Drusilla
Immortality in a Photograph
She remembers
the day they met and how he had a gappy smile. The wax was pooling into puddles before her and she hated thinking she was forgotten. When he took her hand then, it hadn't really mattered who he was or what was happening, as long as she was saved. He had the smoothest pale skin and a shadowed face, but she imagined it must be angelic while music killed her thoughts, drowned them in pulses.
Outside, the sky was falling, and she could have cried but the rain disguised it all. The blue she loved hardened into a stone gray, the colour of the gravel under his wheels, as lost and unknown as their destination. In the country a foal cantered beside them on his new legs. Reaching the end of the field, he watched them, neighing impatiently, but for them there was no end and they were already gone.
His room was bare and almost accidental, as if he didn't really mean to live there. Only white paint hung on the walls like a bare canvas; she wondered about him as his hands circled her waist and she thought she loved him but she didn't know him at all. There were insects calling and she imagined they were really little blue birds.
She remembers
a month later, the morning she woke up empty and the sunlight was burning the day away. The walls were still white and waiting but a little cactus plant sat on the table in the kitchen now, looking out of place. She ducked outside a moment for the daily paper and almost fell when her eyes found the front-page picture.
She was shaking so hard she couldn't read the words as the pages trembled heavily under her fingertips. She forgot to exhale as she scanned the face in the still capture of the security camera, her head screaming and screaming and she didn't need to see the "wanted" caption before she threw up.
She remembers
rising in the middle of the night, sliding silently out from the covers beside him. She burned with sweat, feverishly searching for the right knife in the drawer, the terror choking her from the inside, crawling through her bones like worm. She was certain she would feel his cold hands around her neck any minute then, and she could picture the way the silver blade would reflect her fear as it fell to the floor with a metallic clang.
It didn't happen. Instead she crept back toward the bed with her weapon clutched to her chest. She needed desperately to know him then, to know some reassurance. She stood over him finally, her fingers running over his skin, searching for some sign or symbol to prove his guilt or innocence. She pushed his hair back from his face, crying suddenly, and the way he slept with his lips parted slightly seemed to tell her of his purity.
He opened his eyes and everything happened so fast that even now these memories pass in a blur. Her own eyes widened as he looked up at her, still slow from sleep, watching the wetness flood her cheeks, unseeing and unfeeling until she began to scream as she pulled the blade from his chest. He whispered, "Love?" and closed his eyes, exhausted from blood loss. She fell over him, her embrace an apology, and she despaired when she saw that the walls weren't white now because they were red.
She remembers
the trial and how he was in surgery at the time. So they told her. She felt the handcuffs chafing her skin and it was cold, too cold in that chair and that room and that life. She tried to imagine what it would be like for doctors to sew her insides up too, and felt that she needed it as much as he. She screamed when the judge said attempted murder and pled very, very guilty. She wished for the rain again and to be saved but there was no one to save her.
She remembers, too,
how sharp the cell was, all corners and angles and nothing comforting. She cut her palms on the bars and didn't even care anymore, not after the first week. Her month with him seemed so distant and dreamlike; she wanted confirmation that he was real. She felt him somehow lingering in her bones even as she felt them strain under the meaningless labour overseen by prison guards.
The first month she loaded and unloaded wheat and hay and found no spark of glamour in community service. The bundles were brown and smelled of mould and dust, not the golden yellow she would have envisioned. The sky was clear. She missed the gray storms and almost felt it to be an insult, as if the sun was telling her he was gone.
She can remember
every task appointed to her and the way she locked her jaws together and her mouth formed a thin line because that was all she could do to prevent a shriek from escaping. She closed her eyes and held her knees to her chest when she was alone, remembering him, breathing his memory. She haunted the post office every hour she could, waiting and pacing, step step step step, turn, repeat. The door of the box made a little squeak every time it opened, in protest, louder when she slammed it shut again because he never wrote her a letter.
Maybe he had forgotten her but she hated the idea of giving up. She ripped her pillow to shreds in her sleep and the time seemed to stop and start and stop and start again without her permission. The cushions in the psychiatric ward were soft and she couldn't stay awake as she sat mute to all their questions.
Later they came for her with a parcel which held the clothes in which she had come. They hung from her frame like tired drapes now while the attendants babbled words like bail and probation. Her hand shook as she held the pen and signed blindly where the X was marked. It was storm season and she could hear the sky falling, rushing over the windowpanes. She closed her eyes and knew who had saved her, whispering, "Love?" and watching the wetness pour down his cheeks. He kissed her eyelids slowly and
she remembers
that the gravel under their wheels was gray like the clouds.
She's comfortable now with the walls white, although the cactus on the table is flowering red and looks like Christmas. His funeral was last week, three days shy of his eighty-second birthday. She didn't cry even a little. She smiles fondly at the pictures before her and closes her eyes as she kisses the one captioned "Love". He is holding her to his chest and their eyes are both closed, their faces happy. She goes to sleep now in a cold bed, but he is immortal in these photographs.