Sweet Revival

She wakes up in her room, she thought, windowless and bare. But she’s quick to notice that she’s without her body, and while she might suppose she’d left it behind in the night, she could hardly parse it as even an inconvenience.

She wasn’t much preferred for the things she was, so barred from her body by its own expiration she felt at peace.

A bit empty, but it was better than being full of pain or resentment.

“You’re early,” the Psychopomp says as it sees her eyeless.

“That sounds like a lie.” She said, knowing full well that it was. She’d known she was to die since two nights before, betwixt threats, the tightness of her own chest as she tried to breathe and really she was just thankful that she hadn’t needed to do it.

Hadn’t needed to take herself out of the equation.

“I’m sorry.” It says, knowing what she was most certainly consumed by.

“What are you sorry for? it isn’t my father here, my mother. You could be sorry for that if I’d poisoned them,” she said, almost angry that she hadn’t. Like it would be better to have been sent to this place after the gallows and meet them then. “I just died of a few bruises. I’m weak.”

“Are you?” it asks like it was an odd self-reflection. Like it wasn’t weighing her soul.

“I didn’t poison them when I’d thought to. So I think I am.”

It tilts its head, “How kind, that you’d absolve me as well as mock me.”

“Your right, it is likely kind of me. Still I’m thankful you killed the barley germ also. I think I would’ve been sitting here waiting for you If my mother hadn’t seen that.” She said remembering the incident, Delphia had made a point of being nosy back then, but she wasn’t willing to accept what happened.

“Do you think that was a good thing?” it asked like it didn’t know how these things went.

She smiles in quiet rage, “I’d seduced the shepherd. I’d have gotten what I deserved.”

“You mean your father.” It says, and she’s happy for the confirmation.

Like there was anything about it she could be happy with, and she supposes it does know how these things went. “I said it. I meant it. They did it.”

She pauses to take a breath she doesn’t need. How novel.

“Like I said, thanks for killing it,” she says knowing full well the luck of it all, the shame. “Even if I had been a bastard that wouldn’t have made all that worth it.” She knew that. She’d seen what those kinds of secrets did to families, she’d known why they were cut clear from everyone.

“Thank your father when you meet him again.” It said honestly, knowing full and well how it happened.

What he’d done to make up for his shame. How she provoked him. She’d been pretty in his home; she’d been angry when he yelled. She’d known by then, you can’t tell a bad man how he treats you, a bad anyone, they’ll make the point all over your back. It was that inalienable husbandry he’d felt over her.

That same feeling her mother had, the same that they’d have felt if she was more pliant, more happy, more anything they decided in the moment.

Still it was all fine. Just correction. Even if it was past that last inch that was her life.

“Alright. I can do that once he dies.”

“What makes you think it’ll take so long?”

“What do you mean by that? Do you really strangle fate so tightly Psychopomp?” she laughed, wanting badly for all this to be a joke.

“No, no. I’ve strangled nothing. But I feel the clawing beneath my feet. Your wanted back now.”

“By who?”

“A friend.”

She wakes on the ground after what feels like months bereaved of the sun, she can feel it for once across her face and she wants so badly for it not to be real. The itch-bright thread she feels in broken places, the shape she’s been remade in, her bones worn where they’d been cut.

She feels naked beneath it, beneath the gaze of strangers, and of death whose left her here in her body.

She can almost see it’s silhouette.

Above her.

She doesn’t try to open her eyes, for once not fighting with her tired body she had died before, and now it put her back.

Back here.

In this body made and used, and so dearly hated by her now that she knew she didn’t need it anymore.

She heard cheering. Too many people.

“Glory, she breathes. Glory she lives. My dearest daughter she lives.” She hears and she is disgusted.

But she can’t speak.

She can’t scream for the blightful-lying pain curtesy of her father’s axe; she knows it in her bones. They tore her up and took her apart, and blamed someone else once it was found.

Her body.

And now some fool has brought her back, and they think she’ll carry their lies. She opens her eyes to the woman who gave birth to her, and then to the woman who put her back together, and she feels where her tongue had been cut.

And resewn.

And she realized, they really had the audacity to feel shame for it, even as they begged this charlatan to bring her back. Was this what a friend of death looked like?

Maybe they were it’s enemy finally. Maybe this was her punishment.

Maybe she didn’t care, maybe it didn’t put things like that in her.

Maybe it saw the lies in her soul and actually let her be empty.

That would be a nice thought, she feels the saltwater leak from her eyes, she’d forgotten what tears are to this body, how badly they burn and how meaningless they are. But she feels them, like she does the sun, and she hopes for a while that waking from that room with the psychopomp wouldn’t just be torture.

“You should wake yourself child, do away with that supine position. Show us your will to live.” The Charlatan tells her expectant. Aware.

She pulls herself up, only a little bit so that she’s sitting up. She doesn’t mean to glower.

But she hopes this ‘seamstress’ understands that she’s made a mistake. That she knows what the Psychopomp knows, that she’s accepted what she’s done.

“Your child lives, the crime undone,” she says as the miracles had sprung from her fingers, from needle and thread, “Now you can ask her yourselves, who did this? If it matters.”

Having the girl wake was miracle enough for most and so none there to witness it stayed for more than an hour, save the girl, her mother, the charlatan and now that she’d realized it, Delphia.

Delphia stayed throughout the whispers and hullabaloo, like she hadn’t before. Though in the end she did retire long before sundown, still she was left alone with her mother. This person as much the atter as her father, forked-tongue and all, and still… here.

She’s lead back home, where she was certain to see her father.

Where this was certain to occur again. Even if she’d been made to live, there would be-

“I think I’m done here, I’m certain your will has been done.” The seamstress said, holding her mother plainly to her tears.

“Don’t speak to me. My child wouldn’t have been in pieces if not for your sort.” Her mother lies through her teeth, as she’d seen before her death.

‘No, my husband has never needed to hurt me.’

“You shouldn’t blame witnesses oh mother of the corpse. Not so shamelessly,” the friend of death said, “But Please do clean your husbands axe since you are so free of sin.”

She looks back at the old woman who remade her, cut away farther so then her oh so deserving parents and smiled for what felt like the first time in her new life.