True-Love Showers

I covered my eyes the moment I stepped beyond the castle doors. Still, fresh tears budded from the sun’s sudden brightness. It was as if Mother Nature was emphasizing the queen’s words. 

“I’ve found that if you smile, you can convince yourself, if only for a little while, that everything is fine. Eventually it will be.”

But it didn’t feel fine. It didn’t feel right to smile. And it didn’t feel right for it to be this lovely out. 

That’s not how it works in stories. In tales the weather matches the story’s emotions. It is bright and sunny when the fair maiden falls for her young prince. It is raining when something bad happens, like the sky wishes to also cry. It is within dark, eerie forests that evil lurks. 

But that isn’t true. Evil can exist in the broad daylight. You may even mistake it as a shadow cast by the sun’s glare. I was mistaken to believe these tales. 

The door creaked, yelling about being forgotten for so long. But no one hears except for me. I believe I am the only one who is aware of the door’s existence, so hidden by the vines strangling this portion of the castle’s outer walls. I slipped through, entering the more shaded woods that butt up against it. 

This feels more right. This feels closer to how I feel. Yes there are pockets of sunshine weaseling its way through patches in the leaves. But it is shadowy enough to create a chill. Shadowy enough to hide things. 

Was there once a time when the woods had been more sparse? When the trees had not grown so tall and so vast and so many, that it was the shadows that covered smaller pockets? There probably was a time when one could avoid those dark spots, ignoring their existence because the sunshine was so plentiful and distracting. That time feels impossible at the moment. 

I walk deeper and deeper. Something tickled my cheek. I didn’t wipe it. It was fruitless. Besides, I had grown accustomed to the tears rolling down my cheeks, getting caught by my nose or slipping between my lips like sad kisses. Kisses I will never receive again. 

I let myself cry. This was the safest place I could now that the queen has been ordering me away from my rooms, refusing me the solitude to mourn. 

“We must keep up appearances, my dear,” she would say. 

Or when she has me walk with her in the gardens I had just escaped from, she would say, “It is sad, but almost inevitable. A bride leaves behind her old family and old ways for her husband’s. You would have gone through that just as I had when you marry my son. I will not say it easier, what has happened, but it will make the transition less fraught. A clean break, as one might say.”

If my mouth had not been so dry from all the water in my body escaping from my eyes, I think I could have said, “I do not wish to marry your son anymore. I do not wish to marry Hamlet.”

Yet it might have been a good thing I was unable to speak. Even thinking that had caused one of the daggers in my heart to twist farther. 

How much farther could it twist till there was nothing left but scraps and ribbons?

I halted, standing on the threshold of the woods. Beyond it was a field peppered with beautiful wildflowers. A gentle breeze blew through, causing everything to sway so softly, so sweetly. Just as it had last spring. Back when there were less shadows in the world. But it might have felt like that because I hadn’t realized there was a shadow lurking behind me. Beside me. In front of me. On top of me. As it kissed me. As it made promises of marriage and bright futures. 

I stepped forward. Then took another step, yearning to feel how I did those seasons past. To feel anything else.

The grass scraped against my palms, dried from going too long without rain. The flowers were wilted, brown decay along the petals’ edges. Still, I began to pluck them. 

This one for my father. This one for my brother. This one for my childhood. This one for my dreams. This one for my love. This one for my past. This one for my future. 

Gathered up, I held them to my breast as gently as I had that one late spring day Hamlet and I had run about gathering as many of them up as possible. As gently as I had when I plucked and preserved them within the pages of my book. The pages of knights and princesses and princes and monsters stained slightly from the flowers. It was a mistake to ruin my only treasure.

I should go back.

I should do many things. 

I climb down the hill.

The water was smooth. Too smooth. It revealed as much as my mirror had. My chestnut hair wild and crazy, fluttering with the breeze. My eyes swollen and red. My normally fair complexion now waxy. That seemed most fitting. Like a candle burned then scraped and reshaped to look anew, but shorter and not quite as perfect as it had once been. The image rippled and I could breathe again. I dropped another flower, letting fresh ripples overlap the previous ones. Then I dropped the next one. 

It was not enough. The water still was too smooth. 

Bigger ripples, sharp and jagged like shards of a broken mirror, spread when I stepped in. The tightness in my chest loosened its grip. The queen had tied my dress too tight. But the farther I went, the more it was alleviated, the water lifting some of the weight off of me. 

Eventually the water lifted the weight of Hamlet’s necklace from my neck. It bobbed and bumped my chin, but it at least was no longer strangling me. 

A little more.

Just a little more and maybe the last remnants of my pain could be lifted from me too. 

I realized my mistake too late. 

The water was no longer lifting the weight of my dress, it was adding. It was dragging  me down. It was pressing down. 

I didn’t fight it. Because that was what I did. I didn’t listen to the warnings from the others that Hamlet was too young, too wild, too selfish to ever be a good husband or king. I didn’t listen to the whispers from the other ladies when they thought I couldn’t hear that my father was positioning me in Hamlet’s path in hopes of having his blood eventually on the throne. I had thought they were being silly and jealous. I hadn’t listened to my brother’s warnings that Hamlet had changed when he returned following his father’s passing. I hadn’t listened. I hadn’t fought. And the weight I had allowed to pile onto me was finally too much. 

Despite it all, I loved my father, the man who had seen me as an opportunity to advance, but also praised me when I excelled at something. I loved my brother who had gone behind my intended’s back with his own schemes because it was only us for a time after Mother had died. I loved Hamlet, the man who had slain the last of my blood. But love was no longer enough. It was choking me. 

My lungs were screaming. My eyes were burning. I didn’t move. Looking up, the surface was glimmering like fireflies on hot summer nights. The sun at least was not too bright from this spot that I could stare directly into it. 

At least I could until a cloud drifted in front of its face. Everything went dark. 

Yet again, I made a mistake.