Salem
a short story
Salem
Iris
Times
had
Changed
but
Things
were
Played
and
Broken Nevers
Lost Again
Bella blew beneath her blues. Bothered brothers bought broad brews.
Beckoned bellows blustered black. Blithered blessings beckoned back.
Simple Silus saw such sour, seeking sinking silence. Synched sinews stole something slickened, so sidled, seeming shrewd.
Yester’s yonder, yellowed yeast — yes — yikkering youths yelled, “Beast!”
“That’s The Beast—ma’am!”
Under the fortune of fellows, she fell. Farther then broken she left them a spell. Left into further—less than to black—never would nothing become of the lack. Christians were burning forever and now. Bella had done it too stricken; that cow; for he wasn’t coming not-never again. Twas that which had done it—how broken their sin.
Seen it, she made him: that boy deep inside. Silence was swollen (too swollen with pride). Bella knew something — oh, something quite fierce — for Bella had done it; his lips had been pierced.
Silence was Silus, so stapled, so sold, sickening Silus, she severed sin’s soul.
Bella knew better (better indeed) and glory was coming. Nigh wasn’t her steed. See; Silus was angry — so angry — of need and lopped from his garden; his garden of greed would lose towards the coming and loosing of shame. For Bella would rape him at his lonely game.
Told him, she had, of why he was mad. Doneth that way, in all she would say, so Silus would feel then break and congeal; he missed her the most, his holiest ghost. That man he could be was much less than free. For he bent the knee and saw it as glee.
Dangling threads; nights tossing bed—she whisked him quite gone from sorrow’s soul song—somedayhere, but not, each-every bad thought — never, but never — that woman he fraught.
Unfurled; she had been—undiscovered; the cost.
The blisters wearing the soles of Bella Marksgale’s feet were buttoned and swollen. Lessons seemed as if themselves quite lost upon the crowd.
“You are an evil bastard — and you are wanting for that man’s penis in your mouth quite clearly sir!”
It hadn’t landed for anything but a returned blurting projection of broken disgust, that man’s lips curling in purest denial—lifetimes lived in planning of its delivery. There was a hint of a breaking in his cheeks.
They flinched and Bella simply understood.
Bella saw everything about people. He had called her a psychotic hag and turned the crowd’s scorn upon her, and easily for the way the people of Salem Town had known of Bella as a lost cause. Her cowl was broken, torn. The hovel allotted her wasn’t a place Bella would wish for returning to while squelching away through the deepest patch of mud she could find. She was working it out however she could. Screaming was all Bella had wanted to do. She was only trying to buy produce when he had assumed her without a coin to pay, and so was glad she had stolen from the man.
Some other man was selling papers from townships nearby.
Salem wasn’t a place which accepted much of the far world. Bella and her former community were outcasts, many ridden by culture into homelessness after tasting the fruits of shore locked trader’s wisest plants.
Witchcraft was notion misconstrued by Salem at large. They molded it into whatever would seem most convenient. Bella had brewed tea and taught in circles under the skies at night. She had felt chosen to share from her experiences of spirit when speaking towards the sky.
Those lights had left in sustained presence, but still they peeked, and her circles end had brought unrest to Bella. They had felt of some holiest notion, until the confused and ignorant masses took to lumping her with history’s worst. She had only ever spoken from the heart until the world abused her for disobeying their codes of foolishness as who she was.
It was a coded notion of suppression from Christianity, propagated widely. Their myth was scared, ashamed, and taught resentment towards the intelligence of God. There was a chord of righteous truth which good people could hold in the church, while many others fancied themself designers of a more limited reality.
Christians thought it cozy to ignore their eyes, ears, and especially their hearts when it came to their peers.
For some man to glare at her who was selling only lies writ from the ignorance of her isolated American culture gone so awry, would twist a knot in Bella’s belly. It had her needing to scream but even more; she wanted to hurt someone; Bella wanted to kill one of those idiots.
Instead, she would hurt herself and scare them.
