Marie peered through the muggy shrouding of her bay window, raising her arm to dab at the
rising condensation. The sleeve of her nightie was quickly covered by a light sheen of grime,
stolen in at the window’s edges and carrying the bustle of the street below. She let her arm
fall back into her lap, unperturbed by its dirtied cloth, and returned to watching the world
outside.
Wet imprints lay scattered down the pathways, remnants of the soggy beds once occupied by
fallen leaves before they were ripped away by feral gusts of wind. The air was filled with
smoke, billowing from the chimneys of factory towers, chugging in from trains heading for
London, and settling in workers’ lungs as residual tar. The birdsong that had first raised
Marie from her lamenting rest had been replaced by the talk of businessmen and well-to-do
women in blooming skirts, their arms full of fresh bread, warm laundry, or screaming bundles
of children. The sound of life permeated every fibre of the tiny room in which Marie was
perched, so eager was she to rise and make her escape. She watched the street through her
smudged portal, wishing that one day she might join their busy ranks in work.
Marie had never dreamed of such a life before. When they had first moved to the city, she had
been the talk of the town. She had just turned twenty and still retained a girlish charm with
her celestial eyes and endearing giggle. She had been considered a fair new match for any
well-to-do gentleman or his son. Just so long as he could please Marie, her parents had said.
But the wild winds of winter had arrived shortly after, and Marie was taken ill with a violent
case of influenza. Nothing that a private doctor and London’s best medicine couldn’t see her
through. But Marie had been a sheltered child and never experienced a sickness like it. Her
symptoms seemed to last for weeks, then months, and now it had become her way of life. She
was sure it was no longer active, but nevertheless each breath was a struggle, and she was
often confined to her bed.
Despite her coddled childhood, Marie had enjoyed an active lifestyle. Back in her birthplace
of Marseilles, she had often explored the surrounding patches of nature with her lady friends.
On their favourite route, they would bound through the maze of hedges at the far end of her
father’s green, swinging their clasped hands, before tumbling out of the undergrowth in a
mound of messy ribboned hair and colourful skirts. Maire had been devastated when her
father announced an exciting new job opportunity in London, which he just had to take. She
was distraught at the idea of leaving her life-long friends but, with the promise to write as
often as she could, she left France with an apprehensive excitement for what lay ahead.
Such positive sentiments were short-lived, however, and Marie soon found herself staring up
at the whitewash of her bedroom ceiling for hours on end. She had dreamt of attending
school, or continuing with a private governance, meeting some children in their parents’
common circles and building a new life in this unfamiliar land. But her parents had spent
most of their time in London focusing on her recovery. Her mother refused to leave her side,
doting on Marie in a fretful manner that had quite frightened her at first. She seemed to have
aged significantly in the few months they had spent on the soggy rock of England: her face
had become sunken and grey, and her hair was turning wiry with its bleached roots
permeating the strong black curls which had previously defined her appearance.
Her father had hardly faired better. His original employment plans – their whole reason for
being in London – had fallen through and he was relying on preexisting resources, along with
the generosity of his friends in France, to support them through that winter. He had made
cutbacks, especially where it concerned the staff: most had been relieved of their service
immediately, left to roam the streets in search of employment without so much as a helping
hand. Some had served their family since before Marie was born, and she couldn’t help but
feel guilty for her part in their dismissal. Despite this, her father had remained hopeful that he
would find a job in the coming weeks, and that Marie’s health would improve sufficiently
that they would be able to reemploy at least some of the old staff. Their life as they knew it,
and the survival of her friends, rested on her shoulders. She sunk into a listless existence.
It soon became clear that Marie’s condition was unlikely to improve, and so her father began
to make plans. He reached out to his contacts in London, in search of a man for her to wed.
Whether he was desperate to raise her spirits, concerned that she would soon become too
miserable to marry, or simply wished to wed her to a wealthy man before their own
circumstances deteriorated too dramatically remained unclear. Yet, he was determined to
make a bride out of poor Marie before the spring was over.
The men started to appear soon after. Just a trickle, most likely because they had hardly seen
the girl since her arrival, and they had forgotten whether her countenance or manners were to
their liking. Regardless, a trickle would be sufficient to secure a marriage and more than
enough for Marie to handle over the coming weeks. So, she was manhandled out of bed each
morning, dressed in her finest French clothes, propped upright with a mound of fortifying
cushion and forced to grip her teacup for hours at a time to please these foreign men with
their queer fashion and distasteful looks. None were quite as fine as the boys she had seen
back home, none so learned, nor pleasant to talk to, so lacking were they of the grace and
decorum she had expected of a gentleman.
