The Bluebird's Ruby Feathers

This place was once home, or at least, Skie thought it was, alive under the roof of her rumbling years caught in the cobwebs of the cellar. The crystal chandelier was still as dazzling as starlight, glistening like a foreign galaxy above, reflecting the youthful, curious eyes of Skie’s once future nostalgia. It was here that she became who she was in the guest room of her ancestors' home. 

Plastered with pink floral paper and cheap, fluorescent candelabras, Skie pictured this empty room as it once was: filled with laughter, love, dolls, and books: everything she needed to be the studious mischief-maker she knew herself to be, the way her grandmother saw her.

The same remaining gold-encrusted windows of a cotton king were a mere parlor trick for the masses: her wide eyes lit like a flickering flame in the memory. As for the diamond mirror, Skie could see the curtains behind her move like dancers in a dead ballroom from decades before, something she could not quite picture with her whole heart, yet tried. It was nothing short of painful fun, cast away in the cloth containing the remnants of the storm that shook the kingdom. And this specific towering torrent of all the terraces took the hit. 

“Please, don’t leave me, Nana, I just wanna be with ya, like you promised you would be,” an adolescent Skie cried, with tears cascading from her curled lashes to her clementine-charcoal cut. There was no more anguish she needed to hide- the war was a time for fear and sorrow. And death: but not just blood and bones, but broken hearts and bonds, severed with the baron distance between souls. It boiled her blood like a melting pot of gumbo from a crawdad feast, a tradition in the manor she loved almost as much as she loved her darling grandmother.

“We will be together soon, child,” Lily Jane responded, holding her granddaughter’s clammed hands in her own. Pulling a jewelry box from her house dress fur, she clamped the young fingers around the velvet frame, kissing the head of her kin. 

“I will miss you, turtle,” Lily trembled, hugging her child in the nooks of her arms.

“I‘ll always sing for you, Bluebird,” Skie smiled, as her grandmother pushed her away, behind the door of a horse-drawn carriage. 

Her grandmother’s fate forever remained a mystery to her.

Skie rubbed the warm glass from her silent eyes at the sight of a familiar painting in tatters on the wall: the living history of a ruinous ransacking, and she never really knew why. Reaching her rough, slightly wrinkled hands into her denim pockets, she plucked her gifted chest from below a zig-zagged zipper and held it to the beating of her breast. Lifting the lid, her eyes widened like they did every time before: to the graceful angel playing her harp on a cloud. 

The music was a memory of the joyous life she once lived: a life that disappeared into thin air the way her family did: the way her Bluebird did. Nostalgia sank into her bones and seeped into the surrounding, familial smells of the plaster ceilings and decadent doorways, now darkened with the empty bliss of abandonment. This place was no longer home to anyone but the ghosts of the past generations, now grounded in sullen graves. Skie was alone in the ruins of her runnings, and in the routines of her clockwork cheer with the rising and setting of the sun. 

“Who am I to you, Bluebird? I don’t know if your turtle is still here,” Skie paced, hoping for a sign from the fathoms above in the cloudless blues of the serene sky. 

“I love you Lily Jane, and don't you forget it.”

She rubbed her fingertips across the painting in tears, remembering the blueprint of her childhood. Not a symbol anywhere else of it remained: not even in Skie’s reflection. It almost seemed too distant to have happened.

“You skank, have you lost your mind,” Lily Jane shouted over the railing to the ballroom floor, glaring at her daughter Clara King, a woman of rebellious, wild nature. A nature of reckless loving and whim: the very nature that landed her a child of wedlock, a pregnancy of premature measures. This was an unthinkable humiliation to Lily and her family, they did have a reputation to withhold.

“But mother, I love George and he promised to pay his dues to his child, whatever the cost. It is not as bad as y’all be thinking. Just hear this once again and I will be free from your world, by Jesus, I will,” Clara contested, rubbing her hairline once over with the comb of her fingertips. She knew she had made a mistake, but she wasn’t going to admit it: especially not to her mundane and traditional mother. Lily Jane never wanted anything to do with change. In her eyes, women were homemakers in the making, just misled by fantasies and whimsical theories of evolution and industrial advancement: there was nothing that needed to change in her eyes. It wasn’t broken, so why bother fixing it? She hated hearing that women were more than that these days.

“That man is a no-good cheating criminal from a family who is all the same, and I thought you would have known better than to tangle yourself up with the help. He’s an idiotic boy of ideas and theories that only enchant the maiden's wallet and get her a family before she even seals the deal! You have brought this on yourself, thinking that your juxtaposition was a delicious sight to the kingdom, well now it looks like you’ve seen it. Good for you, child. I hope you roast in the devil’s deathbed with that George from the north with a mouth bigger than a brain!”