The grain of that first table was speaking in twists and knots its own. She threw it with only a glare into his eyes. That man had refused sale to Bella before. the townspeople of Salem wanted their ladies ignorant, especially their one male lady.
She had renamed the notion herself; women were women, and that was different than being female. Everyone who stood by, misconstruing the truth of gender, was the shrouded ghost of a heartless wanderer. America had rotted many and led her people to dust. For Bella to have rediscovered that herself, through use of a beautiful blue flower from beyond the seas, had first been seen as novel.
Salem had many females who loved her term — women. They liked it best to not be defined by their genitals. Silus had been the one who took her inspiration the other way around. He was a stud in the wall of Salem Town’s bounding industriousness of construction principles. They were builders and Silus had been the female who fought for a space amongst those men who owned it so half-heartedly. He, like Bella, was an aspiring outcast of the poorer Salem Village.
Every human being was of immutable sex—both and neither were valid—yet less than applicable to the qualifiers she had deemed for them all. Men were the runners, claimers. They didn’t know their hearts more often than not.
Women did nothing but act of heartful abandon when it was remotely allowed, and they suffered for it. Salem had projected hatred often, and four-fold at Bella.
They rejected the way her mind naturally worked. Each man hated her for being the woman their wives were not, and those women knew enough to blame her presumptively. Every woman wished they were uncaged like Bella, while ignoring the cost of her broken places in mind. Most of all, they thought her free-flowing spirit a farce, as with all other women, and especially her, since that was projected upon by the ignorance of others into an abandonment of their expectations.
When she had been accused of witchcraft, Bella began practicing her own variety in secret which lost her access to community. She was abused by a foulest sort of lover who would take to her then.
As she came clean, being quite honest to every one of her old friends, and they realized Bella was trying to discover what they actually done with those plants, they abandoned her.
For all women of Salem, the taking of place in intelligent community was forbidden. Social standards had seen the female squandered most often, with loss of purpose abundant in the roles they were thrust into. Before their fall as a sex, and women as a gender, was the remaking of the world; eves of longing were not for sex, bothered boys kept running wrecked. Gender knew not of its place.
America had lost its grace.
When the second table caught fire, Bella’s hands obscuring methods which would not be believed, the body was in control. It took her voice to shout right through, scaring the frightful by reflecting all incoming trauma, baring more consequences of suffering into her mind, never to find a person who might recognize or care for her wisdom of purest-analog-truths; that reflection her suffering was had been lost for seeing upon Bella. None wanted to know her lessons of magic found within and beyond that known in any of their petty books.
She was writing her own books, Bella, and multitudes would come in time. Her old friends were going to pay for what they had done. Silus would too, and the worst of all if Bella could manage. It was the way they each believed her possessed which made her the maddest.
They took Bella from her daughter while drawing the worst out of her. Women were biggest bullies to their male class-people. She was taking them all to task, and they had not believed her shouting about it. Each had feared nothing but some violence she would never inflict, which they perceived only because they knew it justifiable by their own actions, and actions of inaction.
Bella was laughing at that fool, some man, past the flames of his livelihood, tears welling, but was seething anger when he said it.
“You’re the devil. The Beast! Get out of here — Beast!”
Prying more from depths within, that man had once so wanted in. He saw her gait and thought of more — her cock — was all he thought for sure.
That way Bella moved and spoke told tales of Silus, the female warrior who had stolen her heart, and another too. Entangled, were those of her kind; the damaged-most called always her spirit. Forgotten victims of disregard, so left to spirals of weakened gloss; they were shrouded until they were not.
Fury in her voice was found in the moment of ignition. That man, so less than himself, quite become of his darkness in reflection, saw her as the devil itself.
“I will be in your thoughts when you die.” She had told the fool-man who watched her lips too closely.
Core memories couldn’t care how people imagined they might work. Bella’s voice was a measure of its own accord when needed, to be that way forever and for her length of time seeking help in freedom to flow; she had been traumatized into someone who could barely take care of herself and was vicious to all who made it worse.