Yet, she endured their visits, partook in pleasant conversation, and spoke of the weather and
her health with a positivity she was surprised she could muster under the circumstances. Of
course, she expressed an ardent desire to see each man again before falling back into bed with
an unparalleled exhaustion following each encounter. Most matches proved unsuccessful,
likely because she had failed to pay attention to their boring stories or to laugh at what they
had intended to be jokes. She suspected that most had come merely to meet the strange
French girl who had made a hermit of herself in their midst, rather than ever viewing her as a
viable match. But one man did return, rather vehemently in fact, and had talked to her with
such an interest and vigour that Marie felt herself compelled to return the sentiment.
Before long, the two had become inseparable. Mr Smith had even returned after learning of
Marie’s illness. He visited so frequently that it had become impossible to mask her failing
health, and on one such visit, she had thrown up over his newly pressed suit! But he had
hardly seemed to mind. He took to holding her hand in his and reassuring her of his
dedication to stay by her side. He would dismiss her mother from her role as chaperone and
ask her to fetch Marie a cold washcloth, littering her forehead with kisses in her absence. She
would giggle and he would make her promise not to tell. He was a proper gentleman, with a
large inheritance and good prospects. His family owned a lovely townhouse in one of the
more well-to-do parts of the city, and Marie promised to visit as soon as she was better. It was
these times with Mr. Smith, these stolen moments with a potential lover, that kept her going
through her illness. When she still had hope that her health might improve, when the
suggestion that she could no longer lead a normal life would have ruined her.
But this magical romance could not last forever. After several months of patiently waiting for
a proposal, Marie’s father grew weary of Mr Smith’s visits. He devised a plan to hurry things
along: he would only allow her lover to stay an hour before rushing him out the door on
account of Marie’s “other appointments”. Her only such appointment was with her bed but
apparently this plan would work by showing that Marie was “in demand”, and that he ought
to act quickly if he wished to keep her. Marie protested of course, thinking that this talk of
other “appointments” might scare him off, but her father did not heed her remarks and this
game of his continued.
The months crawled by, and the couple saw each other less and less frequently, until Mr
Smith eventually started missing their appointments altogether. Marie was devastated: she
lost weight, refused to wash, and laid in bed listening for the sound of his footsteps. A wild
girl grew between those walls. One evening, she decided to find Mr Smith herself and explain
her father’s game so he that might return to her. She rose from her bed with unusual vigour,
and feverishly threw her daytime clothes on. She rushed down the stairs and burst out onto
the street, howling for Mr Smith and demanding strangers to show her where he lived. But
no-one took any notice of the mad girl screaming in a foreign tongue, and she collapsed on
the side of the street in exhaustion. Her father found her in the morning, a sobbing heap, and
carried her back home. She locked herself away again, resentful of this dismal land, where
wetness reigned, and dark days came more frequently than light. It was hard to imagine that
she had held out so much hope for her life in England, or that she had imagined for one
moment that Mr Smith might offer her a salvation in these trying times. She had always
admired those gallant men in fairytales who saved damsels in distress and had rather hoped
that she might enjoy the same fate.
One night, as she was lamenting her loss of life and love, Marie heard her parents talking in
earnest, hushed tones downstairs. She raised herself from bed and padded over to the
doorway to listen. It was rare they were up so late, and even more bizarre that they were
talking to one another so softly – since Marie’s illness, it seemed all they were able to do was
shout and scream.
“We can’t tell her, dear. It’ll break her heart, and you know how fragile she is.” Her mother’s
voice.
“To hell with that!” her father struggled to keep his voice down. “She’d been fragile for
months now. I don’t know how much more of this we can take.”
“Telling her about Mr Smith is certainly not the right thing to do.”
Marie gasped. What about Mr Smith? She edged closer.
“Ok, so we don’t tell her. What different does it make? There’s nothing left for her, Isabelle,
and we can’t let her drag us down with her.”
Marie suddenly felt very faint.
*
“We’ll take good care of her here, mister.” The white-clad nurse had said, replacing her
father’s hands with her own on the back of the makeshift wheelchair. “We’ll find her a
window with a nice view and sort her out some proper equipment. She’ll be better in no
time.” She gave a bright smile. Everything was bright.
The walls of the corridor were almost luminous. They were painted a white that seemed to
elongate its passage for miles. Marie was hardly aware that she was moving down it before
they came to a door, and when she turned her head, her parents were nothing but the backs of
strangers. They had taken her to a hospice, hidden away at the edge of town. For several
months after she had overheard their hushed conversation, she had done her best to recover.
