Siren Song of Madness

Siren Song of Madness

    Deep in the heart of Faubourg Marigny she weeps. Her tear drops cling to her pearl necklace and glisten there like stars in the heavens where April waits for her. April had gifted them to her on Susan’s last birthday they would ever celebrate together.
    Their church, where God loved his LGBT children, had been torched with the doors locked to keep the flock from escaping. Her sisters had perished like moths in a bonfire. The fire saved the undertaker the work of cremation.
    So called Christians had condemned them for loving the same sex. A New Orleans Anglican Church opened their doors to her kind as a place to worship. The priest caught hell from his bishop for it. His response, so she’d heard, was “what would Jesus do?”
    Susan traces the lines of paint brushed by April in her simple paint by number art piece. The blood in Susan’s fingertips catches fire upon touching the brush strokes in April’s self portrait. She shudders like a woman on the verge of a heart attack. But no doctor can treat her peculiar kind of hell. Some fatalities are left to God. She feels a sharp intake of breath as she swallows her fears in a gasp of cold hard reality. Her loneliness devours her like a malaria of the soul.  
    She lights a candle in front of the icon she always prayed at. But the man called Christ whose image looks at her no longer brings her comfort. She blows out the candle like it is on a birthday cake she will never eat.
    She opens Sylvia Plath’s “Bell Jar” book and dreads what she knows she’ll find in there. With each page she is a heartbeat away from insanity.  Finally she breaks away from the grip of this writer whose siren song is the lure of madness.
    She slips out of her gardening clothes and sets out to deal with the devil in sleep. But only the maddening hours meet her on the brink of lunacy. The rain outside falls like a slow depression.  But even the lethargy of sorrow cannot slow down her racing thoughts. She is like a horse jockey racing for the only match which counts.  
    And so she rises from the dead and paces to the kitchen. There she calls Alice her high school sweetheart. At first she speaks of life’s simple comforts, food, books, and gardening. But her heart tolls like a church bell. So she invites Alice to visit her the next day. Will Alice be her angel in time of need?  Or will solitude be her companion?
    But where is God in the maw of the beast? Why is April turned to ashes, in a loss so complete it boggles the mind? She feels the breakage of a faith which once guided her as a school girl. The ligaments which once held her to the Bible are torn. The book now reads like fiction she might have read in some dime store romance.
    If only she could walk that cold and lonely avenue to church again. But these matters seem trivial now. Right now she wraps herself in her cloak under the sky so dark and deep she melts into stars. Each point of light funnels into her eyes to form a constellation in her heart.
     And so Susan’s pulse races to a new beat. In this song the theme of love rises above the carnage of  ghouls. So she steps out into her garden to feel the wet dirt on her bare feet. Her toes dig into the moist loam as if to find peace where seeds sprout.