INTRODUCING TODAY'S GUEST AUTHOR, JULES OLIVER WILKINSON, WHO IS SHARING HER SHORT STORY 'REPERCUSSIONS' #RWRTeamBlog #ReadWriteRepeat

REPERCUSSIONS

By Jules Oliver Wilkinson

The sound of a child sobbing disturbs the air, summoning his mother immediately to his side, to smooth back damp hair from his pale clammy face.

“It’s alright sweetheart,” she soothes. “I’m here.”

“Oh mum!” His voice cracks. “It was the same again! As soon as I close my eyes, I’m standing by the bed!

“He opens his eyes and sees me, and just when I think he is going to smile, he starts to scream, and suddenly I am back here, in bed, and alone!”

“You’re not alone, love! I am here! I’ll always be here! You are my precious darling child, and I promise you, I will always be here for you!"

She draws her son gently to her, and knowing that she has little comfort to offer, tries anyway.

“These things happen sometimes, when someone dies so suddenly! And tragically! There has to be a time of… adjustment. I know it seems cruel love, but it will get better. In time. I promise!”

Mother and son hold on to each other, kindred spirits, bound closer by their loss.

*****

The alarm awoke Robert the next morning for school. He half sat up as he rolled over to turn it off, then lay back down, thinking of the night before.

Like so many other nights his dad had come running in to his room when he had heard his son screaming. He had hugged the trembling body, until the sobs subsided.

“Dad! It was so real!” he had whispered in to his father’s chest. “He was standing by my bed, just watching me! And as soon as I started to scream, he just disappeared!

“Why do I keep having the same dream dad? I don’t like it! “I am afraid to go to sleep in case I dream, and frightened to lie here awake, in case…” his words were lost to muffled sobs.

*****

In the cold light of day, Robert had known that it had just been a dream. Anne-Marie, the counsellor he had been seeing since the accident, had tried to explain things to him in ways which helped him understand and come to terms with the horrific double tragedy that he had experienced in his young life.

Anne-Marie had said that a lot of people thought that they saw friends and relatives who they had recently lost. It was because you expected to see them, and so you did!

It was the brain’s way of helping the heart to heal, by lessening the shock of the loss, Anne-Marie had explained to him.

…And so… as the brain soothes the heart, by transmitting to the eye, images of those which it does not really see… it also finds explanations for that which it does not really understand…

Robert had listened to his counsellor’s words, and derived some small comfort from knowing that others had experienced something similar to what he was going through. However, he could not help but think that these nightly ‘visitations’ from his brother Richard were not helping his aching heart to heal so very much!

*****

Dave Foley, the twin’s father, shook his head as he sat alone at the breakfast table.

He sighed for the memory of how things used to be…

He remembered cold Sunday mornings, ‘bracing’, Liz had called them, and brisk walks to the nearby lake.

The boys would run on ahead, with Jess, their old Border Collie, as he and Liz meandered after them at a more leisurely pace, reminding the boys to stop when they got to the old ‘penny oak’, a sawed-off stump of a tree, more brass and nickel than wood now, after enduring decades of having pennies hammered into it ‘for luck’, or ‘to keep the imps away’, depending on your beliefs, but which indicated you were nearing the water’s edge, whatever your beliefs!

Liz and Dave were as much in love thirteen years after exchanging fidelity and eternity vows… Liz did not believe in exchanging ‘bands’…as they had ever been.

He had fallen in love with Liz’s ethereal beauty the moment he had laid eyes on her, and had never quite gotten over his luck, when she had seemed equally smitten with him!

They would exchange mischievous grins, over their mittened hands, in anticipation of the time they would spend together later, when the boys had had enough ‘family time’, and gone off to meet up with their friends.

When Dave and Liz had found themselves able to buy their lovely house in the woods, close to where they had first met, actually, and so close to the lake that Dave had loved since he was a child, Dave had felt his life could not be any sweeter.

That was, until the twins came along!

Liz had warned Dave early in their relationship, that it was possible that they might not be able to have children together, but Dave had been so smitten with Liz that he had known that he would be perfectly content just to spend his life with her.

However, when they first became aware of the imminent arrival of not just one, but two babies, both new parents-to -be were equally excited!

And when the identical blue eyed blond boys were delivered, Dave had to admit to himself, that much as he was besotted with Liz, he had never experienced such overwhelming feelings of love as he felt for those two squalling scraps of life!

Such tiny, delicate mites both, in their premature states, were almost unearthly in their delicate beauty, Dave thought, and he knew right then and there that he would die for them, if needed.

Looking at Liz’s diaphanous beauty, through tears that showed no sign of abating, as she held the boys, one in the crook of each arm, he suspected that she felt the same way, and that he too had somehow slid down a notch or two in the order of her affections; and he minded not one jot!

Things were now as it should be! They were now complete!

He had not really understood that anything had be missing from his life, until he had seen that snapshot of his life, as it then stood right then; Liz and his boys.

And him looking out for them; protecting them, ensuring nothing ever happened to them.

Or so he had thought.

*****

The blue-green lake had seemed so beautiful, back then; the overhanging trees, the lily pads, the vole holes.

Dave and the boys not only knew where each and every one was, they knew which ones were likely to be occupied at any given moment, and also the name of the individual vole who occupied it!

Although the last bit was more likely due to Liz’s intervention, and embroidering the facts!