She had made little progress, but she had always assumed that a parent’s love for their child
would overcome any momentary desire to rid themselves of the effort of raising her.
It was autumn now, and the weather had turned quickly this year: temperatures had shot down
across the continent, washing leaves from their branches almost overnight and spreading a
light cover of frost across the footpaths. Marie’s parents had taken to a solemn silence over
the preceding weeks. Her father had still not found work, and every time she visited an
adjacent room, they seemed less full than before. Objects had started disappearing from her
room too: old childhood toys and keepsakes from her friends in France were nowhere to be
found, and to make matters worse, all correspondence had died out along with her health. She
regretted lying to them about England, now. She wished she had told them how ill she was,
how much she missed them, that her new life was awful. Her heart ached and she realised
now that she had been abandoned in this world. Her parents were still with her, then, but now
they were gone too: the love they once shared replaced by a distance that had frighted Marie.
The explanation for this distance, of course, came soon after: Marie was to be sent away for a
while to a place that would make her better. She was given a week to prepare. A box for her
belongings. A cold kiss on the forehead from her mother.
She had been at the hospice for little over a month now, and the silent rage that first
enveloped her when she saw exactly what her parents had meant by “a place that would make
her better” stayed with her still. She felt betrayed, and admittedly had made quite the scene
when she first arrived in her decaying room. She was locked inside now, wheeled out once a
day for some fresh air, before being returned to her isolation. Her parents had spoken of
professionals, medical suites, and a treatment plan. But there was none of that here. This was
one of those places where they sent mad women, lowlifes who had nowhere left to go, people
with problems that couldn’t be fixed. This was no place for a lady such as her.
The “hospice” was anything but hospitable, with its concrete walls and iron beds, moulding
mattresses and wet patches creeping in through the ceiling. Wails echoed through its halls: it
was like the hysteria of the place was seeping out of its very fabric. She was treated like a
specimen, a medical phenomenon which could win them awards and accolades within the
community of doctors who studied broken women.
At this realisation, Marie had broken down. Her body was wrecked by sorrow: her thin torso
snapped back and forth as she tore at her hair and screamed for home. To be taken back to a
place where she was healthy, had friends, and parents who loved her, and didn’t just exist for
the sake of it. She was restrained by some burly nurses and dragged down the corridor, her
ankles gaining a splattering of bruises almost immediately. They threw her into her room and
slammed the door shut, where she passed out from the pain.
When she awoke, Marie found that that she was still on the floor at the entrance to the room.
She struggled to lift herself, reaching around blindly in a desperate attempt to grasp onto
some table or ledge so she might hoist herself up. Her hands made desperate waves through
the air and found nothing. Looking up, she saw her room was emptier than before, containing
just a bed and side table. Her makeshift wheelchair was gone, and none of this “proper
equipment” had been supplied. Humiliated, and in pain, Marie tore at the ground in an
attempt to make her way toward the bed.
She thought back to when Mr Smith had left, the emotion she had felt and the emptiness she
had gained when she realised he would never return. The excitement then had provided her
with the comfort of heartbreak, so different to her familiar physical distress that it had almost
lifted her spirits. But now this pain, the constant fragility, her isolation, just made Marie
weary.
She finally flopped face-first onto the bed, sinking between the lumps of mouldy mattress
which greeted her. She lamented her loss of life: her prospects were ruined. Her parents
would not return for her the following spring like they had promised, of that she was sure,
and for the first time in her young life, Marie was filled with a sense of doom. The hospice
would not keep her forever: whatever funds had gained her this bed would soon run out, and
a lack of progress would surely mean they couldn’t justify her stay. She would be a lost
cause, thrown out on the streets or worse: taken to a place that didn’t even pretend to be a
hospice. A place where society sent their unwanted.
She pushed her arms into the sunken mattress and twisted her body into a half-seated
position, staring out the window. Perhaps she would get better. If she cooperated, and was let
outside again, she could meet with the hospice’s doctors and receive some treatment. She was
sure she didn’t belong here, and she told herself that playing along to the system would surely
make them release it too. She kept these hopes playing in her head like a mantra, something
to keep herself going in this place of madness and foreign voices. She watched the ladies
outside with their warm bread and babies, wondering if she might recover to live such an
existence one day.
rising condensation. The sleeve of her nightie was quickly covered by a light sheen of grime,
stolen in at the window’s edges and carrying the bustle of the street below. She let her arm
fall back into her lap, unperturbed by its dirtied cloth, and returned to watching the world
outside.
