the Little Aconite Flower

“Mum?” Catallena whispered against the closed door. Her light bled into the darkness of the bedroom from a crack below the door. It flickered faintly like an old fluorescent light. Shattered glass on the floor refracted the shine into her mother’s watery eyes. 

The mother squeezed her eyes shut and prayed the girl would go away. A tight hold around her midriff and on her thigh kept her from moving or whispering back. The man pressed to her from behind breathed unevenly in a restless sleep, his hot breath on her neck and his clammy hands on her exposed and horribly bruised skin. 

“Are you alright?” the girl’s teeth chattered around the question.

The mother knew her tears had spilled onto her cheeks by the way the salty water stung in the fresh cuts on her face. She wanted her daughter to go away. It was far too dangerous for the little girl inside the house now that her father had been in an even worse mood than usual. The alcohol on his breath smelled more putrid than it ever had before. 

The mother should have whispered an answer to the girl. She should have told her that she was alright, or that she should turn away and not poke the sleeping bear. If her husband woke up from the disturbance at the door, both the mother and the daughter would be in trouble. The man had a serious temper.

However, when a soft knock indicated that the girl wouldn’t give up, the mother’s own self-perseverance won. Maybe her husband would be more lenient with his wife if she showed him again that she was on his side. If someone had to get into trouble, it didn’t mean that the both of them did. The mother didn’t want to get into trouble that night. She didn’t think she would survive it.

So she made a choice. 

“Honey?” she gently ran her bloody fingers along his that were clutching her flesh. “Love?” she breathed out again and this time he stirred awake. “She’s at the door–”

But before the mother could explain the situation, before she could tell her husband that Catallena had disobeyed him and that she herself had no part in it of course, the man flew into a rage and she could no longer get a word in. She couldn't tell him that the disobedient little girl had defied him and that his devoted wife was clearly disgusted by such behaviour.

“You let her in?! You– you dare…! That's it! Now you’re gonna get it!” He roared and his words were badly slurred. He threw the bedsheets off and reached for his wife who had fallen off the mattress and was now scrambling away after the crash. She tried to get to the light that slipped past the cracks of the door but a hand gripped her ankle and pulled her back to the swearing man.

She fought back this time. Her legs kicked out and her arms flung around hitting and scratching him wherever they could. It only infuriated him more. She knew it would be her last fight when his hands mangled her body beyond repair. Her broken limbs refused to raise from the floor, her hands no longer protected her pounding head. His found their way back home around her neck where they squeezed with anger. 

As her consciousness faded away bit by bit in the chokehold, all she could focus on beside his crazed eyes were the frantic calls and knocks from the other side of the door. Her sweet daughter fought for her as well. She pleaded with him not to hurt her mother, her voice thick with tears. 

And for a moment the mother thought that the begging had gotten through to him. His calloused hands left her throat and she gasped for air. The mother watched through blurry eyes as her husband stumbled to his feet and approached the locked door. 

The room was bathed in a bright blue light as Catallena ran to her mother’s side, not minding the smack she took from her father to the back of her head on the way there. She knelt in a pool of blood and cried more at the sight of her beaten mother. The mother was overcome with emotion and she too cried with relief and gratitude for having been spared her life. Gratitude for her husband.

“Thank you! Thank you, love. Thank you… I’m so sorry!” the mother repeated over and over to him. 

Catallena petted her mother’s matted dirty blonde hair and wiped the blood from her smile. 

The father returned to his wife’s other side and accepted the worship she garbled. He listened closely, swaying from side to side, and suddenly the words stopped. The smile the mother had worn faded away slowly and her golden eyes looked dark brown filled with terror and betrayal.

The butt of a knife stuck out of her neck. Blood squelched out as she struggled for a while, never once looking away from her suddenly grinning husband. In just a few seconds, she was dead. 

Death had entered the building. It smelled blood and became satisfied. It, however, didn’t leave the small house and instead lurked in the dark corners, unnoticed by the remaining two people. It sensed that it would be needed again shortly.

Catallena felt like all the air from her lungs froze over. Her heart did painful leaps as if a small bunny was trying to get out of her chest. Words had left her. She hadn’t reacted quickly enough. Mum was gone.

Her father was bored of examining his wife’s motionless body. He tried hitting it again, but when she gave no reaction, he turned to his daughter. 

“You– you were s’pposed to be… I threw you out! Told you to stay there…’till morning,” He picked the girl up by the back of her night gown’s collar, his fist tangling itself in her hair,  and dragged her away from the scene inside. She let him. She had lost her fight, too.

Catallena was thrown outside from the front door. Their breaths turned into vapour in the chill of the early spring weather.

