La Flamme de Purificatrice
The Noise
The noise.
There was so much noise!
Her breath plumed before her, but never once did the iciness of the air seem to touch her. It was all the noise, beating in her ears with neither reason nor rhyme, catapulting clashing screaming voices within her skull.
She turned to her three children, watching her, wide-eyed in fear, shivering against the cold in their burlap-sac gowns. The twins were too young for words, but one of them, with a thumb to her lips and tears in her eyes questioned, “Maman?”
“Silence, ma chère. Maman vous aime.” Mommy loves you.
She gathered them, the thin walls of the shack beginning to tremble. Her bare feet slapping heavily against the packed dirt of the floor, pushed through the cloth flap of the door and into the night air.
The noise. The noise!
She recoiled, unable to control her reaction, dropping the twins she held in her arms, and yanking her hand from the eldest, falling to her knees and covering her ears against the shrieks. Her children, frozen in fear, watched her, unable to protect their own ears. The twins wailed against the cold earth, bruised from the fall, and the eldest wore a face turned blue against the December night air.
“Maman! Maman!” the eldest daughter cried, tearing her from herself. Everything was shaking.
“Silence--il va nous entendre!” It will hear us!
Picking herself up from the ground, she, again, collected her children, calculating where to go. A cry caught in her throat as she realized there was only one place to go.
She turned against the forest which loomed near the village, helped her eldest onto her back and scurried down the roads between the huts, labored by her offspring. The roads were empty and uncobbled, neglected by the French government. Only fires from neighboring collapsed huts lit the road engraved with wagon tracks. Her toes caught on stones, though too numb to feel the tear of the skin and the warmth of the blood trailing along the dirt.
The chanting was beginning again, and somewhere the screams were growing. She pushed on, ignoring the ache in her arms and back from the weight of her children. There was no safety anywhere, only one thing to do, only one place to go.
The roads of the village ran outward, and she continued toward the church, the only stone building in the village, whose spiny, rocky walls fenced around the feeble cemetery. The wall stood taller than the height of the church, and glass poked dangerously from the wall from between the wooden steaks, warding against the villagers.
The priest was dead. There was no one left to keep vigil of the church. His body had yet to be removed from the doorway. She didn’t know it was she who had held that rock which had smashed in his skull. She didn’t remember that it was his blood caked on her hands that lingered under her fingernails.
The chanting grew louder, the eldest squealed at the sight of the now cold body on the ground. As she splashed through the pool of blood, hardly lifting her feet, her children were sprayed with red drops. She tripped on the body, though regained balance before completely tumbling. She went on, her cries now a part of the noise twisting through her brain.
Out the back door of the church was where she fell to her knees. She could go no more, and the noise stopped. She knew that it would. This was the only thing, the only thing that could stop it. Her children would be safe.
The silence was interrupted by the cries of les enfents, the eldest tugging on her dress through tears. “Maman. Maman.” But her body had given out. There was no further that she could go, not just yet. In due time.
Warmth began to spread through her, and not the familiar numbness of the cold, but true warmth. It was le fue, the fire in the well upon which the villagers had been forbidden to gaze. She lifted her head from the ground, blades of frozen grass fastened to her cheek. There it was, a meter in height, fathoms of depth, and Hell’s eternal fire licking flames into mortal world. La flamme de purificatrice. The Cleansing Flame.
Ancient words rumbled through the ground, trembling through the rocks of the earth, through her limbs and began pounding in her ears. The chanting began again as she pulled herself from the ground. She saw from the distance of her stature the babies on the ground, in rough fabric too pitiful to be called clothing, the lips blue and eyes red and swollen with tears. Everything left her. All feeling, all emotion, all thought. There was only this.
Numbly, she took each of their hands, dragging them toward the well. They screamed and squirmed, yet they yielded no notice from their mother. The ancient voice with words incomprehensible quaked through her, directing her steps. Her breath became hot on her lips, singeing the skin from them. The heat of the flames pushed away the hair from her face, the stench of the burning strands filled her nostrils.
“Il brûle, Maman. Il brûle!” It burns! screeched the eldest.
She stopped. The stones of the well solid, unfaltering embers walling the flames, inches away. She did not feel the heat. She did not feel the scorch. She did not feel her nerves deadening as layers of skin tissue pealed from her flesh. She did not notice the twins had stopped squirming, or that the screams of the eldest were deafening as she begged for her mother to let go.
“Mes petites puces, je t'aime.” I love you, she whispered to her daughter before letting her go into the depths of the well.
Her screams stopped. She let each of the twins tumble into the flames. The only sound left was the roar of the flames, which laughed at their full belly before reaching out and claiming her too. She had a final thought of becoming immortal through the flames before dissolving into nothingness.