A/N: I inconvenienced a lot of stuffed animals moving my Festivus party to accommodate this Apocalypse rumour! But that's okay! Because it means you get to read this chapter! Which I am so excited to present! CAN YOU TELL? I bet you can guess who wins the Favourite Character of the Chapter Award!
Melena Thropp, I dub thee spirit animal of Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary and Hester Prynne. And let's throw in Blanche DuBois since you quoted her. I need a moment. I think a fangirl faint is coming on.
Melena felt as though she'd been sleeping for a thousand years, dimly conscious of her surroundings and her emotions, but not of her perspective. Different times; different Melenas. Only now was she hacking through the vines that chained her limbs and peeling back the blindfold that had made the darkness so believable.
For months she had cowered beneath her covers lamenting what had been lost to forty-eight years of failure; what she had sacrificed in the names of love, of her family, of her appetites and her desires. Sensitive, like all beings, to what she thought constituted happiness, though, perhaps a touch too sensitive. Days of psychological warfare. The sputtering engine of her heart and the cement block surrounding her brain. Wasted years gaining on her, the gaping pits in her home.
She couldn't tolerate the noise of the television, the more assertive noise of the radio, the raucousness of rush-hour traffic, the silent holes in Nanny's gossip where she was the topic, the layers of dust collecting on the family photo, the one shirt Frex had forgotten, the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling of Nessa's room, the starred map of Oz in Elphaba's room, Shell's crayon masterpiece on the wall, the torn up garden she used to tend, the danger of her own thoughts.
So, abandoned by everyone and abandoning everything, Melena brushed aside the wreckage and boarded a plane to Quadling Country, battling the undertow in the struggle to reach the shoreline herself.
The city of Ovvels hardly qualified as a city, though it encompassed all the classic ideas of one. There was something about it that both plagued and intrigued Melena. Maybe sometimes the road less travelled was less travelled for a reason. Humidity rendered her hair curlier than usual and adhered her bra to her skin, but she tightened the dark fabric of her shawl around her shoulders.
The air was too thick, the roads too still. The village was shaded a grey sort of calm; dead almost. Sunken eyes peering through curtains, bent on reading the inside of the outsider, stripping her down to the mass of naked shame and lonely determination she was. Something had driven her out of Munchkinland, out of her marriage, away from her morals.
Forced by a lack of addresses to resign to a technique of colour description, Melena was searching for the red cottage between the yellow and the blue. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed a young man watching her with curious eyes and inclined her head the opposite way towards the marshy landscape gripping the horizon, sickened by her sudden yearning to deviate from her mission in favour of cheap attraction.
Switching her view from the wasteland to the grisly sky, Melena almost overlooked her destination. As she neared the dilapidated hut, she found the plank serving as a door ajar and could make out the faintest pounding on the other side of it. Softer than a drum, but perfectly rhythmic. Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom.
Before Melena came across the courage to knock, the door was nudged open.
"Pleasure to what I do owe?"
Thrown off by the familiar backwards command the Quadlings had on the Ozian language, Melena blinked heavily.
An underrated linguistic prodigy, she had mastered the Quadling language and reassured the old crone she was fluent. Then, taking liberties she refused to acknowledge to herself, Melena sidestepped the woman and invited herself into the home. "I'm looking for someone by the name of Raven Hand." She wheeled around, waiting for the response she had already surmised.
The woman eased the door closed and it emitted a disgusting creak that almost had Melena on the floor sobbing. Her nerves were shot. "It is my understanding that you are the mother of an old friend of mine," she continued, her voice barely above a whisper. The word old felt like sacrilege on her lips.
Eyes on Melena. Two with the force of a million. A simple, wrinkled face, hooked nose, puckered mouth. Not unlike the nanny Melena loved so much. But eyes uncannily shrewd, speaking volumes. Eyes that knew exactly when and where she had lost a child, but forcing an admission anyway.
Melena scanned the one-room lodging and stumbled over to a rickety chair with a damaged leg only to find that she couldn't bring her knees to bend. She drummed her fingers over the table accompanying the seat and faltered across the upturned rim of a mirror so clandestine she hadn't seen it lying there. Tilting it upwards, she looked into the sunset-tinted glass and flung it away.
"That's me!"
"Mirror." Raven Hand's voice was a low registered croak. And clearly not impressed.
"But-"
"Mirrors reflect."
"But-" Silenced again, Melena crossed over to the disheveled cot, examining the glass trinkets that dotted every ledge and crevice – a menagerie of animals and people alike. She ran her eyes over the vase of wilted flowers beside an empty picture frame, browning sheets of blank paper scattered across the floor, the cracked dishes and the loose beads along the nighttable that resembled a dissembled rosary.
"Do you have a profession?" she asked, remembering Turtle Heart's own eccentric career.
Raven Hand bared her hand and traced her opposite index finger over it. "Reader of palms."
Waiting for a returning inquiry, but not getting it, Melena inwardly laughed at herself. So all along she really had been a manneristic prude. "I'm a housewife."
"Not a very good one. Where is the house you married?"
Melena bit the inside of her cheek, seating herself on the edge of the bedstead, away from the light poking in through the doorway. The thumping she had heard upon entering was accumulating into a melody, taking possession of the outer reaches of her mind. Her elderly companion lowered herself into a chair as gracefully as her arthritic limbs would allow and waited, looking like a toad that had escaped the trauma of a witch's pot.
Reading the question posed behind the woman's eyes, Melena answered, "I guess one could say I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."
The Quadling was up again, attempting to strike a match above a candle in the centre of the table. Melena rose to help, but was distracted by a screeching noise behind her. She spun just in time to catch a teapot moving by its own accord, dragged by invisible hands. She blinked and it was still.
