HEDWIG

It is not my responsibility to tell someone else’s story, but I do take up this task of telling how I’d say it if I could, and that’s partly because I don’t approve of certain details, or because I wish there were others instead of those established and that in turn would mean acceptance of details other than the ones I object against, which should make it clear that with the forthcoming effort I’m in no way demeaning or plagiarizing an existing franchise, but merely developing on what I thought could be a worthwhile elucidation of an unintentional fact.

“His sleep is but the hours”, she sighed.

Long, dark, unkempt hair, round-framed glasses, skinnier than she’s fed to be, she floated out of her allotted space leaving the door open. Others of her kind could consider this to be a decent level of disobedience, of neglect of such a thing as curfew but under his possession she had never had the slightest of feeling of bondage, or of being owned. Owned, maybe, but never by him, you know, it was like she owned him and he owned her and they co-owned each other, which meant that she couldn’t care lesser about herself than she cared for him and not that she shouldn’t care for him at all. And although the reason why she was out of her cage was more selfish than noble, she was also perturbed that the boy had started to eat his sleep with dreams and that she could find no tangible way by which she could do anything to help him out.

“Look how he sleeps!” she chimed, excited.

“He sleeps?” she queried.

“Yes, he sleeps!” came her response.

“Good”, she said. “He should.”

She sat herself at his bedside, clawed her way to that old photograph he so treasured, that which adorned the gloom he resided in solely by being distinctly out of place and that was what marked its charm; that was what marked the charm of those inside it, within the frame for it showed a couple of people who liked being out of place even when alive. What did she know though, about death and what awaited beyond? What did she know about sacrifice, or having to live without the ones one’s supposed to be living with on a permanent basis without the slightest of contact? Or what could she ever possibly know about love or the slightest sensation of the same, in its multiple forms ranging from the obvious to the obscure or about being deprived of it, that which the boy painfully had to live every day?

“You carried his letters”, she said.

“You took them even to ones you shouldn’t have”, she asserted. “You took them to her!”

“And how many times you have cried!”

“It rains!” she exclaimed. “He doesn’t know.”

“Is that the sun?” she gasped, suddenly aware of extending shadows. “It is, isn’t it?”

“Back to bed, then!” she ordered herself, but not before she lunged and kissed him swift on his lips.

“The boy won’t know what he doesn’t know.”

The cage was shut, the girl within, and the sun woke him up to a day that promised nothing but solitude. But she still smiled; smiled at the thought of him not knowing that love sat closer than he thought it to be and that it always came from where he’d least expect it. She smiled at what had gone beyond, all sobriety of tragedies past and with hope at the ones to come, and at the thought that there would particularly be a point where he’d see her for she is and it was that acknowledgement that was the goal and not the acceptance itself.

Until then she would have to live with the pecks she occasionally endowed, and the fondles she received in return, which she found to be more than what she could ask for.