All So Real
Published 'Atsatrohn' 1992

Maisie and Esme did not mourn their third sister for long, since children have short memories. For a time, though, in their touching innocence, they pitied God having to look after such a mischievous imp.

In their really young days, all three had shared a double bed which was - now that their bodies were filling out - only fitting for two. Their mother scolded them if they ate too much, for she took reckon of the mattress springs, and money was spent all too easily on such creature comforts.

It was not surprising, therefore, to learn that the lights were kept dim which - with the grime building up on the nursery window - meant that the two remaining sisters had to pour over their improvement books with reddening eyes. As compensation, their mother allowed a tiny light to flicker at the depth of night. Esme preferred it that way. Maisie thought it made it more frightening, for the shadows moved piecemeal across the cracked ceiling, the rocking horse travelled from child to child across the generations of its past, and she even imagined the ghosts of wings entangled in her butterfly net leaning against the wall.

In those days, hunger could act as soporific so, before long, even Maisie was snoring, with only dreams to fear.

As time waxed, the girls grew older, despite (or, perhaps, because of) the meagreness of their condition. Esme eventually caught a cold from the years of suffering Maisie's nightly nervous tugging the bedcovers off her. It would be hard-hearted to blame Maisie, but there was no doubt that her actions resulted in Esme travelling the full distance from a sniffle to influenza through fevers building upon fevers to those body-wrenching nights when Maisie was moved from her heaving side to the mother's room. She recalled listening to Esme's rhythmic screeching lungs even a corridor away ...

Then Esme dies, as the previous sister had done.

The family doctor pronounced her gone, the faint heart having given up the ghost after finally fluttering for just a few breathtaking seconds beyond death itself.
Mother shed a few tears, but then took her business-like control of affairs. She allowed Maisie a short while with her dead sister, to say goodbye. That was the way things were done since even soft-heartedness must be recognised, if but briefly.

The nursery had the usual night lamp beside the bed, making ripples down the rhyming walls. Esme, if one can call a dead girl by her name, was resting in carved repose, no longer concerned about the scarcity of covers on her side of the bed. Her hands had been positioned in prayer, as she used to do as a child at the end of the school day, like a closed fleshy moth. Her near womanly face was composed, peaceful, forgiving.

Maisie was scared. She had been too young to appreciate the significance of death, when the other sister had departed. Now, it was the shock of stillness.

Abruptly, the corpse that had been Esme sat bolt upright in the bed, hands still poised, its shadow shuddering in the shape-shifting gloom. Even the rocking horse ceased its light prance of pretence.

The corpse's words hissed out: "I can't go away, since God for some reason won't let me come to Him. And I am SO tired. Help me, Maisie, please help me. Your dear little Esme must go where she can truly rest."

Maisie replied as if to herself: "This must be a dream. I will wake up in a moment, as I always do from dreams ..."

Esme's voice answered, bristling with aggravation: "It may only be a dream to you, dearest Maisie, but it's oh so horribly real to me. Think on that."


And, thus, the curtains close on yet another episode in that shadowy timeless world between birth and death. It will never be known how it ends, for another more pressing cycle of existence is starting in a different quarter of misspent reality.

But it seemed all so real at the time