Lily’s face was a flaring red, burning under the candle-lit chandelier, refracting the rain from the elegant lattice sill. The sky was crying for her, as it would seem, with not a chirp of the sparrows to dote on. The haze of gray was no darker than the fog of her anguished eyes, sobbing in pure embarrassment: she wished she raised her child better, to be smarter, wiser, with just a hint of logic. She had failed as a parent, as a mother and a daughter alike. And she knew that in nine months, her own Clara would do the same. She had birthed another reckless trouble into this sophisticated world of willful greed, as sharp as a dagger in the pulsation of her thumping heart. 

“Well, I suppose I just tip the scale, don’t I mother?”

“Maybe you do. We just don’t make the ends meet the way they should.”

“I guess I’ll just be off then,” Clara whispered, pushing back the raindrops from her eyes as best she could, but her mother let the water fall. Was this it?

The wallpaper seemed to shrink around the frayed edges, leaving nothing but the foundation of a concrete chapel leaning into the hurricane winds of the southern storms. Yet, this fortress was far from falling apart: in fact, it seemed to keep Skie together. This palace represented who she was and who was a part of her in another life: a glorious life, long misplaced. 

While lighting the hanging chandelier, she noticed how the flames glistened like a bottle of sparkling champagne. 

“This brings it all back, doesn’t it Bluebird,” Skie muttered into the ceiling, envisioning her reincarnated life with love in it. 

Lifting the lid of her jewelry box, Skie hummed along with the familiar melody like a lullaby, singing softly to the beating of her laced lungs. Her home was entrenched inside the soft beat. Rubbing her fingers along the chilled lip of her treasure box, the dancing angel flipped to the force of her palm on the right rotation, turning an encryption to the outside air from underneath.

Flabbergasted and surprised, Skie couldn’t help but explore the hidden element of her grandmother’s only living legacy: what she wanted her dear child to one day discover. 

A sudden tap at the door knocked Lily Jane straight out of her cushioned loveseat, “James, would you check the foyer for our midnight visitor?”

A man in a black suit pulled open the gold, creaky knob at his employer’s request, only to reveal none other than a basket, crying in the blistering cold of the winter wind. 

“Bring it to me, James,” Lily called from the heat of the hearth before her feet.

Upon uncovering the wicker-handled lid, Lily couldn’t help but collapse to the floor in agonizing pain: and staring back at her were the second generation eyes of her runaway Clara.

Running to the courtyard gardens of the manor, Skie needed to catch her abandoned breath in the clouds and honeysuckle of the towering vinyl archway. The cold, metallic gleam of the golden frame sent a chill through her spine: it was a riddle. 

THE KEY ENTRENCHED IN HOLLYS PAVED,

A QUESTION UNKNOWN AND EVIL ENSLAVED

Skie must have read the scripture over a dozen times from start to finish, like a record on repeated skip. Why would this have been left to her by her grandmother, and what did it have to do with Foxglove Manor?

Pacing throughout the courtyard grounds, Skie made her way to a cemetery of faded rock, destined to be lost with the hands of ticking time.  

Planning each step with great caution, she made her way through the rows of deceased daughters and sons, placing a single-flowered dandelion at the foot of each name. 

James, Johnathon, Clara, Holly.

“Tell her to be quiet, my lord, please. The sound is more dreadful than a dying mountain goat in a spring avalanche.”

“I’m sorry Madame, but the child is rather ill with hunger,” responded a nursemaid, old enough to have been Clara’s governess many moons ago. 

Lily sashayed over to the nursery from her study across the hall, a Victorian mundane coop to asymmetrical butterfly’s wings, swinging from the hallowed sphere of the antechamber. Lily tried hard not to look squarely at the array of Arabian shapes and shades. 

“Give her to me,” she scolded, taking the child into the crook of her elbow. 

The nurse bowed as she climbed out of the room and into the thickness of the molasses hall, making it even more difficult for Lily to scold her to a point of potent pleasure. But this time, she sang to the child a song of hope, plague, and fertility. She sang her a song of repentance. 

Foxglove Manor was for two types of people: the respected and the cowardly, like a cycle of dependence and service. The long line of slave owners and cotton royals made their true mark of each level, with a gold staircase and crown molding to seal the deal of disgusting wealth. These were the respecteds, going so far as to kill to keep a secret, with only the silent servants as unseeing eyes.

Skie felt as though the eyes of the stone were focused on her, zoomed out from the years in the barren sandstorm winds. This was it. 

Crouching to the engraved letters, Holly Daniels McKinney seemed to be a forgotten name of history in a place unknown to the outside world, except for Skie. She recognized the name as more than a century old. Could it be that easy?

Rubbing her fingers along the weathered tomb, Skie noticed a number upside down in the year of the woman’s death. Pushing away the wild foliage, she turned the number right side up to the fact she knew to be true. 

“Curious,” she exclaimed, just as the ground began to shake under her feet. Falling on all fours, she closed her eyes and sheltered her head with her hands as she fell through the ground like a raindrop from the clouds. The collapse of the cavernous cemetery seemed to be something from a historical novel, an Egyptian treasure secured at the bottom, but what Skie found was far from it. 