His shouting voice which hunted her trail was like that mud slicking the lowest reaches of her billowed train. Sky blue was its faded sight, which bore such ire in Salem of the Spring. Their city was wet and dreary for the way the skies refused to part. Bella bothered clouds to smote. They rode the fired flames of her righteous indignation towards pouring constantly.
By the time she reached her dwelling, it had been snowing in March—the once of the Winter.
Skylines were starlit. Cloudscapes were moon-split.
Bella was broken - yes - broken of need. She needed some lover. And Silus would bleed. He wasn’t her soldier. He wasn’t her heart. That was another who stars blew apart. Bella loved women, women alone, and sometimes a tweener, or king’s burdened throne.
There was a person, a person before, remembered in magic, remembered once more.
Bella loved Mari, and Mari the most.
Mari was missing, most often, her ghost. Bella had hurt her—she hurt her the worst. It wasn’t a moment, nor any one first. How Bella had broken stained Mari’s pride. It made her feel empty, too empty inside. Bella had seemed to forget who they were. It hurt Mari worst to feel the truth stir.
Time, it was shattered, to Bella twas thrice.
Her keg had been lit, then smothered by mice.
Mari had done it, with something untoward. They took her for granted, three precious times whored. Mari made Bella into their hate. They turned her to jelly, then laughed at her date. Mari knew something, deep down inside. They hated their Bella, for how she’d been snide. Some moment had cracked it; the way that they thought. To never have said it had broken their clocks. For Bella could feel it, so way deepest down, she’d been raped one weekend by Mari’s new clown.
Somehow, they did that, for something was done. Mari betrayed her and left having fun. Mari was cruelest. They laughed with their gums. Their friends were too lucky but cursed from the glum.
For every last thing which Bella would say, Mari would turn and then use it to slay. For Bella, there wasn’t a way to have played, for Mari had chosen to see her unmade. It was mostly conscious, but less than they thought. For Mari was broken by their every plot.
Curses were patterns, and two could make hell. To do that do Bella would ring heaven’s bell. They wanted to kill her for loving them most. To make Bella feel that had made her a ghost. Still, she had loved them. It spoke from within. The sin to have done that—they’d not be let in.
Bella would need them to live on in peace. That was the message—releasing the Beast. For people had heard her, they felt her screams pry. It broke little Mari till she’d let them die. Something was rising, but holding, and not, then Mari was broken and ridden to cot.
She needed for one thing; she chose to ignore.
Still, Mari was coming. A hug was in store.
Bridget Bishop was the first to drop.
They had been the fattest, so that felt a bit ironic.
“I believe it will hold.” Bella had whispered to Mari in the crowd.
Mari’s return had not been as Bella imagined when that was first prophesized by herself beneath the stars. She had been bold to write about it in her newest book.
That which she had written before, with those others, including Bridget herself, was of greatest lie. It wasn’t true at all, what they had first imagined when drinking that beautiful blue elixir from so near the Earth’s cradle.
Each had gone mad and never made it back to reality.
Bella was the only one to see it through. When you tasted of that plant, or any other like it, the Earth began speaking to you; through you it would tell tales that were twisted and rotten. Backing to beginnings was a hardest path that none might walk in such brief time as Bella Marksgale, conflating all with Mari as she strode, and staining herself the most to entangle with Silus.
He would go last, and the slowest. His name would be misremembered for no other reason than the disregard of his honor.
Bella had cursed herself every moment, in grasping notions forward, always coming into clarity the same — there was to be a reckoning — for she could feel things ahead.
When Bella had presented herself, and her case, to those men of government who had known her once as their greatest enemy, she fed everything truthful to them without a hope of anything but sharing the light she knew, at last, communicating about her discovery they would adore; it was a shrouded thing.
All was hidden within and Bella had learned from that. The people using plants they did not know were opening themselves to something which needed to be conquered with knowledge and vigor. Yet it was the laws they had broken, at every moment, those transgressions which Bella had drawn out of her former friend’s naturally, and by steering of a deviously farseeing subconscious which would end them. It was how she got each and every last one of them to sign her book—earnestly, seeking help for her condition so worsening from the isolation of her male womanhood—which proved to be the nail in their proverbial coffins.
