I do not own The Last of The Mohicans.
So, um, we're taking a shift here. And I understand if some of you wish to discontinue.
The Dragonfly Woman and the TurtleMan
*Trigger Warning For Disturbing Content. I apologize.*
Gehenna
The wait for the child to issue is interminable.
It takes forever, days and days.
Weeks.
Years.
It is their Purgatory, it is their Hell.
The waiting.
Here in this Perdition.
The fireplace with its flickering flames that make the dim, close confines of the cabin unbearably hot in their exertions.
Heavy, thick furniture, roughly hewn and cloistered together make the space claustrophobic and insufferable.
Things hang down from the ceiling like small stalactites in the dark caves where shadows slither and demons lurk behind stacks of man-made stacks rocks and boxes and baskets.
There is no air movement, no air movement at all, and the air itself is thick and hot and cloying.
It smells of sickness and fear and boiling things and death.
It smells metallic and earthily organic and rotten.
And in the midst of it all, the women.
The pain comes and goes, Cora's face strains with efforts of containment, softens slightly with the easing, remains tense with worry.
She clenches her hands upon the sweat-soaked mattress.
She cries out, she weeps.
Alice plots her brow, changes out the cloth stained with the continued seeping of blood, heavier, then lighter, then over again.
And she helps her sister drink . . .
"Please. Just a bit."
. . . fresh spring water.
"Am I being punished, Alice? Have I sinned?"
Cora's voice is weak, her face bright with sickly sweat.
And Alice is momentarily befuddled.
"What? Why?"
Raised in a religious world, strong Scottish father and traditions, Cora nevertheless veered away from all straight-laced indoctrination.
Charmingly, yet stalwartly refusing the advances of lines and lines of suitors, adventurous spirit more than willing to always chance the gravest of mistakes rather than surrending her own judgement.
Opting to follow her father's armies as a nurse, traveling far and wide in service of King, doing her part to make the world England.
Alice, always in slight, girlish awe of her older sister, convinced she could never attain the maturity, the courage, the bravery, the Cora-ness of Cora Louise Munroe.
"Why?"
So it is now Alice looks on at her elder sister on confusion.
Her sister, who suffers so in body and spirit now.
"I inquired to your tea, to keeping babies away. Now this one is being taken from me. Am I being punished for my wickedness?"
Her sister is very sick indeed, this is not the hearty and hale Cora, the sister who stood so strong in the face of a myriad of sick and dying soldiers, men calling out for their mothers in the last moments of their lives.
The one who bound herself to a wild man of the Americas, followed him into a world devoid rules and process.
This is not that Cora.
This is more kin to Alice before she made herself into who she is now.
Weak, self-pitying, uncertain.
She is struck by the reversal of their roles, the two of them.
A secret pride whispers in the shadowy corners of her mind.
That she can be so strong to her sister when her sister needs her most, when things go wrong.
English-trained humbleness and taught religious humility, especially of woman, balks at this pride, that she is sinning in her pride.
The new Alice she has made herself to be, dismisses the guilt and allows the pride to sit where it is.
It is a part of her strength, if not an angelic part of her strength.
And she has not the time nor care to diminish it.
Without the strength that guilty pride has been borne of, she would have nothing to hold her and her sister up.
And so she lets it tend to itself so that she may focus on tending to her suffering sister.
"No Cora of course not. You are not being punished. You have done nothing wrong."
All she must.
The baby comes, it comes.
Cora Munroe cries out, bears down, weeps her grief freely.
And Alice's hands are slick with viscus fluid and blood.
She formlessly prays it is the blood that comes with birth, not the passing of her sister's life.
There is no joy in this effort, no noble higher purpose.
She is giving birth to death and in the end it may be not only her child's, but also her own.
And so there is no joy at the end of her path.
Only grief and heartache and indescribable loss.
It seems to go on forever, this endless Hell of which there is no escape, no rescue, no liberation.
And when the final issue comes, there is no high-pitched cry of indignation at being thrust into the harsh, cruel world from a blessedly perfect utopia.
There is only silence.
And the sobbing of the broken mother.
Alice holds the tiny child in her arms, the child her sister will never feed, never clean, never rock, never comfort, never worry herself over.
And she wishes . . .
"Show her . . . show her to me . . ."
. . . all were otherwise.
She wraps the child in a cloth, tries to arrange her as though she is sleeping.
And places her upon . . .
"Cora, . . . I am so sorry . . ."
. . . her sister's breast.
Cora Louise Munroe weakly wraps her arms around the child who has gone to Heaven before she came to Earth.
She kisses the damp forehead, weeps her tears down onto the lifeless face.
So light in weight, so unnatural in color.
So still, so still.
The room is spinning, she is dizzy and she fears she may drop . . .
"Alice, take the baby. Do not let her fall."
Her vision is fading, sound is fading to far away, Alice's voice seems to be coming from across a long distance.
And her arms are falling, falling.
"Alice, Alice, do not let her hit her head . . ."
And then Cora Louise Munroe passes out of consciousness.
And knows no more.
I had a burst of storytelling clarity and wrote for hours yesterday and last night so I'm posting chapters as I complete them because I see no reason to prolong their suffering or ours as we work through this story arc.
Thanks to bcawriter01 and blanparbe for your previous review.
