Isabella Foster
I like a look of agony
because I know it's true
H
ell hath no fury like woman scored. I read that, in a play once. I think of my own family, and how we handle, well anything. I wonder if Hell can still know a fury if its silent. It is perhaps one of the last truly warm days before winter comes. Already, I long for summer and our frequent trips to the beach house on the coast. Days where my brothers and sisters and I forget our lessons and we are children once more. Our grandfather comes with us, no longer staying in his own large home, his own wife passed just two summers ago. Granny Colette had been a fine woman in the Foster family. Not born a Foster, married one, just like my father, but a Foster all the same by our standards. She was quick to judge and play favorites, but she was also warm. If you went up to their own beach house early in the morning, back when we had been small, you could wake her up and she would have the servants make warm biscuits, as many as you wanted before everyone else woke up. She took us berry picking, saying how us Foster children didn't know how to get our hands dirty while she lavished in diamonds and silks.
She took us to charity events she planned, let us dress up and put on her jewelry and dance on the floor as if we were grown ups. Snuck us each a sip of wine, saying not to let the red stain our lips.
“Know how to mourn with dignity,” my mother had said at the back of the church at the funeral of my grandmother. Everyone kept coming up to us, apologizing on our loss. “It is the Foster way.” As if keening on your knees were in some way, crazed As if their dignity was so astounding—that it could eat away the pain. I still cried when she died, in front of the mirror, with no one around, those big, fat, ugly tears. I have never looked less like a Foster in my life and it was—freeing.
My quill scratches against paper, making notes of alleyways for another map, another improved map of Terrastella for the Foster library. The map I carry has the basic components of the city, all the main streets, the main shops, even side streets and smaller boutiques and bars. But there are these places, forgotten, tiny slivers where life bleeds red and hot. Dusk Court offers the lavish lifestyle, it is even so upfront about its swamp, but there are places they would rather be swept under the rug. I have heard of Night Markets, if never having been, I wonder if it is the rug where everything we sweep ends up. I wonder too how many jewels have been accidentally pushed away.
I move down quieter corners, where I get stared at because I am unfamiliar, or they recognize me and wonder why I am so far from our libraries, our mansions, our money. I draw the alleyways like they are veins from the heart, to the extremities. We concentrate so much on the heart the we forget where the blood must go, lose blood to the arms and the legs, the fingers, the toes, and we lose something we so easily forget how much we need.
I wont let any piece of Terrastella be forgotten.
Another alleyway, this one bustles with life, I am noticed about as much as one would take care to look at a brick wall. This world is loud.
I love it.
picture colored by Elidhu
@Caspian