Liz, like Dave, was very much a nature lover, but whereas Dave was a keen naturalist, and intent on teaching the boys the many detailed, and factual intricacies of nature, Liz preferred to colour the stories with myth and make-believe, and spent many hours spinning fantasies and fairytales about the woodland creatures who lived around the lake.

Dave used to tease Liz that when the boys grew up, they wouldn’t know the differences between the wood and water nymphs from her stories, and the mayfly nymphs hanging under the water’s surface, that he pointed out to them!

One family story, that they had put by to tease the boys with when they were older, was that one day the boys had run ahead, and then come scuttling back to bring their parents to, ‘Come see! Quick! There are dragons on the lake!’

They were dragon flies, of course, but it did prompt Liz to start introducing the words ‘real’, and ‘pretend’ in to the stories and tales that they weaved for the boys.

It didn’t deter her from weaving further fantasies however!

Fairies, she told them, could sometimes be mischievous, and therefore dangerous! But they were wary of all things metal, and so stayed lakeside of the penny tree!

That story had worked a treat to ensure the boys did not wander too near the water’s edge unsupervised, as even though they only half believed their mother’s stories, even when they were tiny, the idea did lodge somewhere in the recesses of their childish brains, causing them to slow their approach to the water’s edge, whenever they neared the penny tree, even if only long enough for their parents to catch up!

*****

Dave shook his head and brought himself back to the present.

He wished he could do something for his remaining son, poor Robert.

Death is traumatic enough for any child, but this double loss, one almost immediately on top of the other, seemed to have been more than Robert’s young mind could take.

Robert was really struggling to keep a grasp on reality, and Dave worried that this was partly due to he himself struggling so much to come to terms with his own double loss! He was not being there for Robert, his one remaining son, and for whom he had declared such an undying love in the moment he had been born!

What was he doing?

Why was he failing Robert when he needed him?

Dave remembered how he had reacted when they had first lost his beloved Liz, who has succumbed suddenly to a heart condition that neither of them had even suspected afflicted her.

For nights on end he had dreamed that she was by his side in bed, until he had awakened, and she had faded away, leaving him burying his head in to the pillow, imagining that he was still breathing in her perfume.

He had accepted when doctors had told him how shock can play strange tricks on the mind.

Robert, however, was different.

He seemed to actually believe that he was seeing his brother by his side, as he had been since the day they were born.

But this was more than just wishful thinking, like when dragons, dragon-fly nymphs, and fairies had all blurred into one wonderful magical reality for the boys when they were younger, and wrapped up in their father’s nature stories, heavily embroidered in their mother’s fantastical tales.

But surely Robert was old enough now to be able to separate reality from fantasy?

And even if Robert was allowing himself to dwell in a reality where fantasy and reality were blurring… why would he seem so… terrified… by the thought of his beloved brother visiting him in his dreams?

Dave even suspected that Robert’s nightmares sometimes followed him in to his waking hours, as he had on more than one occasion found Robert with that same haunted look upon his face in the middle of the day.

*****

Richard nestles his head up closer to his mother, reverting to baby behaviour in his misery.

“I’m glad you are here mum, but I wish Robert and dad could be here too.”

“Oh, love don’t say that! Don’t wish their lives away. We’ll all be together again when the time is right.

Liz cuddles her son, as she remembers how it was for her, when it had first happened to her, when her weak heart, which had never been meant to carry the overwhelming amount of love for the treasured family she never expected to have, had given way on her.

Whenever she had not been concentrating, she had found herself wandering… materialising… in some familiar haunt.

Sometimes she would find herself by the kitchen window, watching her sons play in the garden, fighting each other for the best swing, which she and Dave had installed for them on their last birthday.

Then, they would stop fighting, as she watched, as though influenced by something of which they were not aware, and suddenly remember that it was more fun to share… as their mother had taught them.

Sometimes she would drift in to Dave’s arms as he lay sleeping. He would snuggle up to the body that wasn’t there as he slept, and reach out to its absence as he awoke.

Liz knows that she has to teach her newly arrived son how to curb his own wanderings, so as not to continue to disturb the peace of mind of her surviving son.

Or worse.

She knows how easy it is to forget what you are; as she had tried to forget her own unearthly beginnings… when she had been alive. And how subconscious thoughts, even of those not second or even third generation fey, can influence not only your own drifting soul…and those of others too.

And she remembers…

She had watched her sons playing by the lakeside, and she had been trying to quieten disloyal feelings of jealousy and resentment; Dave, her beloved Dave, had been left with both twins, while she wandered alone.

The dark, jealous side of her nature, which she had been able to silence when she had been alive, had become more powerful since her own passing to the other side…

Richard and Robert had rolled and tumbled by the lakeside, without their father’s presence to warn them that they had strayed too far beyond the penny oak, and were too near to the water’s edge!

With only their mother’s presence…their mother’s …lonely…presence, watching from the shore.

She remembers feeling the cold shock almost as though it had been herself that had suddenly rolled in an uncontrolled slither of mud and crumbling banking in to the green water.

She doesn’t remember the rest.

The mind has a way of protecting the soul… even a fairy soul…in death, as the brain protects the heart, in life.

And anyway, she tells herself, she has no time to dwell now.

Her son needs her.

She did so love to feel needed again.

The End

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COMING SOON: On Monday, 15th September, our team member, author Eva Bielby, will be sharing her Flash Fiction story, 'Interference'.