Fire

She stood now, finally alone at the casket. Looking down at the small shriveled creature in the satin lined box, she felt no sense of relation. Mother....? It did not truly look anything like her mother. Actually, it more resembled the old woman at the grocery store they had gone to, long ago, in another place.

"Some people bless by coming, and some bless by going"... an old saying she had heard long ago, and felt very strongly now. Yes. A blessing. Gone, finally. Long overdue, and leaving so many feeling their lives too long scorched by her mother's having lived into her eighties.

A tyrant, a punisher. One whom you did not cross... ever. Repayment would be severe, if of uncertain timing, as Mother loved to drag old wounds to the surface, so as to take her pound of flesh from the unsuspecting.

Yes, this thing in the casket.... Good riddance to the damned! For she must be, if such a thing were even true. She hoped it was, in many ways. But, it was also true that she, herself, might go to that same dark fiery shore, if her behavior toward her men-friends was tallied. For she had followed her mother's sick patterns in that one, large way.

This casket... to preserve the dead.

Strange and perverse, even a bit absurd to her frayed mind. She would, if asked, opt for the corpse to be burned in the city dump, ashes washed into some ditch.

Wow, she thought. That is some kind of wicked, belated, pound of flesh of her own flaying. The apple doesn't fall far, obviously. Sad. Painfully.... terribly... sad.

Truly, was this now the legacy of that dead thing before her.... lying, waiting to be captured forever in the earth? Was she, herself, now to take that place, that will that seemed only to live for itself? She shuddered. Deep things moved within her... bone deep trembles, vibrations that had no words, no thought. They were wounds, bleeding beneath the crust, hot magma of fears, slowly pressing upwards, certain to find some fracture, some broken place to come out with... fire.

Then...

A light...a question...a need to know...

Was it possible- at all- that this dead woman had, herself also known such wounds, such pain? As she found a growing inner vision within herself, she also saw possibilities, probabilities, within her mother. Could that horror that inflicted itself upon all who knew her have had its source in such a body of pain that she now saw within herself? Was this dead woman....the same as her?

Her fears through life that she was like that wicked tyrant now turned, as a glimmer of truth grew slowly into a single ray of light. Her Mother. Not a monster, but... a broken child. Victim... turned torturer.

She looked down at the casket at her Mother. There would be no heartfelt talks over coffee... tears... or hugs. No apologies, no connecting in womanhood... no asking forgiveness.

Was she then... doomed as well? Would she merely follow the pain and fear and just hurt others?

No! She heard and felt something rise from within... the deep heat pressing for violence was being forged into something else...a will...a determination, to build something new, a glass house that would throw no stones. She was, this elemental fused sand... clear and colored with impurities and also, filled with light. Lines of fractures, refractions of prism light- all... her.

No will to wound, no desire to burn others. No intent to burn herself.

This woman below her now, who never knew friendship, never allowing anyone to remain close was being redeemed in her daughter. Those fiery flares within her were being made into determined will, allowed now to rise beyond the crust now, as tears.

Sobs, such as she had never shed, never known broke through and now flowed freely. Tears came from the deep wells and streamed down her face staining her Mother's dress. She did not stop them, did not seek any more to hide, press down these hot streams.

Her body shook with the force of the slow eruption and she bent over the casket, her hands grasping the edges with all her strength. Bowing, folding over her mother's body, her face fell to bury itself in the dress. She wept and moaned in some strange alchemy- a releasing and reforming body of glass.

And when she felt the forces of heat beginning to cool, the new form of her heart beginning to take shape, she slowly rose from her mother's body.

Standing now, seeing the woman who had born and formed much of her fire, she felt only a sadness and grief. She would have loved to know her, to laugh with her. Never to be, but formed within her heart now, she knew a new peace.

A love, that could see with eyes cleared by fire.