Dark and Deepest Red(15)

Possessed.

The word is the sudden prick of a needle on Lala’s finger.

Possessed.

It echoes in Lala every time she flinches, wondering if Strasbourg’s wives are truly flicking their eyes toward her, or if she is only imagining so.

Possessed.

Even Lala cannot deny how it looks, as though these women have demons within them, tormenting them into this frenzy.

Delphine spins fastest of them all, her feet bleeding the most, her face streaked with dirt and salt. She throws her long arms and thin legs, her skirt flying like spilled milk. She leaps and turns, as though her body is letting loose some spirit within her. Her linen cap has soaked through with sweat.

The watching crowd grows by the minute. Merchants cram alongside hawkers, priests with coiffured hair next to tradesmen. Burghers with their jewels and silk gowns sidle near fishmongers if it will give them the best view.

Delphine’s husband tries to take hold of her. Her sons try to still her. The strongest men to be found, masons and blacksmiths, lend their help trying to pen her in.

But with each twist of her body, she escapes. With the force of her movement, she breaks from their grasp. She keeps on with her dance.

They plead with her. They order her to stop.

She keeps on.

Her fervor and passion fall on Lala’s skin heavier than the day’s heat. Her face shows no joy. No satisfaction at disgracing her husband, nor the celebrating air of some festival dance.

She carries the look of a saint in stained glass. Pained but transcendent. Eyes cast toward heaven. As though her body remains among them but her spirit has flown.

This is the expression gilding her face the moment before her heart gives. She drops, one hand reaching toward heaven as she falls.

Then she is gone from them all.

Lala can see the life leaving the woman, like a wisp of smoke.

In a hushed moment comes the crowd’s understanding. Before their eyes, a woman has danced herself to death.

Screams rise through the watchers, as though the sound is a thing being passed from one tongue to the next. As each onlooker realizes what they have witnessed, the horror tears a gasp from each of their throats.

Those screams, the clipped breaths, turn over in Lala’s brain in the hours that follow, as the sun falls toward the blue-green ridges of the Vogesen.

And that night, she lives it all again, as though the scene plays before her.

They will not rest, says the crowd in her dreams.

They will not stop for food or drink, the onlookers whisper.

Their places go empty at mass.

See, they are bewitched.

Lala’s dreams tumble toward the moment of Delphine falling, the instant of her soul fleeing toward the sky, leaping silhouettes at her back.

Lala wakes to the moon hanging low.

Bewitched. That word leaves even more of a chill on Lala’s sleep-damp back than the word possessed.

She finds Alifair working by the light of a single candle. The glow lights his face, showing him tense and haunted.

She wonders if he too dreams of a flailing woman whose form scatters into ten more, like light thrown through water drops. Or perhaps he dreams of Delphine lowered into the earth, the funeral shroud offered to the Church, the green-pine smell of rosemary wreaths sharpening the air.

Alifair presses a dye-darkened pestle into an oak gall, and the shell cracks, the inside crumbling like meringue. The darkened center sticks to the pestle like crystallized honey.

Lala and Tante have tried grinding other things for pigment. Alder and blackberry. Walnuts and meadowsweet. Peach stones and vine. But each makes an ink more gray, not the deep purple or black as rich as an autumn night.

And none of them break as the oak gall, into a hundred pieces with a hard first shove of the pestle.

Lala tries to put her arms around Alifair, to stroke a hand down his back.

“Please don’t,” he says, mixing a jar of water and rusted nails. “You’ll distract me.”

He usually says such words with flirtation. They both know one lapse in attention can ruin a batch of iron gall ink. A bit too much rust, too little acid, and the ink will turn green rather than purple-black.

But now the words come with a regretful edge.

After a long quiet, after grinding a few more oak galls, Alifair says, “Henne told me thirteen dance now, maybe more.”

It is more. Lala already knows.

Alifair pours the solution over the ink base, measuring the way Tante does, this delicate art of balancing tannins and astringents. “We should have said something.”

“We couldn’t,” Lala whispers. “You know that.”

He leaves the mixture to soak. “Tell that to Delphine’s children.”





Rosella


Red shoes. One pair of red shoes I’d sewn back together, and this fall had become more than the bright, almost-lemon smell of rain on leaves. It became more than that spice I could never quite place, as though the trees got their color from being dusted in chili powder.

This fall had become kissing Emil Woodlock, who I had never thought of kissing before tonight. I walked home from the reservoir with the taste of his mouth on mine, and the feeling of the red shoes sparking something into me.

I got so lost in thinking of all this, in licking my own lips to see how long I could feel him there, that I stumbled and pitched forward, like I’d slipped on the rain-glossed leaves.