by Julia W., 17
The first time Lucie’s finger touched the stovetop, it was an accident, a careless error that ended in Lucie pulling her hand back in a staccato flight. After the burn, though, came the warmth, and Lucie cherished how it felt. Caught beneath her blistered skin, reminding her of the fireflies kept in jars on those summer nights as a child.
She was so cold. All the time, she was cold. The kind of cold that festered like an itch, seizing her muscles. Her knees felt like paper, trembling so violently that she spent her days collapsed on the icy, hard floor that bit into her stiffening bones. Lucie’s days crawled by in front of an ashy, damp fireplace, her body yearning for a flame, some warmth. She sat crumpled on the floor of an empty room, with air that sliced her lungs and left her releasing ghosts of breath. The sunlight seeping past the window never seemed to touch her skin, stretching shadows across the room. Lucie shivered with the ticking of the seconds, with the attacks of frigid wind through her thin walls, her teeth clamping down on her tongue, her jaw painfully clenched.
Lucie used to play the piano, but even if she wanted to, her fingers were too far burned now to touch the keys anymore. She had played beautifully, with care, her hands dancing over the keys, the steady puff of the pedal in the background that blended the notes into a flowing legato. She missed the whisper of that final note, a perfect C, and the rolling thunder of the bottom octaves. Most of all she missed her son, and how he would sit beside her on the bench, following her hands as she taught him. She started with the alphabet, labeling each key with tape and a pen. Middle C, then comes D, and in between that is the black note, C#. If you play C and E at the same time, it makes a lovely harmony.
At night, Lucie would force her legs to stumble to the kitchen, and she would turn on the burner to boil a pot of tea she would not drink. Pressing her hand against the stovetop, Lucie counted the seconds to beat her previous time until the pain was so great that she could feel her flesh boiling, and she swore she could feel her bones charing away, but it still was not enough. Sometimes the tea kettle would shriek until her head buzzed, ears pounding, and it would take some time to realize she was the one screaming.
She would run the shower before returning to her empty room with its cold floorboards, sure to make the water scorching hot, stinging her skin and setting fire to her swollen, blistered burns until they finally went numb.
Lucie tried to hold the heat in the palm of her hand. But fireflies always died, or got away. The aching chill set back in her body like a fever, and there was blood on her hands, and she missed the piano. To Lucie, the piano was a comfort; to her son, it was an art. He soared past her, his hands becoming a part of the music, as if there was a melody in his blood. Lucie stopped teaching him, and found comfort in simply sitting next to him on the bench, listening to him play.
He was sixteen when the other boys started talking about joining the army, fighting the Germans. The legal age was eighteen, but they could lie.
It was only supposed to last a few months, anyway. I’ll be home for Christmas, Mum, he promised, and Lucie let him go. He took a piece of her heart with him, she made him swear to bring it back when he came home for the holidays. She would never forget the last time she hugged him goodbye, how he pulled away too quickly, and how there was such light in his eyes. He had so much hope for a future. Lucie prayed that war would not steal that from the both of them.
When Lucie was alone in her cold, empty room with nothing but her thoughts, she would wonder if she got it all wrong. She would think about how they all told their sons stories of superheroes, and she wished she told her son that he did not have to fight a war to be a hero. She wished until her heart was shriveled and numb and sunken in her stomach and her forehead was resting on her knees to shield herself from the grief and she was dry heaving the contents of an empty chest—wished that when she hugged her son goodbye, that she took him by the shoulders and looked him directly in the eye and told him more. There would always be words unspoken.
Lucie’s son promised he would be home for Christmas, but that was impossible because his third Christmas away was in a week, and he died eight months before. The man who delivered the telegram knocked so sharply—as if handing her the news that would end her life was a bother to him—that she startled while making her morning tea, the mug falling to the ground with a satisfying crash, her hand accidentally brushing against the scalding stovetop. The sound of the mug shattering reached her ears in a delayed time, like her brain was trying to ease the final moment of not knowing, letting it linger like the sickly sweetness of candy. She knew, though. He was her child, she always knew. As soon as she heard the man’s fist meet the wooden surface of the door, her muscles went slack, and she would have to clean that mug up before she stepped on it. Wouldn’t want to hurt herself.
She was given a small bag of her son’s things: a watch that broke, stuck at 10:58 after she clasped it around her wrist; a picture of his girlfriend who moved on six months ago; a letter that only read Dear Mum, the rest disintegrated into the fire that killed him, the remains carrying the memory of smoke; a stack of playing cards. She never got her heart back, that burned away with him.
The piano, once an art, was hidden under a coating of dust. There was a chip in the wood, and shattered glass in between the scratched keys after Lucie threw a vase and watched it shatter. She tried to play, but all she could feel was the shadow of her son’s weight on the bench. She moved to the very edge to leave room for him out of habit, and when she brought her hands up to play, she froze, because all she could see were the places where her son’s fingertips had touched. It made no sense to her, none at all. The realization hit her bluntly, like a slap to the face: in all her life, there would never be a single moment that he would exist in again. Lucie’s hands shook, and the shaking turned shivering as the aching cold settled under her skin. She threw the vase at the piano, because she needed more than anything for something other than her heart to break. A glass shard cut her finger, and she sobbed uncontrollably over the pain.
Lucie watched the flame rise under the burner. She wished she could have held him, taken the pain away. She wished it could have been her instead.
When her son was eight, he scraped his knee on the playground. She held him close as he cried, and wished with all her heart that she could take the pain from him. “I would do anything to make it better,” she whispered.
Lucie’s son would not be home for Christmas, and she was so cold in her empty room, and she would never play the piano again. The kettle was wailing in the other room. Snow was falling in London, the first of the year.
Downingtown, Pennsylvania
Bridge Ink 