Silent Death

Your skin was pale, your mouth was blue, and your fingers purple-tipped like delicate violet buds. I named you Silence for the way you spoke, or rather, the way you did not speak. 

Next to you I imagine I was strange. My skin tanned from the sun, my back and legs sinewy. Your moonlight limbs sought only the cover of night; during the day you would sit in the shadows and stare. My lips were startling red when paired with your own blue mouth. Sometimes I caught you shaping words I said and other times you mouthed your own phrases, glimpses to another life. 

Your vocal cords, a muscle like everything else, were weak from going unused for years. I hoped you would recover soon. In the meantime, your past went unheard.

When I first brought you back from the dead, you curled inside your coffin like a wild creature in its den. You were a girl once. You must have been, though I cannot imagine you laughing, smiling, brushing your hair in the morning. For when you were with me, the only way I knew you were not past death’s door was by your teeth violently chattering. Always cold.

The village talked. Their words trickled past my ears, whispering of dark arts and ungodly magic. 

None of that mattered when I looked at you. My creation, my life’s work. I named you Silence but forbade you to return to the silence of death.

The rumors continued, taking root in the villagers' minds. I did not notice the roots set aflame, a wild eruption of fear. I should have, but I only noticed you.

You had grown restless in your new awakening. Hungry. Your gaunt frame haunted my bedroom door, and oftentimes I would awake to your shining eyes, watching, wanting. Your sharp fingernails would dig into my wrist and from your blue lips would come a breathy exhale, an attempt at words that chilled me to my core. Oh, how I longed to know the secrets you held in your rotted mind. Eventually, you revealed fragments of the torture you endured at the hand of someone you had trusted. You were once pure, but this person darkened you.

From your chapped lips came a familiar word: Uncle. One with teeth as sharp as knives and knives sharper than your scrabbling fingernails, digging into his skin as you tried to push him away. He was larger than you and a heavy weight on your lithe body.

For the first time I could, in fact, imagine you as a girl; see the way you laughed and smiled and brushed your hair. See the way he might have grabbed that hair, used it to jerk up your chin and reveal a pale neck that would soil a clean blade with gore. Steel to be warmed by your body’s blood.

When I tried to get you to speak of it further you clammed up, your waxen face growing even more moonlike in its pale hue. And again, you would grip my wrist and haunt my doorframe.

I swore to you I would bring you sustenance. Yet you did not touch the bread or the stew. What would an incarnation of death want? When I saw the lamb I questioned why I tried offering up anything else.

The lamb, soft and woolen with wide eyes and large flat pupils, gentle rectangles. What more could the darkest creature wish for than the purest form of innocence? 

I waited for it, scraped by penny after penny. Most villagers avoided me, and it suited me just fine, only now I could not find work. As I slowly gathered the coin needed to buy the lamb, I began to teach you things.

Though you hardly spoke, you started to understand what I read to you. Girls did not learn how to read. It was only after death that you started to understand how to read letters drawn in the dirt. Your pale hand, thick from blood-clotted veins, would trace letter after letter. You soon understood my simple commands when I put them out on paper.

Sit, stand, stay. Perhaps it was cruel to treat you like a dog, but I do not believe you minded. You learned how to heed my commands, and they grew with difficulty until you were helping me with my work.

How to describe my work? It is the work that brought you to life, the work that stained my hands and soul black with ink and darkness. I brought you back from death’s own darkness with what the villagers call unholy. How can you, a beautiful creature, be called as such? I do not know.

Sometimes your eyes would glaze and you would murmur in a voice that cracked like a dying fire. Murmur curses against the man who took your life. Yet you did not have magic in your blood, and the curses fell flat.

When I had enough for the lamb, I was careless. I left you alone in the house, told you to wait for me in silence. Took my time walking to the marketplace.

But oh, when I had the lamb in my arms. How do I explain the glee from holding a creature I knew with certainty would perish at your hands and mouth, my most wonderful creation? I cannot; all you must know is that when I returned to my house I did not meet you but a trove of men with pitchforks and torches.

The house was burning, the woods lit with their cruel fire. How dare they call me wicked when they used a weapon meant to punish those in hell? 

The lamb had escaped my arms; I did not know when. I only knew the chaos of smoke and angry men. You were there, with your glorious, thin frame held taut and hungry. A goddess.

A man screamed, and then another. They brought out the pistols from their pockets and the curses from their mouths. Some prayed to God, asking them to save our souls. I wanted to laugh. God had never saved you; I did. Why would He save us now?

And then there was another scream. Another man. Your gaze hooked on him. For a moment you looked lost and then a feeble whisper emerged.

“Uncle?” You asked. You looked broken for a moment, confused. A girl once more. But a girl no longer as your gaze sharpened and hardened. I remembered you as you had been when I first brought you back from the dead. A wild animal, I had thought. 

Your eyes turned feral as they locked onto the man who bruised and bloodied your skin with hands and steel. In that gaze I saw months of pent up anger and hunger. I finally realized you never starved for food.

You craved revenge.

As my house burned down and shots rang in the air, as bullets ripped through my skin with a pain that had me on my knees, I uttered no sound. I was spellbound by the scene in front of me, the screams that ensued as you launched a body I once called frail onto the man that had you killed. Yet he could not keep you in the dirt.

As your teeth tore through his throat, he made no sound. Only a small gurgle as his blood welled.

More screams for God, more screams for mercy. Evil, they called you. Yet I thought you might be an angel when your face turned to mine, blood on your maw. I wondered, faintly, if they would still call me unholy. If they would still call me a demon. And dressed in orange-purple flames, you smothered him with your embrace. You both burned as one.

I don’t think you cared about the pain. Not then, as the man beneath you lay dead, silenced just as he had silenced you once before. 

In the distance I glimpsed the lamb. Running away. Free. 

The grass turned slippery with my blood. I closed my eyes. 

I heard a broken whisper, a strangled goodbye. A cold, charred hand grasped mine. My last thought was this: I named you Silence, but no one could take away your voice.