The Black Butterfly

Sarah Bakewell

Latte

I was about five years old. I’d shuffled across the waiting room to a plastic blue chair in the corner, away from the eyes of others, and clambered onto the seat. The chair was next to a small wooden table with a box of tissues sat upon it. I was sobbing silently in the corner on my chair, my little legs dangling above the floor, with three mushed-up tear-sodden tissues in my small fist. One of the nurses had offered me a cup of juice, but I’d shaken my head without taking my eyes off the floor, my scraggly brown hair hiding my tear soaked face; I’d felt sick.

After an hour or so, a plump, redheaded nurse had squatted down beside me and asked my name.

'Hannah,' I’d muttered.

'I’m Nancy; it’s nice to meet you, Hannah.' I said nothing. 'Do you know what, petal, I think I have just the thing for you.' She’d pushed herself up and I’d dragged my eyes off the floor to watch her through strands of limp hair as she went behind her reception desk, rummaged through some papers, and came back towards me, holding something behind her back. She crouched beside me once more, smiled, and held out a brand new colouring book and some crayons. I looked up properly as my small green eyes filled with tears at her undeserved kindness; I’d never been given a colouring book before. She smiled at me again and left them with me. I took another tissue to dry my eyes before carefully turning the crisp pages until I came across an outline of a butterfly. I carefully coloured it all in, making sure not to go over the lines, using only the black crayon; it didn’t feel like a time for colour. Not when my mother was in a nearby room having her stomach pumped.

When we’d got to the hospital they rushed her off, entwined in tubes and wires that I didn’t understand. Then I waited. I spent the night curled up across two of the plastic chairs in the waiting room because my mother didn’t want me by her bed; she refused. Nancy had found some blankets for me but I didn’t sleep very much. When my mother was discharged, she stormed towards the waiting room, grabbed my arm and marched me straight out of the hospital without a word of thanks to any of the doctors or nurses. The colouring book lay open underneath my chair at the page of the black butterfly.

That colouring book was mine. Nancy kept it especially for me, and throughout my childhood I’d coloured in almost every picture in the book. It didn’t make me look forward to my mother collapsing by any means; I dreaded having to come back and sit on that chair, it always brought back an unwelcome sickly feeling in the pit of my stomach. But I had someone to look out for me when it was clear that my mother didn’t. They’d had to replace their black crayon several times during my infant years. I never touched the others.

That was years ago. I imagine other children have used every colour in the carton since they were mine. I hope they did. I wonder if Nancy would recognise me now, or if she remembers me. I’ve spent a lot of time in the hospital recently but I haven’t seen her. Then again I haven’t exactly been in the waiting room. Funny, I’d spent hours and hours in that waiting room because I was an accident and I drove my mother to drink, but now it’s different. I’ve caused my own accident this time.

A doctor comes into my room and checks the machines surrounding my lifeless body. After making some brief notes, he leaves again. It’s too quiet in here for my liking; at least the waiting room had a bit of noise, the buzz of the reception desk, the other waiting families. I never realised when I was younger how much I needed other people to be waiting for someone too – I’d always sat in my corner, away from them, but now I really am alone and I don’t think I like it. I never appreciated the noise. Now it’s silent. I can’t go anywhere in here; I’ve only been able to drift around the room, never leaving my body for too long. Maybe if I went too far I might not be able to get back at all, and I haven’t made my mind up about that yet.

I’d been walking. Not walking anywhere in particular, just anywhere to get out of the house. I was always easily distracted, by a stray cat or a cloud shaped like something other than a cloud. My mind had to wander; it would have been a dark place otherwise. That day, I remember seeing shadows on the pavement at my feet. I’d chased them. I chased them all the way into the road, but they escaped over the car while I crumpled at the front of it. I’d been chasing the shadows of butterflies.

I circle the room some more, and hover in the chair next to my unrecognisable self. I’m curious as to how far I can actually go, so I allow my ghost to wander just outside my room and take a nosey peek down the corridor; I see my waiting room. I float closer until I can see my chair. The tissues have been replaced my magazines on my table. Underneath them, I see a child’s colouring book.