It had been a wonderful vacation to the Middlelands, as she liked to call it, in a world drenched in crater lakes and evergreen glades of green fir flames.

“Are you packed, darling,” Lily Jane asked through a thin tent flap no more extravagant than the dirt grass and peat moss itself. But all Skie wanted for her birthday was a camping trip with her Nana, and of course, Lily had to come through, especially because of the life her daughter gave her grandchild. The orphan wanted relations the way she never had with her flesh and blood: Lily had to make up for the terrible daughter she raised. 

“Ready, Bluebird” the child responded, all dolled up in pigtails and charm bracelets, like Barbie straight from her plastic wardrobe: Lily absolutely adored her.

“I have a surprise for you, darling,” she whispered into her granddaughter’s bejeweled ear as she handed her a package wrapped in the same green velvet fabric she made lopsided gowns out of in the ballroom. Skie’s sole excuse was “it spoke to her”.

“You haven’t had much of a family besides me, Skie. This gift holds the key to your very existence and breath in this wood. You are one with Foxglove Manor.”

Every night under the butterfly lampshade lit with a dim kerosene flicker, Skie relished in the genealogy of the book’s thick, parchment paper like a scroll from the library of Alexandria. She cherished the book, keeping it hidden and safe in the pillowcase under her very head each night. Nothing would come between her and her family, and she meant it literally. 

She eventually came to memorize the names on each page: Dolly, Mason, Ivan, Holly, the list went on like the Bible. She finally felt as though she was one with Foxglove Manor.

When Skie opened her hazelnut eyes, she could barely hold her tongue as she yelled in shock through the layers of solid dust. 

“What kind of sick joke is this?”

Just as she was about to forget her French filter, a glimmering portrait caught her eye. “Wow.”

“Hold still darling, or Monsieur Nelson won’t get your profile right.”

“Hey Mr. Nelson, I like your dress and top hat!”

“This, Mademoiselle Skie, is a beret, not a ‘top hat’,” the artist scoffed, rubbing his horsehair brush across the yellowing canvas, “And child, not a dress, but an apron for the shell paints.”

“My sincere apologies, Monsieur, she has never been painted before,” Lily Jane stated, adding the slightest tinge of embarrassment to the sympathetic mix of her silky voice. It would seem to Skie as though she was never angry, or even, that she didn’t know how to be. After the several-hour ordeal, Lily and Skie took a walk in the garden, sharing secrets and stories like they always did.

And there it was, hanging just above her sewn-up hair like a stag head on the wall, showing proudly the hunt at the manor decades ago. A swell of tears came to Skie’s eyes as she stared at her grandmother’s face for the first time since their parting. Not even words had been shared that day, and Skie regretted not even saying a simple ‘thank you’ to the only family she had truly ever known or had for that matter.

Weaving her way through the maze of sod and rubble, Skie touched the face of her elegant Bluebird dressed in a fur cloak over a ruby red ball gown only seen on the occasional eve of her favorite festivities. Skie pictured her own soft hands in her grandmother’s pearl-gloved hands, like the Virgin with a sinner under white fallen snow: pure magic. After making her way past the painting, she noticed a golden wardrobe closet strung on fading sketches with flowers on a bundle of sullen ivy. 

The wrinkle in time had been resurrected with the masses.

“Now darling, as this gown was Great Aunt Holly’s willed to be, it shall be passed down to you,” Lily Jane pet, braiding the hair of her second chance child. 

“I don’t like wearing animals, Nana,” Skie interrupted as the tears flooded her whimsical brown eyes. She liked to pretend that her grandmother was wearing a living bear still intact, not a dead one reduced to a bellowing fur pellet.

“Alright then, maybe not the cloak, but you will have this ruby dress.”

“Nana, whenever I think of you, I think of that dress. Is it magic?”

“It has the power to keep people connected through love. Just as I loved my darling Aunt Holly, you will forever love me the very same way.”

Skie couldn’t help but gush at the thought that she and her Nana would be together forever, one way or another. It was a power that seemed to vanish over the hazy years.

There was something special about the closet, Skie could almost feel it the minute she settled her gaze on the wonderous glint of the wardrobe. Pressing her fingers to the hollow drawers of the chest, she noticed a knob was missing on one of the levels. Tracing the outline of the puzzle piece, she noticed its immediate similarity with the music box her grandmother had given her at a time of comfort and golden memories. It was nothing but nostalgia now. 

Skie untucked the gift from her pocket and placed it in the exposed wood, mimicking a jigsaw at its finest. She turned the makeshift stub to the side, cracking the lid of the rectangular secret. Excitedly, she forced her hands into the unknown and pulled out a ruby red cloth protected in bearskin fur. 

She was finally one with Foxglove Manor. 

She had reunited with her Bluebird.