The Sorceress Queen and Her Messy Dragon
The storm tired itself out until only a few fitful gusts of wind and broken rain clouds were left of it. At the edge of the forest Chandra’s mother pulled herself up onto a low-growing tree branch. Fresh mud flowed down her ankles and dripped off the tips of her toes. But the rain had rinsed away every trace of dirt from her long shirt and her make-shift crown. The forest had been washed clean and the air scrubbed so pure that it tasted like the first breath ever taken in an unspoiled world. Sunlight overflowed the rainclouds and streamed down to the earth. Fewer trees at the border of the forest kept less of the daylight from falling straight to the ground. Chandra’s mother felt the mud around her feet hardening like plaster casts as she sat and watched over the passing of the storm. Winds from the tail-end of the storm pushed up against the trees to shake all the leftover rain from the leaves. Drops sprinkled across her lap and tapped at her head. Her tree-branch perch rocked back and forth beneath her with a steady sway.
A cliff had broken in the storm and let a pile of rocks and mud slide down to the bottom. In the fallen pile a natural cave had formed, held open with tree roots and boulders. Sitting up on her tree limb Chandra’s mother watched the opening of the little cave and the shadowy form that lay sprawled out there. Chandra lay halfway in the daylight and halfway in the darker shade of the cave with her shoulders propped up against a broken log. As she slept the child took deep easy breaths even though her body shivered under the cold weight of her soaked hair and clothes.
Having chased the girl all through the woods Chandra’s mother waited now on the outskirts of the trees watching over her daughter from a short distance. She continued to watch until the wind ran out and her tree branch became still beneath her. Sliding down from her perch she dropped onto the sloppy soft mud of the forest floor. She began to walk towards the shallow cave that cradled her daughter, the miry ground sucking at her toes with every step she made.
At an arm’s length from her daughter Chandra’s mother stopped and looked on as the child shuddered and whimpered in fitful sleep. The child had wrapped herself up as tight as she could in her wet clothes with her arms and legs pressed against her chest. Her fingers still gripped her own arms tight even as she dreamed. Beruka the rag-doll sat balanced on the top of the child’s knees but Chandra’s leg twitched and the doll rolled down to the ground. Beruka landed upside down, balanced halfway on her head, with her limbs sprawled out around her like withered flower pedals too wrinkled up and weak to even hold up the weight of the daylight.
Chandra’s mother picked up the doll heavy with rainwater. With even the mother’s gentle touch water squeezed from the doll’s saturated body. The water trickled off the ends of her sewn-up arms and legs and off the tips of each strand of twirled-up yarn hair. With her other arm Chandra’s mother reached out to touch her own daughter. Her finger rested on Chandra’s knee only for a moment before her daughter let out a little shriek and scrabbled away from that touch, the child still lingering halfway between a dream and the waking image of her mother bent over her. Chandra’s mother’s lips fell at the ends and water began to gush from Beruka’s body as the woman’s fingers squeezed the cottony flesh of the doll. Turning her back on her daughter Chandra’s mother returned to the woods.
Out among the trees and the mud Chandra’s mother gathered up all the clothes she had already used for all her conjuring tricks. Even the scraps and strips left after the battle with the bush bandits were all pulled up from the mud. Returning to the tree that looked over Chandra’s little cave Chandra’s mother began to spread the clothing out over the tree, stretching shirts and pants over all the braches until the tree was tented over from the top to the bottom. She decorated the ends of some branches with shoes and let long socks dangle down from other branches. The rainwater weighed down the clothes and held it all in place so that the Sorceress Queen had for herself a sturdy and fearsome creature as tall as a house and watching with hungry eyes as the girl fussed and slept in her shallow cave.
Picking up Beruka again and stashing the doll away in the pocket of her long shirt Chandra’s mother began to climb up the cloth creature she had made. Up she went through the leaves and the sleeves until she was at the highest branch sitting on the cloth dragon’s head. Then she began to shout and rock back and forth on the branch that held her up.
“Get up Chandra! Wake up and see what I have made!” She called to the child still sleeping in the cave at the dragon’s feet. “Chandra! Get up! Or I will eat you before you even know it!”
“What are you doing, up a tree and screaming like a child?” Said a voice from the shirt pocket of the Sorceress Queen. She patted the pocket but it was empty. She glanced down into it and saw no trace of the ragdoll.
“I’m doing what Chandra always does. I’m making a mess. I’m doing what I want.” The Sorceress Queen said to the woman form of Beruka sitting on a nearby branch. Beruka swung her legs back and forth lazily studying the toes of her shoes as they disappeared and reappeared beneath her. “You should go away or … or I’ll turn you back into a ragdoll.”
“A ragdoll?” Beruka’s legs went still and she tilted her head back until her yarn hair fell to the side revealing her two-color eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“A ragdoll! A ragdoll! You’re just a doll! You know what I mean! Now leave me alone before I do something terrible!” A rumble of sound shook the tree hard enough that the droplets of rainwater on the edges of the leaves trembled. It could have been returning thunder, or perhaps it was a growl that came up from the tree itself. The wind returned and caught itself up in the tree, shaking the branches and filling up the shirt sleeves so they billowed and flapped. The arms of the tree stretched and groaned and the shirt sleeves became fingers that opened and closed. Each shoe hung from the branches bounced up and down in rows forming rotten brown teeth in a chomping mouth wide enough to swallow up half of Chandra’s cave in a single crushing bite.
“Eurina?” Beruka said shrugging her shoulders and smiling a sad and familiar smile. “I wonder which is more of a fantasy? This game we are playing, or the fear that you live out every day?”
“What do you mean?” Chandra’s mother called back over the wind and the trembles of distant thunder. “How do you know my name?”
“He is gone. That is the only real thing there is in your life and her life.” Beruka looked down and Eurina followed her gaze. At the feet of the tree-dragon Chandra was awake and standing. Her head was bent over so that her hair shadowed over her face. She did not move to clear the hair away but kept her arms tight against her sides with her hands rolled up into two fists. A thicker rain cloud closed off the sunlight again. Rain began to fall onto the tree-dragon and the girl at its feet with heavy drops that seemed to burst when they struck. The Sorceress Queen looked back to the branch where Beruka had perched herself but Beruka had vanished without a trace of doll or woman. Eurina clung to her creation as the tree dragon shifted and bent itself to test its joints and limbs. Rainwater worked its way between Eurina’s fingers and her toes so that she had to claw against the tree bark to find purchase. But her body slid down the branches inch by inch even as she struggled to hang on, and she began to scream with her own fear.