––––––––

~1834, New Orleans~

SHE’S WHIPPED ME FOR the last time. Watch me. I’ll be as free as Lia, running until I fly.

Beneath the full moon, my footfalls echo up and down the New Orleans street. I have to get away from her. I won’t be swallowed up by the fires of justice when they find her, and they are hunting her.

Her reckoning is coming.

Each step is one closer to freedom. My pulse thunders in my eardrums as the sweat beads on my upper lip.

I’ve heard the whispers. The town will not stay quiet against my mother’s atrocities. I wish I could thank the old slave woman who started the fire, the fire that led people to discover the tortured souls splayed out in the slaves’ quarters.

The truth set me free.

My feet pound against the cobblestone without rhyme. The slap, slap, slap of my broken slippers is manic, unchecked and uncensored. I cannot control my gait or the way I stumble on my evening gown every few steps, barely regaining my footing before falling forward.

I can’t ask for help. No one will hide me—a girl fleeing in the city streets at an ungodly hour when even whores sneer and turn away.

My heartbeat is as wild as my racing legs. It thumps, thumps, thumps erratically. It threatens to jump outside my body, refusing the containment my chest provides.

I turn down Royal Street. I cannot get away fast enough.

From the accusations, the threats, the nightmares made real.

From the horror.

From my own mother.

The street is my ticket, the way out. In the deep calm, my footsteps echo until it sounds as though a ghostly horde chases me, urging me on—the spirits of those that fled and failed. The French Quarter’s lamplighter is long in his bed. There’s none to save me. At the next intersection, I turn away from the lazy curve of the Mississippi River. Dresses aren’t made for swimming to freedom.

If only Richard was still alive. He would save me from this. He would hold me and keep me safe. Richard. Richard... A bright pair of baby blues, rife with mischief, floods my mind’s eye. His laugh seeps into memory like a fluid ribbon led by a purposeful needle. But he is lost to me, taken by the sea. He was driven to ruin in the waters by my mother, who refused our union until he had proven his monetary worth.

My mother is a monster. I hate her.

Even now, I can hear the screams of the innocent man alive in my home’s attic of horrors. The slave is only a stranger, no passion or tenderness between us, yet my mother refuses to believe that we are not secret lovers. She is so consumed by her need to torture that she will find any excuse to apply her tools of mayhem and distress against dark, yielding skin.

I have been under her control too long. Fear has rooted me, like sap flowing over a mosquito and crystalizing, to her bosom and tyranny. I won’t become her. I won’t accept her mantel.

Richard was relief from the madness. Without him here... God help me, I feel the insanity seeping in.

He made me more than my parentage. He made me alive. I am human in my own right, independent and free, full of my own feelings and desires. He’d made me believe I could have more. Be more.

I wasn’t just her Borquita to abuse. Anytime I tried to help the slaves in our household—offering a crust of bread, or something that would have been discarded in the compost after dinner, to one of them—she would catch me. No matter how I tried to hide the pitiful nutrition, wrapped carefully in a handkerchief or artfully folded within my dress as I mounted the stairs after dinner, she would smell me out. I bore the scars of punishment from those occasions. The healed, pale scars that seemed to catch light and glow as reminder.

My legs protest their use, and the skirts threaten to trip me. I stop to catch my breath, leaning in the shadow of a doorway. My heartbeat thunders in my ears.

Behind intricate iron scrollwork across the lane, a woman rocks a curly-haired child on a balcony. The nurse doesn’t flinch at the sight of me. She’s seen it all before. She croons a French lullaby to banish her master’s daughter’s nightmare.

I’m fleeing my mother’s arms. I’m escaping my nightmare.

Richard never faulted me for my sympathies towards the darker-skinned. He supported me. He... he loved me for my compassion. Just thinking his name brings him back in full color, painted with confident strokes that undulate with life. Ripples across his skin. Amber tan and black lashes.

I am pulled away from the memories of his face by a yell behind me.

It is her voice, the lilt of twang marring the socialite training in her efforts to siren me back to her. She is pursuing me. “Borquita, you insolent fool. You come back here, girl.”

Child soothed, the woman who’d stood on the balcony has gone in. I’m alone in my exodus. Polite society ignores the problem. Decorum ignores the ripped dress and bloody gashes on my bare shoulders.

I race faster, acid flowing in my veins. It trails, like a raging wildfire, into my toes. It burns me and forces me forward, ever quicker, towards an unknown destination. Where am I going? Where am I going? But I know whatever is ahead of me, in all its choking mystery, is far preferable to the known terror that haunts the halls of my home.

“Borquita!” My mother screeches, a desperate vulture fighting for a morsel of carcass.