"Kindness? Forgiveness?" Raven Hand wondered, finally succeeding with the match.
"I won't ask for forgiveness for something I didn't do. A child with a hand in a cookie jar isn't necessarily stealing a cookie," Melena murmured, unable to surrender her vigilant watch on the mobile antique. "Advice, yes. Closure. An epiphany. A glass of water, maybe." She deflated, sinking back onto the bed and resting her face in her hands. "How do you cope? How do you lose everything and pretend you didn't?"
"Lose everything?" Raven Hand picked up a glass figurine and stared at it as if the concept was new to her and the object explaining. "But not everyone has lost everything, so you stay."
"I don't want to stay. I don't want to suffer. I don't want to see it. I don't want to cause it. I don't want anything to do with anything."
Raven Hand laughed – a terrible, throaty cackle. She reverted back to standard Ozian, the mother tongue of the remainder of Oz, implicating Melena as the intruder she was. "Lady Goodness to have very sober lifestyle."
Covering her lips with her fingers, terrified that the woman had somehow smelt the wine through the mask of toothpaste, Melena loosened her thoughts in an effort to guard her tongue. "I held Turtle Heart's hand as he died. He fathered one of my daughters, but never got the chance to see her. I contrived the entire affair. I suppose something wasn't going to let me off unpardoned, because now I've lost my own children. And so, I offer you my sincerest condolences. There's no deeper pain."
For a moment Melena thought she saw Raven Hand cocking her arm. She sealed her eyes shut and waited for the blow, but it didn't come.
"Where did they go?"
"I'd rather not..." Melena responded tightly.
"Where did they go?"
"I don't know. I don't know anything anymore. I'd pass through hell for a glimpse of how they're getting along without me."
"You must be very important figure in Land of Munchkin."
Melena was taken aback. "Well, I'm the daughter of the Eminent Thropp, but I don't see-"
"To always be talking about yourself."
Avoiding the beady eyes of her accuser, Melena pouted. "Well, I've been locked up with only myself for company and I haven't had a hobby in the past thirty years beyond homemaking. Even then, I've hated it from day one."
"You born housewife?"
Frustrated and communicating it through a catty tone of voice, Melena hissed, "No. I used to dance and sing and read and write and paint and run and smile. I loved the piano more than anything. People like me thrive on flattery." She laughed. "I loved people, but they didn't love me. As soon as I was married and found myself living second best to my husband's work schedule, I realized what a mistake I'd made. I missed out. After so many years of waiting for my big adventure, I hadn't given myself credit enough to believe I could have achieved it on my own. Escaping my life became the sole purpose of it. When it failed, well...all I have left to do is die. My life is as good as over." She was faintly conscious of the beating sound intensifying.
Raven Hand hadn't moved in the slightest. "Your children's not over."
"They don't need me anymore than I need myself."
She looked exhausted all of a sudden. "Assumptions to be used to prevent lots."
Melena clicked her tongue. "Yeah, so are condoms. What's your point?"
"Lady to use much of one and none of other."
"Look-" Melena began pacing around the room. It wasn't much of a course, but it soothed her anger substantially, "-I was unhappy. So what? I tried to deal with it. Simple, instinctive human impulse. Granted, I might have taken it a little too far. I might have tossed everything I had out the window, down four stories into oncoming traffic. That doesn't mean I deserve to feel this way! No one deserves to feel like this. I feel like there's nothing. Like there will never be anything but nothing. I just want to be happy."
Melena sat down again and sighed. Raven Hand seemed completely indifferent to the soul purging. "I don't suppose you could predict my future, could you?" But as soon as the words left Melena's mouth she realized that the future – once a broad, romantic prospect – now seemed horrifying.
Starting with a noise deep in her chest that sounded suspiciously like a chuckle, the Quadling reached for Melena's hand. Melena saw the appendage coming towards her and wondered how a palmreader could have such withered hands, before snatching her own away. "Could you...uh...could you guess? I don't want to know for sure."
"Play not about you. Play never about you. Your time as lead is over, but the play keeps playing. No erase. Just ease. Erasing not your job."
"And how am I supposed to ignore everything that's happened?"
"Stupidity to ignore, courage to accept." Raven Hand stared straight ahead, her eyes changed and her voice curved. "Punishments to be gifts. Gifts not to come back one day. Gifts find new home." The candle, which had been flickering for some time, faded into nothing as if someone had passed a hand in front of it.
The words rang true in Melena's ears and if she was going to lose her composure, she didn't want to do it in front of the unsettling Quadling woman. "I appreciate your help and your...um...sympathy. I suppose I came here to understand myself-"
"Who to be myself?"
Melena flashed the old woman a smile.
Taking inventory of the encounter and the smile now etched on Melena Thropp's face, Raven Hand hypothesised just how intrinsic the need to step behind her smile, her beauty, her charm and her belief that people would catch wind of her pain and use it as ammunition against her was in this woman. "One more stranger to ring doorbell," she warned.
Melena smoothed her hair over to one shoulder and tugged. "Well, here's to hoping they're as good-looking as your son." But just before her departure, she stopped and faced Raven Hand one last time. "If you don't mind my asking, where do you think Turtle Heart is now?"
Exposing her missing teeth in a wide grin, Raven Hand clasped her hands together. "Turtle Heart to come behind you. Turtle Heart to thank you and goodbye."
That's all it took for Melena to bolt, completely aware of the gust of wind over her shoulder. She ducked under a laundry line, formulating a shortcut back to the inn, naive to the old man across the road watching her with curious eyes and the package of pinlobble leaves that slipped out of her pocket and thudded in the mud behind her.