The loud panicked beeping of machines starts screeching from down the corridor. I tear my eyes away from the reception I know all too well and float back towards the noise – it’s my room. Doctors and nurses are running in, I can’t get close enough to see what’s happening to me. I don’t think I have a choice anymore. It’s being made for me.

Bio: Sarah Bakewell is a 21 year old English and Creative Writing student at the University of Salford. She has had a passion for writing since childhood and enjoys reading and writing snappy, short pieces of fiction. 'Chubby Little Cheeks' is her first published short story with CafeLit, this is her second.

Blood On The Rose

Dorothy Davies

Ruby Grapefruit Juice

You see me not.

            How could you see me? I am no more than the morning mist which rises from the dewed grass as the sun touches it at dawn. I am no more than the fleeting touch of a spring breeze as it passes by your face and you reach out to touch it only to find it gone. I am no more than a name in history even if that name does resonate with you in your lessons on monarchs of the past. No one knows the truth but those who lived then, those who walked, talked, cried, laughed and loved. Oh, how we loved!

            The sorrow of it is, the heartbreaking truth of it is, we loved the wrong people.

            I loved the wrong person.

            It is 469 years now since I laid my head on a block and had it severed from my body. 469 years I have had to regret my actions – but you will note, you who seek the fleeting breeze and the touch of mist at dawn – I said I have had the time to regret, not that I do.

            It was my Uncle Norfolk’s fault, he encouraged and coerced and in the end, blackmailed and blustered me into attracting His Majesty’s attention. It was not difficult, a saucy glance, a bounce of curls, a hurrying away with breasts moving and thighs pressing the silks I wore, skirts lifted enough to show slender ankles, knowing his eyes were firm fixed on me and he was mine for the taking.

            But I didn’t want to take him.

            Know this; then he was not a fine handsome king but an old man, to me anyway, carrying much weight and much illness. The sore on his leg smelled as if a doorway to hell had been left open after the bodies had been in the fire for a while; his smile was an array of teeth and no teeth where the apothecary had removed the bad ones and all in all, I have to say, what was left to be considered was the fact he was King Henry VIII, that I could be queen and have endless clothes, jewels and money.

            Was it enough? I pondered this long into the night, tossing and turning in my bed until my curls were tangled and my bed a snarled mess of coverlets and pillows punched out of shape. In the end, family avarice overcame my scruples. It will not be long, they told me, he will die and you will be rich. And so will we.

You hear me not.

            I speak but the words are no more than the rustling of the grass or the crunch of the gravel as you walk. I can speak and I do now speak of my love, my Thomas, my life, my soul, who I had to reject to marry His Majesty and how I could exchange one huge body and stinking ulcer for the slender strength, the cleanliness and the arms of Thomas Culpeper is beyond me even now, as I think on it.

            Know this, though, I did my duty as wife and Queen. Did I not let him fondle my young body before others at banquets and the like, did I not control my face when he released the wind from his bad digestion and filled the room with a smell almost as bad as his ulcer, did I not let him lean on me when he could not walk well because the leg was paining him so? I did all this and so much more. Can you begin to understand how it felt to ride this gross body, to feel his thrusting, to know I could become pregnant by a man I had fast learned to hate with a deadly burning hatred?

            And yet he was kindness itself. He thought of me, he treasured me; he called me his rose without thorns. I had clothes and jewellery finer than any I had ever possessed in my life. I had fine apartments and servants and my Lady Rochford as companion, I had horses and squires and all would bow down before me and grant my every wish. And that of my uncle, too, soon the family had the honours they so wished. And I cried myself to sleep every night in longing for my Thomas.

Why do you not sense me?

            I am the presence that haunts the grounds of Hampton Court, where I could find happiness for a while, where I could walk with those I loved and feel the touch of their fingers folded around mine, see their smiles which were radiant and their faces which were full of love.