Death watched as the girl took hit after hit and kick after kick whilst she laid on the frozen ground next to the previous autumn’s aconite flowers that had been revealed by the melting patches of (now bloodied) snow. Her blood-stained hair glowed purple under the twinkling stars.

It went on for a while before Catallena accepted her fate when her father raised the rock in his hands above his head once again, ready for the final blow. Everything in her ached. Most of all her heart. Even in her six-year-old mind she knew what death meant. She had been threatened with it all her life, after all. 

She knew that her mother was dead. She could comprehend that much. During the last fleeting moments of her miserable life she wondered if she would join her mother in some sort of afterlife. It’s what her mother had told her – that she would get to live with her mother even after death if only she did as she was told. Like if she ate the peas served to her, or if she stole those cigarettes from the shop. Then if she stayed hidden behind the sofa, if she stopped crying because of simple bruises, and if she took the blame for something she didn’t do because her mother was not in a condition to endure a beating herself. 

Catallena wished her mother would accept her. She hoped she had sufficiently done everything that she was asked to do and that she would be forgiven for having stood by when her mother had died. She prayed her mother for forgiveness for having come back inside, when she was exiled out of the house for the night. If only she had bared the cold. If only she hadn't gone back to see if her mother was alright after the abuse she had suffered in the evening at the hands of father. She might still be alive, if that were the case.

The girl turned her head to the side. She didn’t want the last thing she saw to be her father’s unfocused eyes and maddened, twitching face. She watched dry blades of grass dance in the wind, instead.

The rock came down with great force and with a sickening crack Catallena died for the first time.

Destiny spoke to Death, then. It spoke of another life spared – of prophecies both young and old, intertwined. It spoke of The Chosen One, the boy who lived, whom Death had already spared when he was but an infant. And it whispered of the other one: The Reborn One, the light in the darkness. Stardust.

The stench of blood excited Death and it took a lot of willpower not to whisk the girl away right away.

And Death looked down at the caved-in head, the now shimmerless hair, the broken limbs that stuck at odd angles, trying to discern what exactly made this girl so special for Destiny. It tilted its head, catching the glossy crystal eyes, much like the budding aconites in the nightfall. There was also the singular tear that uncovered a streak of pale skin from underneath blood and dirt, much resembling the last of the snow around them. Her open and resigned fists were so small and her fingertips frostbitten. In her palms was a story of an unfortunate young girl, The Reborn One. 

Death watched as her sparkling life force rose from between her parted and bloody lips. It asked to be taken. Even so, Death didn’t capture it like he had done with the girl’s mother. One shouldn’t get in Destiny’s way, Death knew. Instead, Death breathed life back into the girl and reached somewhere deeper for what was even more precious for it. Something it hadn’t taken before. 

It pained Death greatly to let go of the girl’s mortality. It felt heavy in Death’s hold and when Death finally did release it, the bright orb took off into the sky, disappearing amongst the stars.

Death embraced the waking girl and nursed her back to health. The aconites around them bloomed again as if it were summer when blood seeped back into her trembling body and her eyes found her saviour’s. She could now see it, the black skeletal figure whose dark and worn-out cloak billowed as if it were windy or as if they were deep underwater. Those empty eyes stood out the most. Catallena would never forget them.

“Child. My child,” Death declared. “Destiny has spoken tonight. This is not the end of your life. Something awaits you, a prophecy worthy of immortality. 

Your life is not mine to take until Destiny lets it be so. Until then, we will have such an alliance.”

Then, a scream pierced the silent night. Catallena’s father tripped over himself and stared wide-eyed as Catallena breathed once again. He didn’t seem to take any notice of the cloaked figure. The father sat in place for a long moment, rubbing his blown out eyes and wiping his bloody hands onto his pants. 

Abruptly, it seemed he had made a choice. He picked the rock back up again. He frantically approached Catallena on unsteady feet and swung his arms back once more, acting like someone deathly afraid of spiders trying to squish one that stubbornly refuses to die.

The father was just about to throw down the rock for the second time that same night, when he stopped short. The rock slipped from his fingers and he clutched his chest. And then he collapsed by the girl’s feet, right next to Death. 

“I have been refused one life today. I shall take yours in exchange,” Death drawled indifferently and reached over to the man, closing its fist around the sparkling life force that exited him. Catallena couldn’t say she was too sorry, though her fear and her longing for her mother were too great for her to feel gratitude for Death.

Catallena fell into a deep sleep in the soft bush of aconites and when she awoke the next morning, Death had disappeared. 

The girl buried her mother in the field and her father deep in the woods, far away from her mother. Catallena Nocturne left and never returned back home, though in every beam of sunlight, at the centre of every fire and in the reflection of the Mirror of Erised she saw her mother’s eyes which were more like home than the house had ever been.