brynn stone ⚜️ [eleven] (leggomyeggo) wrote in dunhavenic, @ 2018-11-12 15:54:00 |
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Entry tags: | !narrative, r * laura, r: brynn stone |
WHO: Brynn Stone
WHEN: afternoon, Nov. 12
WHERE: her bro & sis-in-law's living room
SUMMARY: Brynn meets Jane's mama.
WARNINGS: Brief descriptions of birth & violence & torture.
A woman sat in a rocking chair, mumbling a string of words over and over: breathe, sunflower, rainbow, three to the right, four to the left, four-fifty. Everything else around them was pitch black, even the wet floor. “Mama, I’m home --” The woman grabbed her wrist, “no,” and the memories came in a flash after that -- her own, but also not her own. A younger woman walked, hunched over with pain, moaning, the hem of her long dress soaked through. She cried out in pain and fell to her knees, and Jane could finally see the blood on the front of her dress and the agony in her eyes. She looked up, and her aunt Becky’s face was there, glowing in the dark, telling her to breathe, over and over. “Just breathe, all right? They’re on their way.” Women in blue scrubs telling her to stay with them, ceiling tiles and lights passing by quickly overhead as they wheeled her -- Mama, now -- somewhere. Jane could see all of it like she was really there. Her vision blurred, and a baby cried. Sunflowers in a vase on a table, just behind where her sister sat by her bed. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry --” but Mama didn’t believe it. A safe with a gun inside, the lobby of a building, a guard trying to stop Mama, a gunshot and Mama rushing through, trying door after door after door. Until she reached a door with a rainbow on the frame. Two girls sat inside -- Jane remembered now, she remembered playing with another girl -- “Jane --” but the guards found her and pulled her away, screaming. Her mother’s wails, her pleas, and Papa’s face staring down at her. “Four-fifty.” Mama’s body shook with electricity until it went limp. Jane pulled her blindfold off, panting. She felt her aunt’s arms wrap themselves around her shoulders, but she could only stare at her mama, sitting there rocking back and forth. Brynn jerked awake, tumbling off the couch in a tangle of limbs and blankets. The ceiling of her brother’s living room down at her, pulling her back to reality, but it did nothing to settle the hammer of her heart. Memories within memories -- it was the last thing Brynn wanted. To add memories of a mother she’d never had, visions a mother had of losing her child and her sense of self, it was more than she thought she could bear. She scrambled up to her knees, but her stomach lurched along with her. It wasn’t fair, Brynn thought. She’d lost her mother once already; did she have to see it twice? There was a flicker of hope, though, hidden behind the trauma: another little girl like herself. Jane had recognized the camaraderie without needing to be told. Brynn grasped at that feeling and held on -- not for herself, but for Jane. Jane needed it more than she did. |