Wet imprints lay scattered down the pathways, remnants of the soggy beds once occupied by
fallen leaves before they were ripped away by feral gusts of wind. The air was filled with
smoke, billowing from the chimneys of factory towers, chugging in from trains heading for
London, and settling in workers’ lungs as residual tar. The birdsong that had first raised
Marie from her lamenting rest had been replaced by the talk of businessmen and well-to-do
women in blooming skirts, their arms full of fresh bread, warm laundry, or screaming bundles
of children. The sound of life permeated every fibre of the tiny room in which Marie was
perched, so eager was she to rise and make her escape. She watched the street through her
smudged portal, wishing that one day she might join their busy ranks in work.
Marie had never dreamed of such a life before. When they had first moved to the city, she had
been the talk of the town. She had just turned twenty and still retained a girlish charm with
her celestial eyes and endearing giggle. She had been considered a fair new match for any
well-to-do gentleman or his son. Just so long as he could please Marie, her parents had said.
But the wild winds of winter had arrived shortly after, and Marie was taken ill with a violent
case of influenza. Nothing that a private doctor and London’s best medicine couldn’t see her
through. But Marie had been a sheltered child and never experienced a sickness like it. Her
symptoms seemed to last for weeks, then months, and now it had become her way of life. She
was sure it was no longer active, but nevertheless each breath was a struggle, and she was
often confined to her bed.
Despite her coddled childhood, Marie had enjoyed an active lifestyle. Back in her birthplace
of Marseilles, she had often explored the surrounding patches of nature with her lady friends.
On their favourite route, they would bound through the maze of hedges at the far end of her
father’s green, swinging their clasped hands, before tumbling out of the undergrowth in a
mound of messy ribboned hair and colourful skirts. Maire had been devastated when her
father announced an exciting new job opportunity in London, which he just had to take. She
was distraught at the idea of leaving her life-long friends but, with the promise to write as
often as she could, she left France with an apprehensive excitement for what lay ahead.
Such positive sentiments were short-lived, however, and Marie soon found herself staring up
at the whitewash of her bedroom ceiling for hours on end. She had dreamt of attending
school, or continuing with a private governance, meeting some children in their parents’
common circles and building a new life in this unfamiliar land. But her parents had spent
most of their time in London focusing on her recovery. Her mother refused to leave her side,
doting on Marie in a fretful manner that had quite frightened her at first. She seemed to have
aged significantly in the few months they had spent on the soggy rock of England: her face
had become sunken and grey, and her hair was turning wiry with its bleached roots
permeating the strong black curls which had previously defined her appearance.
Her father had hardly faired better. His original employment plans – their whole reason for
being in London – had fallen through and he was relying on preexisting resources, along with
the generosity of his friends in France, to support them through that winter. He had made
cutbacks, especially where it concerned the staff: most had been relieved of their service
immediately, left to roam the streets in search of employment without so much as a helping
hand. Some had served their family since before Marie was born, and she couldn’t help but
feel guilty for her part in their dismissal. Despite this, her father had remained hopeful that he
would find a job in the coming weeks, and that Marie’s health would improve sufficiently
that they would be able to reemploy at least some of the old staff. Their life as they knew it,
and the survival of her friends, rested on her shoulders. She sunk into a listless existence.
It soon became clear that Marie’s condition was unlikely to improve, and so her father began
to make plans. He reached out to his contacts in London, in search of a man for her to wed.
Whether he was desperate to raise her spirits, concerned that she would soon become too
miserable to marry, or simply wished to wed her to a wealthy man before their own
circumstances deteriorated too dramatically remained unclear. Yet, he was determined to
make a bride out of poor Marie before the spring was over.
The men started to appear soon after. Just a trickle, most likely because they had hardly seen
the girl since her arrival, and they had forgotten whether her countenance or manners were to
their liking. Regardless, a trickle would be sufficient to secure a marriage and more than
enough for Marie to handle over the coming weeks. So, she was manhandled out of bed each
morning, dressed in her finest French clothes, propped upright with a mound of fortifying
cushion and forced to grip her teacup for hours at a time to please these foreign men with
their queer fashion and distasteful looks. None were quite as fine as the boys she had seen
back home, none so learned, nor pleasant to talk to, so lacking were they of the grace and
decorum she had expected of a gentleman.
