Into the Wishing Well

They spoke till the hour against midnight, what will you do? How will you do it? What do we have? Who will do it?

It was a round row save the lost and broken spokes of their normal dining room table, made empty and much too small by the young-most and now silent.

It would seem like a waste of time, if it were simply a child trapped in a well. The trouble was why she was trapped. All waterways no matter how distorted lead to hell, and they had no better proof than what pulled her in.

“Take the rope and harness, we’ll pull you back when you find her.” This is what her Aunt told her when it was finally decided that she would take the leap. 

After all, it would likely be a comedic feat for any of them, dragging Alex up.

Size was the largest factor, knowledge was another. When it came to the latter, Alina was not prepared. Izzie knew that on instinct. Alina took it on faith what they’d been taught, that is, if faith was a book in her rucksack.

“You’ll only break your neck.” she remembers saying, a bit of a hypocrite now she’s jumped in. She should be careful with her thoughts down there. Such a small act and Isabel was already grieving her.

Because of course, Claudia won’t be found by her.

Alina knows she’s alive. She decided that when Aunt Gillian first guided them to the well, she couldn’t know what Izzy saw, but Alina smelled the earth, nothing so much as blood, or flesh. She looked in and saw the vines, burdened by weight abandoned down there.

And she would go in to prove it.

She couldn’t allow this unjust thing to live, so she would march right in and make it spit her sister out. This was the insensible manner she must’ve seemed to Gillian the night of. Nothing can be compared to a girl’s rage after all.

Still Izzy was silent.

“You shouldn’t cut your hair yet.”, Gillian said when they were alone walking side by side to the well. Alina had always kept it long, down farther than her sisters, they’d offered before to help her cut it, but Alina had never thought to before that night. She’d need to be lighter after all. Less to grab. 

She’d said, “Won’t it just hinder me?” it had been tied taut then, but she had a knife. It would be nothing to give up now.

“Anything can be currency if you dread losing it enough.” Alex said, hearing them. He’d decided to lead, sure of the path and it’s distorted nature.

She wondered if she could carry both, the weight of her hair, and her sister up the well.

That didn’t matter yet. As she was lowered in.

“Don’t look from your path, no matter how dark.” her Aunt said to her, a kind face illuminated by lamplight.

Claudia was snatched by her shoulder, her arm, too fast to be sure of anything.

Alina, she wasn’t sure of much but it was a slow decline. Nothing to do but look up, to avoid her own nausea, the light of the lamp dimming the farther down she went.

Soon she was alone in the dark.

Though it would be farther still before she hit bottom.

Soon she saw the faint shine of coins falling, landing lucky on the dry dirt at her feet. Death is cheap, but it would be unfair to compare the smell to a light, so she spared a memory to things like pine, mold, and an ugly sappy sweetness.

Alina doesn’t know where she is, she was as far as she understood, straight beneath the thing they dubbed the wishing well, but there was no true map of things like hell. Landmarks for all their complacency moved much more frequently than that of the living world.

For her the well could only be the way in, and she would be marking her own path, even if there could have once been a map.

She looked up, still trying to remember how Claudia might’ve landed. She doesn’t know how the roots moved beneath it’s claws, or why it bothered to pull her in.

They just dropped two coins in after all, was something like that really going to ignore her?

Alina was almost sick, but still she could be thankful for it’s disinterest.

She turns on her flashlight, before moving forward into the double pitch of layered night, distance and foliage. She wonders if there’s such a thing as light beneath the Sheol of hell, if there was a sun, or a reflection of the moon hiding among the roots above her.

That she was simply blind in blight of her living self, or lost for the shallow hours between the waning-waxing of a foreign moon.

She wonders if those basic anatomies would be so self-evident for the kinds of things that existed here, as her path becomes clearer with distance, though not for light, or earth, or stone. 

Alina might cut her path, mark it with silver, or anything else, but a straight path isn’t a simple demand, as she sees her path once taken twist above her, as she carries careful the cord that would help her back, given success or failure. 

She’d never been curious of things such as this, the little things her mother regaled her with when she was small. The oddities her parents meant to share with her in their totality, that she only half remembered.

Did they ever tell anyone how wrong the paths would lay? Or were they as ignorant as her. 

Her thoughts fell to the Grimoire, who wrote it, and why it was on offer alongside knives, flashlights and rope. She knows she should be careful, but she’s already looked from her path.

Up and back, and away.

Still she hears no voice but her own.

In the end she cuts the line, if you're in hell it’s because you're already lost, if you're lost. Well, you’ll have to find your way right?