“Borquita!” She does not often allow her real-self to show in the outside world, but it is dark now. The neighbors’ prying eyes are long closed. She does not fear the honesty of her blackness against the backdrop of the night and moon. She is almost shadow made reality. I feel she can seep into the surroundings and be embraced like a true creature of hell. If I do not keep moving, she will sink her claws into me, and I will be voided of any light I possess.

A mile, two miles? The city fades behind me, lawns become fields. City homes turn to sprawling estates. My mother’s voice has faded. If I can hide until morning, I can beg my way onto a carriage and be free of Louisiana.

“Marie. My lovely Marie.”

The world around me comes to a halt, my heels skid in the dirt. What was once a blur of passing, indistinct objects in the darkness, punctuated only by the occasional flickering gas light, is now a still life painting by a drunkard with no eye for detail or shading.

A garrison of shadows announce a small pecan grove in front of a country plantation home, cut in two by a short drive. I remember this place. I hadn’t realized I’d been running towards it. It is where Richard and I used to meet, our late-night rendezvous full of stolen kisses. A city lamp lights a circle in the center of a drive, still strange glowing orbs that I find unsettling, but tonight I am grateful for them. Because they bring to life the body that has spoken to me from a bench.

He is here. In this place, like he was so many times before... Before he was gone from me.

“Marie. My lovely Marie.” The words are a repetition that push me with such force and I am too weak to stay the emotion they elicit. Yet, I have no desire to create a dam against the flow of emotions that wells within.  I want to hear his voice again. Again and again and again. He is bathed in shadows where he sits. I want to see his face. I need to see his face. The figure stands, arms outstretched, but moving no closer.

“Richard,” I whisper his name like a prayer. He is here. He is alive.

Yet, the impossibility of his presence is not enough to break the fragile tether that keeps my legs motionless. The hope, that is thin and reedy and a breath from snapping.

He turns from me and begins to walk—no... float—farther from me. The widening gap pulls taut the connection between us. I let him separate us only as far as I can stand, only until the cord is a high wire that I can walk across, walk across rapidly to the other side where he is. My legs are no longer still. I begin to move.

To the other side. The place removed. Let me come with you, Richard.

Because I will traverse the planes into the land of death to truly be with him.

Yet Richard is here with me. He is my savior once again.

“Borquita!” Mother’s yell is too close. She is not giving up, a true and hungry predator. She’s followed me out of the French Quarter. She will take him from me once more.

I am racing again and Richard is moving to match my pace, keeping the space between us steady and unrelenting. We are on the outskirts of town, passing through unfamiliar regions. I am so far from home, and that fact is a balm to my legs that are once again burning with fatigue. It is almost like the farther I am from the attic and its inhumanity, the more I regain my...human-ness.

My right slipper falls off my foot, a pathetic shred of silk and ribbon. My bare foot is now subject to the uneven surface of the ground. After a few paces, something sharp cuts my delicate skin. It is pain, something I have felt before in my life, but this pain exhilarates rather than maims. The wetness that I feel exiting is like a transfusion ridding me of impurity. I know it must be leaving a telling trail behind me, a path easily followed by my deranged mother.

There is no time to care. No time to stop and bandage the injury with the dirty hem of my evening gown. Richard is turning down another manicured lane; he is swinging open a cast iron gate that separates the green lawn of a two-story estate from the dusty trail we are on; he is opening the beautifully-crafted front door. He is gone from sight.

“Richard, wait. Richard. Wait for me.” I continue my words, a mantra in my brain that is a record spinning around and around. Richard, wait. Richard. Wait for me. Wait for me. Wait for me.

I walk across the threshold expecting to see him. There is more light here, hundreds of candles flickering against the oppressive shadows. There is enough illumination to see every detail of him—the curve of his lips, the angles of his high cheekbones, aristocratic despite his humble situation, and the single unruly curl that often falls across his forehead. As I move, shadows begin to float down to obscure his face. Dimmer. And dimmer still. I keep moving, observing my surroundings as my heartstrings play for my love.

White sheets cover grotesque shapes that remind me of my mother’s attic, the used-up bodies prepared for disposal. I swallow, trying to halt the tremble that works through me. Dust motes cling to the air, so heavy that they thicken my lungs and slow my breathing. It grows ever dimmer in this place.

I wish for Richard as the darkness grows too heavy. He called me to this place.

I need to see Richard again. Embrace him and push that unruly curl away from his forehead. Kiss him without the reservation of courtship. I want our lips to meet, stoking a fire to rival the flames still licking at my muscles. I crave respite.

But he is nowhere to be seen. He is gone from me again, and the loss is worse this time. My heart has no life. It is no longer fighting to get free. It is a dead and limp thing. It is a vestigial organ to me.