Yet, she endured their visits, partook in pleasant conversation, and spoke of the weather and
her health with a positivity she was surprised she could muster under the circumstances. Of
course, she expressed an ardent desire to see each man again before falling back into bed with
an unparalleled exhaustion following each encounter. Most matches proved unsuccessful,
likely because she had failed to pay attention to their boring stories or to laugh at what they
had intended to be jokes. She suspected that most had come merely to meet the strange
French girl who had made a hermit of herself in their midst, rather than ever viewing her as a
viable match. But one man did return, rather vehemently in fact, and had talked to her with
such an interest and vigour that Marie felt herself compelled to return the sentiment.
Before long, the two had become inseparable. Mr Smith had even returned after learning of
Marie’s illness. He visited so frequently that it had become impossible to mask her failing
health, and on one such visit, she had thrown up over his newly pressed suit! But he had
hardly seemed to mind. He took to holding her hand in his and reassuring her of his
dedication to stay by her side. He would dismiss her mother from her role as chaperone and
ask her to fetch Marie a cold washcloth, littering her forehead with kisses in her absence. She
would giggle and he would make her promise not to tell. He was a proper gentleman, with a
large inheritance and good prospects. His family owned a lovely townhouse in one of the
more well-to-do parts of the city, and Marie promised to visit as soon as she was better. It was
these times with Mr. Smith, these stolen moments with a potential lover, that kept her going
through her illness. When she still had hope that her health might improve, when the
suggestion that she could no longer lead a normal life would have ruined her.
But this magical romance could not last forever. After several months of patiently waiting for
a proposal, Marie’s father grew weary of Mr Smith’s visits. He devised a plan to hurry things
along: he would only allow her lover to stay an hour before rushing him out the door on
account of Marie’s “other appointments”. Her only such appointment was with her bed but
apparently this plan would work by showing that Marie was “in demand”, and that he ought
to act quickly if he wished to keep her. Marie protested of course, thinking that this talk of
other “appointments” might scare him off, but her father did not heed her remarks and this
game of his continued.
The months crawled by, and the couple saw each other less and less frequently, until Mr
Smith eventually started missing their appointments altogether. Marie was devastated: she
lost weight, refused to wash, and laid in bed listening for the sound of his footsteps. A wild
girl grew between those walls. One evening, she decided to find Mr Smith herself and explain
her father’s game so he that might return to her. She rose from her bed with unusual vigour,
and feverishly threw her daytime clothes on. She rushed down the stairs and burst out onto
the street, howling for Mr Smith and demanding strangers to show her where he lived. But
no-one took any notice of the mad girl screaming in a foreign tongue, and she collapsed on
the side of the street in exhaustion. Her father found her in the morning, a sobbing heap, and
carried her back home. She locked herself away again, resentful of this dismal land, where
wetness reigned, and dark days came more frequently than light. It was hard to imagine that
she had held out so much hope for her life in England, or that she had imagined for one
moment that Mr Smith might offer her a salvation in these trying times. She had always
admired those gallant men in fairytales who saved damsels in distress and had rather hoped
that she might enjoy the same fate.
One night, as she was lamenting her loss of life and love, Marie heard her parents talking in
earnest, hushed tones downstairs. She raised herself from bed and padded over to the
doorway to listen. It was rare they were up so late, and even more bizarre that they were
talking to one another so softly – since Marie’s illness, it seemed all they were able to do was
shout and scream.
“We can’t tell her, dear. It’ll break her heart, and you know how fragile she is.” Her mother’s
voice.
“To hell with that!” her father struggled to keep his voice down. “She’d been fragile for
months now. I don’t know how much more of this we can take.”
“Telling her about Mr Smith is certainly not the right thing to do.”
Marie gasped. What about Mr Smith? She edged closer.
“Ok, so we don’t tell her. What different does it make? There’s nothing left for her, Isabelle,
and we can’t let her drag us down with her.”
Marie suddenly felt very faint.
*
“We’ll take good care of her here, mister.” The white-clad nurse had said, replacing her
father’s hands with her own on the back of the makeshift wheelchair. “We’ll find her a
window with a nice view and sort her out some proper equipment. She’ll be better in no
time.” She gave a bright smile. Everything was bright.
The walls of the corridor were almost luminous. They were painted a white that seemed to
elongate its passage for miles. Marie was hardly aware that she was moving down it before
they came to a door, and when she turned her head, her parents were nothing but the backs of
strangers. They had taken her to a hospice, hidden away at the edge of town. For several
months after she had overheard their hushed conversation, she had done her best to recover.
