Prilla
Legacy Name: Prilla

Morning breaks, but it's hard to tell. The sky is all white like bleach stains on my cornflower blue skirt. I don't mind though. The bleach spots remind me of flowers; blotches of off-white, soaking into the coarse fabric like a bloodstain.
I know it is morning when the church bells start to sound, the gong-like mantra of clanging and bellows. I count. 1...2...3... 7. It's 7 in the morning, and the sky is all white.
I stretch to my feet and stuff my feet into my decaying brown boots. The leather is cracked and the fabric cuffs are muddy, but they really are nice shoes.
Today is supposed to be a sad day for me, but I don't feel that sad. I feel a sense of relief and a twinge of loneliness, but it's not too sad. It's melancholic in a music box sort of way.



It's supposed to be spring, but it's still very cold. The ground has yet to thaw, but the freezing rain of the night that tormented my dreams soaked into the hard dirt and created small mud puddles peeking through the browning, sick grass. The grass was the same colour as my nails; nicotine stained and chipped pink paint.
I'm holding a bouquet of flowers. The flowers are yellow. I picked them out myself.
"Those?" My mother asked at the shop.
"What's wrong with them?"
"Nothing."
"I like them."
"They are nice."
I like yellow because it's happy. People aren't supposed to be happy where we are going, but why not? What is so wrong with peace?
My father was a good man. He fought in two wars, one in Germany with a gun, and one at home with a bottle. He was not an angry man. His face would flush sometimes and he may have gotten a bit sulky, but he always made it up to me. I really love dolls. I love the porcelain texture of their skin. I love the frozen look on their face. Forever frozen in contentment. My father knew which dolls I loved the most. He had quite the eye for beauty.
I'm sure Mother was once beautiful. Her hair was faint now and her skin was sunken, but the glassy green of her eyes, I imagined, was quite doll-like when she was a girl. They met in France. It was love at first sight.




The road was winding uphill, flanked on either side with broken, black trees that stretched their limbs up to the sky as if begging the sun to come out. Well, don't be ridiculous. The sun hasn't been out since Father last smiled. He had a gap in his front teeth. Charming, really.
Mother's car hunkered and groaned as we climbed the hill and I could not help but gaze out the window at the sky and the trees, and it was all so very bleak, but the yellow flowers on my lap still smiled. That's how I believe life should be lived. That's how my father lived.
His gravestone is large and looming and I touch the cross with my fingertips. It is chilling and grainy. It seemed strange to me that such a warm man is remembered by something so very cold. That's just sometimes how it is.
"Well now," Mother says.
I drop the flowers at the overgrown grass at the base.
"Happy birthday, Father."

Poem Translation

Tomorrow, at dawn, at the hour when the countryside whitens,
I will depart. You see, I know you wait for me.
I will go through the forest and over the mountains.
I cannot stay far from you any longer.
I will trudge on, my eyes fixed on my thoughts,
Ignoring everything around me, without hearing a sound,
Alone, unknown, back stooped, hands crossed,
Saddened, and the day will be like night for me.
I will neither see the golden glow of the falling evening,
Nor the sails going down to Harfleur in the distance,
And when I arrive, I will place on your tomb
A bouquet of green holly and flowering heather.
Demain, dès l'aube, Victor Hugo