From another room, there’s rustling. For a fleeting moment, I think it is him, that he has not abandoned me once again. I take a step toward him, toward forever, ready to welcome it if it means that I am his for eternity.

But it is not Richard that moves into the foyer of the home.

The figure that presents itself is lithe and tall, womanly and full. She is dark as coal, her face punctuated by a line of white framed by a twisted mouth. A warped and cruel smile. I do not know her, I know of her.

She travels with Laveau, having taken over the liquor importing a few streets over when the great voodoo queen wearied of the mundane occupation. Our delivery boy says they can bring the dead to life, speak to the spirits, and perform all manner of haunting, horrible ritual.

He’s a flighty man-child that asks to see the maid’s ankles, and they lift their skirts when they’re frightened. Even so, I’ve seen how ugly things beget ugly things beget weird magics and horrors.

My stomach twists, and I fight to keep bitter bile down. The fear I have flown from is an inviting paradise. I wish for the attic. I wish for the horrors there. They are familiar. They hold less fear for me.

I shrink back, pressing my palms over my mouth. I am like a pigeon that finally sees the ambush, finally realizes the small crusts of stale bread have been poisoned. I turn to the door and work the handle, but nothing happens. The door is sealed to the frame and I’m trapped. I am not like a pigeon, free to fly. I am a caged bird, ornamental and nearly lifeless.

“Sweet child, sweet child.” She croons the words, her tone eerily similar to the woman on the balcony. Then she hums the chorus of the lullaby, the same one. It threads through the space that separates us. It hits my body with force and purpose. “Yes, yes, I’ve been summoned.”

“Borquita!” The sound of my mother slams against my eardrums like a fist, pounding against my temple and weakening my knees. I press my forehead against the door, fighting the desire to give in, give up and accept whatever will befall me. I hear her once again; she screeches like the devil is driving her, like she is a hellhound with a singular purpose. But her yell is not from the wraparound porch. “You must be punished for your disobedience, girl.”

She’s inside.

I whirl, ready to run again, but the voodoo woman is there, blocking my path. And then my mother is also there.

“She is here, Delphine. You have chased her to this house, to this prison.” The voodoo woman slurs my mother’s name, pouring a fierce hatred, as hot as brimstone, into her speech. “You have kept your end of the bargain, traded your daughter’s soul for your sins. It is not your time. My mistress will take care of you though, devil-doer. Killer of my kin. In the end, you’ve only bought yourself time.”

Her hand rises as she speaks her last sentence. Killer of my kin. I can see, like a fast-moving fog, an inhuman magic emitted from the dark woman’s fingers. It hits my mother with such power that she is thrown from the house. She flies into the night, a dog of the shadows, no longer a hellhound on my heels. The door slams, the sound punctuating the shock of her forced departure. I am glad she is gone. Glad she cannot reach me here.

“What... what’s going on?” I stutter, the words falling like broken glass onto the wood planks below me. 

“You gonna stay here, girl. This house is-a your prison. Your purgatory, girl. Daughter of the killer of my kin. She sold you, sold you like my people have been sold. You-a slave girl. You-a slave, and we gonna use you. And ain’t nothing going to make you free again.” The way she spoke sent shivers down my spine.

She starts chanting, the words grow more and more frenzied, the rhythm a syncopated abstraction of hard where there should be soft. I sink to the floor. I can’t fight her. If I do, if I fight her and escape, then I will be left to the war with my mother.

This is the better of the choices, I change my mind. I do not long for the attic of cruelty now. This new hell will leave me some shred of purity. At least I hope it will. Or will it bleed me? Will this woman, firing off her spell like she is a weapon and I am the target, take everything I have left and finally leave me empty.

The figure that I thought was Richard is gone. A ruse meant only to trap me.

My mother punishes me every day for having compassion anywhere in my bones. She has always wanted me to be her follower, her devotee in the torturous arts.

I will never be what she wants. I’ll never be what I want either. Now she’s traded me away for a little more life of her own.

I should have ended it all when news of Richard’s orchestrated demise reached me. I promised him I would live for both of us if she caught him.

Richard, I tried.

As I weep into my hands, a cold wind blows through the foyer and extinguishes the candles. I look up, my palms salty and soaked. Two inky shadows are floating towards me. Spirits, dark as pitch. They turn to one and, before they swallow me, I see the voodoo woman. She is hugging her arms around her body, as if even she is feeling herself disappearing with the power of the spell that has been cast.

I am swallowed. Nothingness.

Yet before I am truly disappeared, I hear his voice again. Richard’s, but changed... different. Altered.

It is a promise on unseen wind.

I will find you, Marie.

Then I am gone.