The Answer
a chalice of
poison
Debz Hobbs-Wyatt
You said it would rain. You
said it always rains.
Words spoken by
a gypsy in a fairground when you were ten years old. Words you later repeated.
You said she
wore a scarf draped around her head, sunken cheeks and hoop earrings that made
a moment dazzle when it should have been grey. Your mother pressed silver coins
into her begging hand and asked for a miracle.
“Save me,” she
said.
But it was too late.
The world
begins and ends with rain.
It was raining the day she died, the day she tasted the offering you
pressed to imploring lips and uttered goodbyes through a veil. It is raining
now, each drop as if to realise the prediction. Or perhaps it never stopped.
What of the
rain?
Not soft gentle
summer rain.
Not leaf
dripping hazy rain.
Hard fierce
unrelenting rain.
Lion’s roar
rain.
You wait in a
doorway, close enough to touch it, but held back as if something stands between
you and it. You become the hunted. A finger poised in a moment. It is a slice
of time as thin as the fracture in the sky where a lip of white light cuts the
world in half. As thin as the draught that stirs coldness into time like drips
of venom. Are you the sculptor of your own demise? The composer of your own
requiem? Are you the author of your own eulogy?
Are we all?
You beg for one
more moment, stealing only what you claim is still yours; clutching it to your
breast. But it’s not yours – is it?
But still you
hold on.
Until it’s
gone.
Until all
that’s left is mist.
And now you
have it. The answer.
But what you
leave behind is the question.
Debz Hobbs-Wyatt
Debz is a
writer/editor/publisher and she also edits for CafeLit. She says she would not
normally publish her own work here, but came across this that was written a
long time ago and thought it seemed apt for Halloween.
She says she
has no idea where it came from and why she wrote it or indeed what the answer
is. She says it’s not 42. She wonders if she was possessed at the time she
wrote it.
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