            Warn me not of the Lady Rochford. How naive was I not to think she would seek revenge for the killing of the Boleyns, how swiftly did she introduce the thought I could bed with Thomas and not let His Majesty know a thing. So I did and I had nights of pleasure and days of anxiety, fearing not for myself but for those I loved so dearly. I am right glad, even now, that she followed me to the block, for did she not corrupt my life and my thoughts entirely? Did she not lead me astray? And did I not go willingly, fool that I am?

            Of course he found out. Of course the court is nothing but the biggest gossip place in England and soon enough my husband, the king, was presented with a record of my infidelities.

            He sent that sour faced Cranmer to tell me I was confined to my chamber; he told me too that my beloved secretary Francis Dereham and my lover, Thomas Culpeper, were at the Tower. I knew all was lost for they would have been tortured – my love, my life, my Thomas, in the hands of the torturers! Was ever love such a painful thing?

            They moved me from here to Syon Palace but a prison is a prison for all that.

            They tore my lover’s body apart, hanged him and held up his guts before his eyes and that day I knew true desolation. That day I knew I wanted to die, that there was no reason to live, that even if I could have persuaded my husband the King to let me live there would have been no life in me. So why even try?

            Do you sense me now, oh visitor who comes to idle away the hours in a stately home beyond your imagining? For then we knew how to live, with magnificence and with wealth, did we not?

            The time between my imprisonment and my execution was a thousand years – in my mind. They tell me now I went bravely to the block, but when love dies, when your only love dies, what is there left to live for?

            Now tell me, visitor who knows me not at this moment, how do I find my Thomas? His body was cut into four and taken to the four corners of London. His head was impaled on a pike. But where is Thomas himself? I can find him not, though I search Hampton Court endlessly, endlessly, looking for him.

            I bid you, if you can at all see hear or sense me, be compassionate with this lonely queen who only sought love in the arms of the man she loved beyond all reason, help me find my one love.

            I can, at times, create a single drop on the perfect roses in the gardens.

           

Tell him he will know where I am by the blood on the rose.

Dorothy Davies lives on the Isle of Wight, a small island off the south coast of England.  There she works as an editor, writer and medium, channelling books from the rich (and not so rich) and famous from all eras of history, ancient through modern.  Her novels are available from Amazon. She edits and features in Static Movement anthologies.

 Her latest book, I Bid You Welcome, is available from

https://www.createspace.com/3840578 

Check out my writing website:
www.notes-from-a-smaller-island.com

Waiting for the 9.03

Dorothy Davies

Steaming hot water

There is nothing as heartbreaking as a train whistle at midnight across a desolate lonely countryside. Nothing tears at the heartstrings quite as much as the sight of the brightly lit windows making a streak of light as the train clacks and rocks its way along the glittering rails. 

            Nothing draws the wanderlust out of the soul of someone more than the thought of the train travelling through the night to far off places where the people are different and colourful, where the food is exotic and the weather erratic and hot, where the language is like molten silver in the ears and you cannot understand a word of it.

            Nothing is more lonely than standing on the platform of a deserted station and feeling the ground vibrate as the midnight train races through without so much as a nod toward a place where it once stopped to let people off, let people on and to top up with water and coal.

            It’s been a long, long time since a steam train went through here. I know, I have stood here many a long year watching for the steam and smoke rising above the horizon, hearing the clicking of the rail that said ‘I’m coming/I’m coming’ and it was, in all its heat and noise and steam and coal dust glory. But no more.

            I stand on the platform and dream of days gone by  Days of steam and fashion, of porters and guards, of slamming doors and shining wheels that sing their message as they click and clack their way down the lines that lead to – anywhere else but here.

            And I play, ‘do you remember...’

Many a year ago I came here day by day to board the 9.03 train for London and work and people and bustle and taxis and everything. So sophisticated, stiletto heels and bucket bag, those huge handbags we all carried at that time, stuffed with everything the girl about town needed, including a book. Everyone carried a book or a paper. It was not done to speak on a train; you buried yourself in the words and did not look at your fellow passengers. The great engines huffed into the station, metal dragons tamed by man, all steam and smoke and coal dust. With much slamming of doors we would climb aboard, find a seat if we were lucky, hang from a strap or the overhead luggage rack if we were not, book in the other hand, immersed in the words. Outside the whistles and slams went on, the last minute passengers running for a compartment, any compartment, until the final blast and the dragon found its breath to carry on its journey.

