the tales bobbing in our heads?” I replied, knowing it was not much of an answer. Judith, Bertram, and I spent our childhoods holding one another captive, spinning stories of dark woods and generous lords and mysterious ladies, spending wondrous, magical hours doing so. Without our mother, ours was a sad life. Our imaginations provided some escape.
Judith did not notice the finished book. Well before its discovery, she ran for the maid, Betsy, she waked and buried my body, she noticed the signs of her own consumption. When she finally found the unmoved book upon the desk, she read with amazement, assuming those last lines were her own forgotten inspiration. Pleased, she wrapped the pages and sent them to the publisher.
Soon, she passed too, cold in her own bed. With nothing left, the windows blew in, the papers scattered, the walls collapsed. Released from our stories, we flew from the page, the demands of story. Reunited, we whipped in the wind, loose, frenzied, free. In life, we believed composition our greatest joy. Now we knew something else.
