Her Name

When she was younger, she felt as free as the warm winds that came from far off over the sea, bringing the wild rain and storms that she loved watching and dancing in. She would carefully step among the puddles left from a recent rain, smelling the wet, fresh, growing grass and hunting for a new insect to look up in the books in her father’s library, where she could hide in a dusty, seldom-used nook and no one would come looking for her for hours. Some mornings, when it was dry and the paths weren’t slick with mud and rainwater, she’d steal some food from the kitchens and a pair of breeches from the quiet room no one ever went in - another child’s room, like hers - and go clambering over the rocks and paths that led up the mountains near her home. Whenever her father looked at her, he’d shake his head, disappointed, but she ignored him - she was happy, and that was what mattered, wasn’t it?

	When she was seven, her mother screamed. Her mother had done that before, but not quite so long, nor so loud - and she’d never directed it at her. Her mother yelled that she was a dirty good-for-nothing, someone who was going to go mad and be trapped in her own mind. At the time she thought that of all the places to be trapped, her mind didn’t seem a bad place to be. And wasn’t she already trapped in her own mind to some extent? The thoughts nagged, chasing themselves in a circle, like the family dog after his own tail. A week later, her mother was gone, never to be seen again, and her father wouldn’t explain why. “When you’re older,” he’d say, and send her off to learn etiquette with one of the family servants. She hated etiquette, the rules and the posing and postures, the corsets tightening round her waist and her breath growing short as she began to panic.

When she was eleven, as she traced her feet along the patterns on the smooth hardwood floor in an attempt to delay the inevitable lesson, she saw someone beckon. Where had they been a second ago? Was this a new servant? She followed them down the left hallway, and outside, climbing the path to the rest of the port town, until they disappeared as she was looking at a wailing cat in a side alley. Confused, she looked around in a circle until something new caught her eye, and she began wandering the town. Her father caught her as the sun began to go down, and when she tried to explain, tongue tying itself in knots, he looked at the servant with him and said, “I told you so. She’ll be mad soon enough,” as her world began to crumble around her.

When she was thirteen, she stormed out of an etiquette lesson and ripped off the fancy dress she was trapped in, heading to what she now knew was her younger brother’s old room to grab the breeches. Her younger brother who’d gone mad. She put on his clothes and ran to town, beginning to learn where the best places were, with storytelling shopkeepers and wild animals and dusty books and ships that sailed in and out constantly, tacking to the wind. Her thoughts tumbled and churned amidst the images of people around her that only she could see.

When she was fifteen, she met Eralia, and Eralia was definitely real. There was no blur to her edges, no glimmer to her in the dark. Eralia was her age, she thought - one could never be completely sure in a town like this, in the places she haunted - but she felt older in some ways, warm and comforting, stalwart as the bulwarks of the ships that sailed past. She would always think of ships with Eralia, because they met on the docks, and she always smelled of salt and the sea and the rain, fresh and beautiful and glorious. Whenever she started shaking, in the throes of whatever agony only she could see, Eralia would hold her. Whenever she would veer off towards the beckoning people, Eralia would grasp her shoulders and guide her back. And whenever she felt lonely and troubled and worried that the person her father would force her to marry wouldn’t love her, wouldn’t love her freedom, Eralia would whisper that she would always love her, and don’t you forget it.

When she was eighteen, her father told her that he had found someone, that there was no debate, that this was where she would be kept for the rest of her life. Kept. Like she was an animal that must be chained. And when they ate dinner together, the man never looked in her eyes, just down at her chest and her tanned arms and the way her hips swayed when she walked and she hated it. When she tried to ask if he liked entomology, carefully pronouncing the syllables, he looked at her as if she’d started speaking in tongues. What would he say if she actually started speaking in tongues? Her other brother looked at her, smirking. It whispered, “You’re mad, and I’m not.”

She snuck out, after they were married, to be with Eralia, who understood everything, and he thought she was being unfaithful. She screamed, after they were married, to try to convey the pain that only she could see, and he thought she was being bad tempered, nasty, brutish, a heathen. The last time she snuck out to see Eralia, she looked at her, thin with matted hair, shoulder tilted to one side from the time he tried to “restrain” her, nails grown long, and cried and held her the whole night long. (What really ‘sped up’ her madness? Her freedom, or her lack thereof?)

She was twenty-one when they left Jamaica so he could go back to England, twenty-one when she left the only people she’d ever loved, to be with the man who found her a curse. The room she was in was tight, claustrophobic, intent on swallowing her down its maw, a beast of chains and angry emptiness. The woman who watched her was an empty shell like the room, an automaton that was one arm of the beast, as he was another. So her life went, in endless sound and fury, for ten long, burning years.

She was thirty-one when she next saw a person besides the automaton. Through the grimy window that she forced open to breathe small gasps of fresh air while the automaton dozed on the chair, she saw an older woman and a young girl. The young girl twirled in the dim spring evening, stooping to look at the bugs below. All she could see was her younger self that still haunted her.

She laughed, now, when things happened that pained her, because what could one do when there was no escape but laugh? The laugh always bordered on screams and tears, but it was a laugh, and that was what mattered. She laughed when she heard the steps back and forth on the walk outside, because that was what she did in her little prison, and she had found a kindred spirit in the other trapped soul on the other side of the partition. She tried to escape, one night, setting a fire in his bed so he would die and the automaton couldn’t work anymore and she could be free, but as she walked back she heard the kindred spirit stirring, and laughed because she knew she would need to go back.

When she was thirty-two, her brother came to visit. She heard the familiar walk and cursed that smirk, envied that blood that didn’t carry the warmth and rush of madness. When the pitter-patter of the footsteps came near her, she ran to attack that reminder, bit it, and felt the blood run down her throat and wished that that blood was her blood, thought that if she sucked all of the blood out she would be free, but he came back, and she laughed as he dragged her off that blood and that freedom. She heard the kindred spirit whisper in worry and gurgled in the silence, attempting a warning.

When she heard the kindred spirit was going to marry him, she gurgled and groaned and slipped out at night while the automaton slept and came into the kindred’s spirit’s room and ripped the veil, glorying in what left her kindred spirit free. When the kindred spirit left, she didn’t laugh for weeks, so joyous was she in her success, but still he didn’t let her go. She was waiting, clinging to hope, but knew her time was running out, knew that her last bits of consciousness were slipping away, so once again she left in the middle of the night and let the spark and fury leave her and touch the curtains of the room where the kindred spirit had slept, let them flicker and dance so the kindred spirit couldn’t be trapped again, and then went up to the roof. She didn’t laugh, because she would soon be free.

And when he grabbed at her, when she was gloating on the roof in her victory and freedom, feeling the fire’s winds whipping around her like the winds when she was younger, full of hot air and damp, trying to drag her back to her pain, she screamed her rage at him, let it all leave her as she, too, let go.

Her name, reader, was Bertha.