Inspired by the Prompt: OLWG#416- Did you bring the diamond?
She remembered she once had a name, people used to call her Lenny.
She knew that a long time ago she had long dark hair that tangled easily and that her hands were small and her fingers stubby and unattractive and when she laughed her Aunt Rene used to say she sounded like a screeching monkey.
She still remembered the cherry tree in her backyard that she used to climb and she remembered there had been an apple orchard next door to their house that housed countless numbers of wasps nest.
That is all Lenny remembers about her life.
Stamped on every cell in her body, rooted in in the darkest, park of her brain where it has spread unchecked like wild violets though is not her life but her death.
Black Diamond Cemetery Black Diamond, Washington – Photographer Unknown
Lenny listens to the people who visit her neighbors- the newly buried always have lots of visitors and over the years their visitors come by less and less and sometimes those visitors end up moving in and now and then Lenny hears them whisper, ” I wish I wouldn’t have spent so much time here before I needed to. ”
As I said, most of Lenny’s memories are gone now and she’s not sure if she ever felt that way, but she doubted it.
When Lenny lived above ground and she knew what the cold felt like and what laughter sounded like and those simple things weren’t just faded soundless memories , she used to walk across a bridge that spanned across Leaning Birch Creek just before sunset.
One evening she was watching the sunset- the sky was orange and the Sun looked bloated and she guessed there was a fire somewhere up in the hills and she wondered if it would spread down the hills to Black Diamond. She looked down into the creek- the water was bubbling over polished stones and the water was as clear as one of three Aunt Rene’s polished mirrors with the heavy gold frames that were hung in the basement and did nothing except reflect the dark day after day and night after night.
Lenny saw her face and then she saw another face reflected over her shoulder and she didn’t turn around because she was surprised to see it there. What did surprise her was the horrible burning pain that suddenly flared up in her right side. She was also surprised how long it took for her to hit the water below. It felt like it took forever. Maybe it did.
That fall was all she thought about for a very long time.
Then she became that fall and if she had been anything else, she couldn’t remember it now.
Black Diamond Cemetery Black Diamond, Washington – Photographer Unknown
Last Winter many years ago, or maybe it was yesterday- Lenny’s sense of time was non existent – Lenny woke up and found herself in her Aunt Rene’s basement with the polished mirrors. She put her face up against the glass of the one that reflects the door and she blew on it.
Lenny watched thin veins of frost take root and spread across the glass. She watched them melt away. She gently blew on the glass over and over again and then she heard the basement door open and she heard her brother – who is an old man by now- catch his breath when he looked into the frosted glass covered with silvery threads of wild violets and saw his sister’s face looking back at him.
Lenny’s left hand was pressed against her right side and he thought she was smiling at him, but then he saw the flesh was gone from the lower part of her face and her smile was actually a grimace.
He fell forward with his heart exploding in his chest – it felt like it took forever for him to hit the basement floor.
Maybe as you read this, Lenny’s brother still falling and that fall is all he will ever be- which maybe better then living in that last moment of his sister’s life on that bridge all of those years ago when for no reason at all he jammed a knife into her side.
Unless of course that’s where he has been all of this time after all.
Photographer Unknown
