The Ring of Roses

Mama's face is hot and flushed. Her once creamy complexion is now worryingly florid.

Our neighbours stay away and have taken to lighting bundles of twigs around our house to warn others. We all know that it means death is visiting. We are called "roses," my sister and I, and people cross themselves as we walk by. They ring the house, at night, with fire, hoping to cleanse the air of disease. It won't work. It never does.

Mama insists we keep posy petals in our pockets to protect us from what we cannot see. She is delirious oftentimes and can't seem to see that it is too late. Papa died last week and my sister and I dragged him out to be burned with the myriad of other dead.

We had been safe, but then Mama's face, once so clear and bright, became something else. The blisters gathered, like a vulture to carrion, around her beautiful lips and the "roses" bloomed upon her cheeks. My older sister, Mary, tends her while I chop wood for our meager fire.

The ashes. The ashes fall down, they are forever falling, and they leave nothing untouched. There is no respite to this wickedness, this plague. Only the ashes. The fires, the ashes, the stench. It never ends. All of the men in our village, those who have not died, pile the corpses in the ditches and light them. These, once human, torches blaze so brightly that day and night are indistinguishable. And the ashes fall like snow over the trees and the pastures.

Mama collapses and Mary tries to lift her. But they have both become too weak. The roses have bloomed on Mary's cheeks and it is only a matter of time before she succumbs to this terrible curse.

I place her rosary about her neck and begin to plead with the Virgin to spare what is left of my family. My cries fall on deaf ears, for, in the morning, I discover my mother dead.

There is a ring around the roses, a small ring of light to brighten the night as I bury my mother with a pocket full of posies. The ashes, the ever-present ashes, fall into my hair and my eyelashes as I struggle to lay my sister to rest.

It comes for us all, in time. From the strongest of men to the weakest of babes.

We all fall down.