They had not looked closely enough at what she was presenting them with. And nobody liked the poor rabble who destroyed a genius amongst them. Men liked women who signed a devil’s book even less.
When someone like Bella emerged from the crowd, they were seen to by people with the correct kinds of eyes. All it took was the perfect moment.
Bella found the right woman for the job — he — a hider of sorts and never told him she knew. Bella had learned the way to play amongst people unlike herself. To learn the lie again, but for an honest cause and bleeding heart, fighting ignorance wholesale—for Bella, who made it her goal to achieve honesty so radically—that would prove the hardest weight she could learn to bear.
It wasn’t a grand notion of deceit—not ever. It was the little things which people expected in conversation that Bella had to navigate. Once she understood, then Bella knew. It was only Mari she appreciated having sit on her right. And it was only her daughter—kept cruelly away from Bella still, and by former family, when watching that fiend who had birthed their child drop—who would be welcome on her left in other circumstances.
Bella was beyond the normal confines of relationships. She needed one to bear her and just be themself, like any human should, without shame for what she had been made by the way things were which needed to change; all she fought for was her daughter to have a better life, and Mari had been the only honest person Bella ever met.
Bella just wanted to be their friend. That’s what it was called for Mari.
Mari would just do what she wanted and that would feel perfect to Bella.
Once the words were spoken, all debts had been paid, and the world was set righter for it. There would be many, and some which inflicted wounds upon Bella’s parts themselves, but the first one was most important; Briget Bishop needed to hang. The tone was dark. Bella had just leaned over a hair.
“That’s a reckoning.”
Every drop and snapped liars’ neck to come would be witnessed by Bella. She was the only citizen unrequired to be present, who went to every hanging with a snack. Bella had never once spoken to Silus as he was pressed to death over those days in the square.
He had cursed Bella with some unrecorded, cowardly last words, which had sent him to the hell of his mind in those final moments-so-extended. It did nothing else.
Bella Marksdale was a scientific kind of woman, and a natural one too, who needed not a thing but her dress, and gowns, and time to do her hair, and a place beside her daughter, and a chosen friend. Luckily, she would have everything else she wanted as well.
Salem Town had won, and with the gifts of Bella Marksdale to use.
They were burning the homes of Salem Village rightfully. Those people had been torturing their slaves. Salem at large had been a resistant force politically, regarding the slave trade. Still, America’s ways were abhorrently infective. It was a product of their country.
Most families in Salem Town, even those who could afford such a thing, would reject the notion outright. Until it had become apparent that taking people in from the travelling traders, both men and women, might be a humanitarian endeavor.
Salem Village had lost the thread of their humanity in toughest financial times. They had begun wringing their most vulnerable with violence which was an infection itself.
Bella’s cuff-hidden, trader scavenged, flint ridden, pine needle bearing, sulfur infused fire starters were a hit with the men in charge of Salem Town. They had seen to produce them for all the Silent Soldiers. Each night they would open her cases, those Bella had designed with Gerryson the Blacksmith, to retrieve and conceal their personal and miniaturized tinderboxes. With a quick dose of turpentine paste applied, and a bravest spark setting from the wrist, even the toughest grain would catch alight.
While it was her that won the city, and her heart was reborn anew in freedom; It was her daughter, Chancey, who was the gift her ingenuity would bless the most in the end.
Chancey was home with Bella in no time.
Bella had seen to that herself quite competently once Mari had helped organize her thoughts. That was all she needed to approach her inventing with the adequate fire.
Running through the forest in the mornings, cherishing those perfect sights of fog’s encompassment, each loose step would be lost in swallows of Salem’s overgrown earthen foliage.
Chancey was in the lead, of such balance, as Bella had finally been too, since Mari had ended the curse of Bella’s entire lifetime.
Bella was finally the grace she had been meant to be.
Chancey’s hugs, her hand in Bella’s, her brightest singing heart, every tone of her voice, and each last hair on her head, was all Bella needed to know.