            It was on one of those days I saw her. She was standing at the very end of the platform, alone, lonely. I wondered all day why I thought she was lonely. She was wearing vaguely old fashioned clothes, as if she had come from another time almost, but that was stupid, wasn’t it?

            Wasn’t it?

            I looked for her when the long frantic people crushed day was over and I got out of the train. She wasn’t there. Had she got tired, or had the person she was waiting for actually arrived and they had gone off somewhere? My imagination was working overtime. I created all manner of stories over the weeks that followed, all wild and wonderful and no doubt every one of them a million miles from the truth.

            Then I saw her again. Same clothes, same sad face, same point on the platform. I wanted to speak to her, to find out why she stood there, what she wanted but the crush carried me onto the train and London-bound before I could get near her. If I had, what would she have thought of a stranger asking such personal questions?

            The biggest question of all was; why was she getting to me?

            As we – I say we meaning that dragon puffing steam and coal dust and the motley collection of commuters being dragged along behind in carriages that were close to being cattle trucks – came into the station, I realised what was getting to me.

            The woman was my twin.

            If I was to go to a ‘vintage’ shop and buy a similar outfit and stand next to her on the platform, no one would be able to tell us apart.

            The thought was scary.

            I looked for her day after day. She wasn’t there. I went to work feeling oddly empty, something missing, something needed filling and only she could do that.

            But I didn’t know who she was. How could someone I didn’t know be responsible for my feeling empty and lonely and lost?

            How could someone I didn’t know look so much like me?

            It was about that time I began to change my clothes. It wasn’t a conscious decision; it was just that the clothes the woman wore seemed more attractive to me than the mini-skirts, tight tops, stilettos and everything I had been wearing.

            The people on the platform, the people on the train, hardly gave me a second glance when I wore the different clothes and it was about then I realised that as commuters we were all anonymous. The only thing which had character was the train itself, the huge puffing dragon which towed us back and forth from our station. 

            The ‘modern’ clothes were discarded, binned, handed in to the charity shop, depending on the state of them at the time. The wardrobe became filled with 20s clothes, elegant, pastel coloured suits and beautiful blouses, the small hat perched on a new (to me) hairstyle that suited the suits better. Flowing dresses with long strings of beads. I looked more like the woman on the platform than ever before.  It bothered me and yet it felt right.

            I saw her again one morning as I was waiting for the 9.03. She smiled and gestured to me to walk over to her. I did, pushing my way through the commuters who turned away in their studied indifference to my passing them by, jostling their papers and briefcases, brushing against their arms or back.  I was all but invisible.

            She smiled widely when I reached her and held out her arms. Without thinking I walked into her embrace.

            And changed places with her.

            I watched her walk back to my place on the platform, watched the steam announce the arrival of the 9.03, saw her climb on board with a smile for the man who stood back to let her get on first.

            I’ve been here ever since.

Nothing is more lonely than standing on the platform of a deserted station and feeling the ground vibrate as the midnight train races through without so much as a nod toward a place where it once stopped to let people off, let people on and to top up with water and coal.

            It’s been a long, long time since a steam train went through here. I know, I have stood here many a long year watching for the steam and smoke rising above the horizon, hearing the clicking of the rail that said ‘I’m coming/I’m coming’ and it was, in all its heat and noise and steam and coal dust glory. But no more.

            I stand on the platform and dream of days gone by  Days of steam and fashion, of porters and guards, of slamming doors and shining wheels that sing their message as they click and clack their way down the lines that lead to – anywhere else but here.

            And I play, ‘do you remember...’

            When I looked for the arrival of the 9.03 and saw a woman out of time standing on the platform waiting, waiting, waiting...

Dorothy Davies lives on the Isle of Wight, a small island off the south coast of England.  There she works as an editor, writer and medium, channelling books from the rich (and not so rich) and famous from all eras of history, ancient through modern.  Her novels are available from Amazon. She edits and features in Static Movement anthologies.