DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.
The Story
Iva lingered at the entrance of her home, which was a cottage, which was empty. Not yet ready to push the door open, her bare feet soaked in the floorboard cold while her toes kissed the splinters of the threshold, which was worn from the traffic of large boots, which were absent from the two ovals of dry mud that had been dry too long. Maybe tomorrow she’d clean them. Maybe tomorrow.
Her hands, like her toes, found splinters. The door where she placed her hands was not worn smooth like the threshold, so splinters were easy too find.
The stab of the cold and splinters grounded her, reminded her, though she didn’t need reminding. A ritual she performed yet never finished. Today would be different. Today she would finish.
The comfort of her cottage no longer comforted her. It had grown dark and festered with memories she couldn’t hide from. They infested the down mattress she had cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. They infested the view from the small window in her room from which she used to gaze and sing with her hands crossed over her stomach because it was warm and stretched smooth. They infested the emptiness, which was everywhere, especially inside her. She was empty.
This emptiness was a thread, red and unbreakable, which made it sharp. It encircled her middle in so many loops and trailed behind her to her empty room. She didn’t need to turn and look to know where it ended, where it wanted her to be. It ended at a red she hadn’t been able to clean or hide, no matter how many blankets she knitted, no matter how many furs she laid. It was warm, though, beneath those layers. She had spent many days there, many weeks, sometimes not even getting up to use the toilet. She knew it was dirty, filthy, and abhorrent, but it, too, was warm. She thought the smell might cover up the stain, become even stronger than what she could not clean. It never did.
So, here she found herself, at the door, which had been a journey. She had made it twice. The first time she arrived naked, having forgotten the need for clothes, having forgotten to need.
This emptiness also stained her clothes. No matter how much she washed, no matter how long she left them on the line to dry in the midday sun, the emptiness remained. But today she decided she would wear that emptiness because it was inside her already, and she feared it no longer. She had donned her wedding dress, because it was the only one clean, as clean and smooth as her bedding. A small part of her thought she might never come back, and wanted to ensure that whoever discovered her empty cottage wouldn’t feel the emptiness lingering there. Maybe that traveler would find comfort in the love she had left, and she did leave it, because she couldn’t carry it with her. It was too heavy. The other half was carried by boots missing from their muddy spot near the door.
A drop of crimson beaded where her right hand touched the door. She smelled iron, a smell she was intimate with. A smell that brought both joy and sadness. Those emotions wrestled in her head, in her bosom, in her emtpiness, and she knew she must act now or they would wrestle her back to her bed where she would be drowned in the deepest depths by the unbreakable thread that was the color of the blood on her pale hand.
The door wimpered open, and the wind threw it to batter the cottage wall. She teetered on the threshold while the wind fought the unbreakable thread around her, and her hair fought her vision.
She thought her back might break, and then she would be forced to lay at the threshold unable to venture out or to return to the emptiness of the cottage. She joined the wind’s side in battle, fighting blind through the whipping locks of her hair, which she had brushed many hours in preparation for this moment, because she must look beautiful. For them.
A snap resounded, like splintering wood, like a blade of thunder. But it was not her spine because she stood, outside her empty cottage.
The clouds, exhausted, too, lay across the ground in ghostly heaps. But they didn’t obscure. They illuminated. Frosty swathes molded a path that led her to trodden trails flanked by yellowed grass. She knew why it was yellow, but couldn’t say the word, so used the color because it was a warm color, and outside was cold.
Where paths converged sat a bushel of the yellow grass. Where it had happened thrice, her emptiness. The soil there still damp, but not from the mist. The soil dark there, but not from shadow. She closed her eyes because it was the only way to see them.
She waited for a time, relishing the sensation of her veil and tresses and gown giving in to the breeze that crawled over the yellow grass. Then the swish and crunch of footsteps were near. Too many to be her love, but they were her loves, too. All three.
They waded toward her, ever shadows, ever twisted, ever cold. Crawling still, but of course they should. She wished to warm them, but her hands were locked to her belly, which was loose and scarred. The final place where her emptiness festered, where it was with her always.
She beckoned her three loves who had no names. She could never bring herself to give them any, because that would anchor them to this world, and they were too good for it, too pure. No matter how they appeared now.
They came to her, and she held them, and she told them she loved them, and she asked for their forgiveness, but they told her there was nothing to forgive, and she was empty no more.
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