Mary

Flash Fiction

Mary

I imagine myself stuck in time, my husband's heart in a glass jar on my desk as I wrote or promoted his works. It now lays beside me in my tomb, but the closest that beats comes from a man who has no home, so prettily asleep beside me, his dark, Italian-like eyelashes fluttering. His warmth echoes in waves through stone and calms me. For it has been many years since I felt such intimacy. I wonder if he feels the closeness or when he last had lain with a woman. Whether he deliberately chose the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley or just fell and slept without thought.

I've been awake in this graveyard for one hundred and seventy-one years, knowing my son and his descendants lived in this town. But it was not the place in which I was born, nor my parents. The house my precious boy purchased for me is now a doctor's surgery, I have heard in passing conversations. You see, people converse, not knowing who I am or mother or father either. Some chatter and touch the stone above me, tracing their fingers over the engravings of my name. Feel them. I have heard people stand over her grave, my mother's, calling her the first feminist writer, then me the first of the Gothic writers, discussing my husband's death and my creation.

They wish it were possible to escape the monster, for he haunts them as he tormented those of his time as if I have made room for him within my coffin beside me, and he might burst out at any moment. I chuckle at that, for if they knew the truth of inventive writing, they might perhaps write new and untried versions.

I listen to them as they discuss poor Percy’s death as if I had not lived the loss, the sorrow, watched his dead heart being rescued by Byron and handed to me from the pyre. Reading his poetry to me as if I had never heard it myself.

It is soothing to hear, but they speak like I no longer remember every word.

I hear the heavy tread of footsteps as they pass.

The sounds of the town have changed significantly with time. Often the church is the only interference to my tranquillity. People sing in their drunkenness, and it does not change, leaving the taverns and houses of Ill repute, passing us, mother, father and me.

I wonder if mother thinks as I do or if her rest with father comes in repose. If I could speak to her, it might make this continuous fate less quietus.

Mother was glorious, they say. Her writings provide a guiding light to the women of this age. They pronounce while standing above her grave, reminding me that my father is also at rest here, that it was my choice that they were interred with me.

When will my rest come?