A Mother's Love

A Mother’s Love

  Copyright 2015 Abigail Williams

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 1

  To be a mother is not an easy task. One must be wary of how they act, what they say, and how they treat their child. Every motion and word that a mother speaks and does count tremendously in the eyes of her child.

  But how could I have known? How could it have even been possible that such simple little words could mean so much? How is it that the words of one child to another could form the child in such a way as this? What is a mother to do when her child has all but vanished? Devoured by a demon birthed from the words she herself spoke in her naïveté.

  Yes, we must be careful, we must be wary. As mothers, we must love, we must have patience, and above all else, we must have faith.

  *****

  Their faces were of stone, and their eyes filled with pity, but still I bore my smile.

  “Do you ever regret giving birth to that thing?” the soldier asked coldly, gripping the spear firmly in his hand.

  Staring down at the courtyard, I spied the thin line on his face, the tight line of resignation that had beaten down his once brimming smile. For what use is a smile in the world he has created? Poor child, he has truly forgotten how to smile. That beautiful smile he had once worn as a babe had died so pitifully long ago; and even I, the boy’s own mother, have begun to forget just what it once looked like.

  Not turning from the window, I answered the soldier, “Even if you had come to me when he was just a babe, even if you had told me all the awful things he would do, and somehow shown me what he would become, I would reflect upon the images and things you had told me, but I would hold him no less tightly to my breast, and I would defend him just as strongly. I would then say to you ‘his eyes were not always so black.’”

  With a shaking grasp on his weapon, the infuriated man’s voice echoed through the tall chambers. Cursing and flailing as the others dragged him out, I heard his words, just before he was to be forever silenced, “You foolish woman! That monster will kill you one day as well! Why protect that thing? Why defend that monster?!”

  With that, the heavy doors slammed shut. Though they took him out so as not to have me see it, I still heard his cry. I always heard their cries.

  There are no enemies, no rebels, no traitors, no prisoners, no missionaries, no hope whatsoever in his world, and so there is none in this world which he rules.

  “Oh, my son,” I whispered, grasping the cross that lay hidden beneath my clothing, “Oh, my son!”

  *****

  I remember when he was a child, so young, so innocent; yet even then I saw that there was something within him, something fragile that would one day inevitably break. I once tried to hide this from myself. A useless effort. For that fragile thing, when broken, would rebuild itself and then break and rebuild itself and then break again, until that gentle fragile piece of him would turn into a stone as hard as diamonds, and as rough as the pain that beat at his withered heart.

  Looking back at it all, I nodded to myself, “Yes, I think it started then, at his father’s death.”

  Though he widowed me, and I was a young widow, his father was a strong man. He was neither rich nor poor. And although many could not see it through the bangs which he had worn so long, he was a handsome fellow. I met him at his father’s store. He was a cobbler, a mighty fine one at that. I was only a girl then, and he but an apprentice boy. So young and in love we were, and when we wed and Merek was born soon after, it was the light of my youthful marriage! Oh, but how short that light did last. Although a strong man, Jobel, my beloved husband, died so very, very young, leaving me a mere child of a wife to raise our four year old little darling of a boy.

  I remember that day distinctly, the day we buried Jobel. All the other mourners had gone. It was only Merek and I left standing at his grave. Merek’s tiny little hand squeezed mine, his tears having all but run dry. He looked to me with those big, dark brown eyes of his father, and he asked me a question that all children eventually ask, though no one parent can truly know the answer. Nonetheless, I tried my best to answer with what little wisdom a nineteen year old mother could give.

  “Why do people die?” he asked.

  “Well,” I said gently, bowing my head to his, “People die, my son, for one or both of two reasons. The first is that God has seen that they were ready to go. And the second-”

  He interrupted me, pulling at my fingers, he scrunched his little brow, “Does God care whether or not we are ready to let them go? Doesn’t he know we needed Daddy? Well, Momma? Doesn’t he?”

  Gently moving my hand across his face, I smiled wearily. “We are not God, Merek. We cannot know or say whether or not someone is ready to go. Only He can. We are not meant to know the reason why those closest to us die; we can only hope that the reason will help us grow closer to God.”

  I still wonder if those were the right words to say, if that sternly bent brow of his then was the beginning of the constant one he wears now. I wonder if all of this was my fault, if he lost sight of everything because of me.

  I know now that if those words had indeed changed him, than the ones I was to speak later would most certainly transform him.

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