She had made little progress, but she had always assumed that a parent’s love for their child
would overcome any momentary desire to rid themselves of the effort of raising her.
It was autumn now, and the weather had turned quickly this year: temperatures had shot down
across the continent, washing leaves from their branches almost overnight and spreading a
light cover of frost across the footpaths. Marie’s parents had taken to a solemn silence over
the preceding weeks. Her father had still not found work, and every time she visited an
adjacent room, they seemed less full than before. Objects had started disappearing from her
room too: old childhood toys and keepsakes from her friends in France were nowhere to be
found, and to make matters worse, all correspondence had died out along with her health. She
regretted lying to them about England, now. She wished she had told them how ill she was,
how much she missed them, that her new life was awful. Her heart ached and she realised
now that she had been abandoned in this world. Her parents were still with her, then, but now
they were gone too: the love they once shared replaced by a distance that had frighted Marie.
The explanation for this distance, of course, came soon after: Marie was to be sent away for a
while to a place that would make her better. She was given a week to prepare. A box for her
belongings. A cold kiss on the forehead from her mother.
She had been at the hospice for little over a month now, and the silent rage that first
enveloped her when she saw exactly what her parents had meant by “a place that would make
her better” stayed with her still. She felt betrayed, and admittedly had made quite the scene
when she first arrived in her decaying room. She was locked inside now, wheeled out once a
day for some fresh air, before being returned to her isolation. Her parents had spoken of
professionals, medical suites, and a treatment plan. But there was none of that here. This was
one of those places where they sent mad women, lowlifes who had nowhere left to go, people
with problems that couldn’t be fixed. This was no place for a lady such as her.
The “hospice” was anything but hospitable, with its concrete walls and iron beds, moulding
mattresses and wet patches creeping in through the ceiling. Wails echoed through its halls: it
was like the hysteria of the place was seeping out of its very fabric. She was treated like a
specimen, a medical phenomenon which could win them awards and accolades within the
community of doctors who studied broken women.
At this realisation, Marie had broken down. Her body was wrecked by sorrow: her thin torso
snapped back and forth as she tore at her hair and screamed for home. To be taken back to a
place where she was healthy, had friends, and parents who loved her, and didn’t just exist for
the sake of it. She was restrained by some burly nurses and dragged down the corridor, her
ankles gaining a splattering of bruises almost immediately. They threw her into her room and
slammed the door shut, where she passed out from the pain.
When she awoke, Marie found that that she was still on the floor at the entrance to the room.
She struggled to lift herself, reaching around blindly in a desperate attempt to grasp onto
some table or ledge so she might hoist herself up. Her hands made desperate waves through
the air and found nothing. Looking up, she saw her room was emptier than before, containing
just a bed and side table. Her makeshift wheelchair was gone, and none of this “proper
equipment” had been supplied. Humiliated, and in pain, Marie tore at the ground in an
attempt to make her way toward the bed.
She thought back to when Mr Smith had left, the emotion she had felt and the emptiness she
had gained when she realised he would never return. The excitement then had provided her
with the comfort of heartbreak, so different to her familiar physical distress that it had almost
lifted her spirits. But now this pain, the constant fragility, her isolation, just made Marie
weary.
She finally flopped face-first onto the bed, sinking between the lumps of mouldy mattress
which greeted her. She lamented her loss of life: her prospects were ruined. Her parents
would not return for her the following spring like they had promised, of that she was sure,
and for the first time in her young life, Marie was filled with a sense of doom. The hospice
would not keep her forever: whatever funds had gained her this bed would soon run out, and
a lack of progress would surely mean they couldn’t justify her stay. She would be a lost
cause, thrown out on the streets or worse: taken to a place that didn’t even pretend to be a
hospice. A place where society sent their unwanted.
She pushed her arms into the sunken mattress and twisted her body into a half-seated
position, staring out the window. Perhaps she would get better. If she cooperated, and was let
outside again, she could meet with the hospice’s doctors and receive some treatment. She was
sure she didn’t belong here, and she told herself that playing along to the system would surely
make them release it too. She kept these hopes playing in her head like a mantra, something
to keep herself going in this place of madness and foreign voices. She watched the ladies
outside with their warm bread and babies, wondering if she might recover to live such an
existence one day.
Lucy Rumble is a writer from Essex. Her work has been published in Crow & Cross Keys, Rust and Moth, and Needle Poetry, among others. Find her on Instagram @lucyrumble.writes, X @rumblewrites or read her blog at https://rumblewrites.substack.com/
