Monday, February 18, 2008

Dead Ground

In the final year of the plague she asked if her child, although illegitimate, could be quietly interred in the church grounds if its time came. She was motivated less by the shreds of her faith than the cherry blossom on the last tree left in the churning mud. Her request was denied on the grounds of long standing tradition so she buried the child herself with the last of her strength, clawing the stony ground with bloodied fingers. The Cossacks gazed down, on the crag above the convent, sat on their squat, pig eyed ponies. It was beneath their dignity to rape her again.

Katherine wept as she piled stones over the frail, twisted body in a vain effort to keep the dogs at bay. She wept for this child and all those she had left by the roadside. She threw herself over the grave and shivered herself to sleep, cheating the carrion crows, but when she dragged herself back to her feet they were waiting.

She walked down the hill, without looking back, into the trees where the ground was soft as carpet to her heels bare and sore. She slipped through the gates, hanging off their hinges at the Convent and pushed through the leaf littered cloisters. The sores on her arms were beginning to flower. She coughed and swallowed the blood that bubbled in her throat and then spat out her lungs in her hand. She lay in the courtyard and stared up into a sky as pitted and brown as her eyes.

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