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June 1920.
When Nancy was a little girl, she liked to read her father's books. They were thick, hefty things, heavy in weight and words and sometimes even glancing at the first page stressed her out. He didn't like what she did: Jane Austen's love letters to romance itself, or Charlotte Bronte's bold, independent protagonists. He liked wordy topsy-turvy tales of worlds outside of Villette and Mansfield Park. Oscar Wilde was one of the names she had flicked through, The Canterville Ghost. When rereading the same stack of her father's books the other night, she came across something printed on the page.
"Yes, death. Death must be so beautiful."
Reading those words made Nancy want to give Oscar Wilde a hefty, wordy punch across the fucking face.
Death could never be beautiful, not to her, not at all. Guttural coughs, trails of tissues and handkerchiefs, retching and gravelly sobs. Ashen, clammy skin. Cold to the touch. Still and silent. Mouth agape, reaching to God for a gasp of air, fucking something to keep her alive one day more. Ruth Cochran left the world by force rather than forfeit, after all.
They had both slept through the night that night, or at least Nancy thought her mother finally found rest after coughing her lungs inside out all day. She crept into the room with a mug of hot tea, which only furthered her fears when she reached to grab her mother's hand and it was brumal, chilling.
The look on her face, begging and bargaining even in her demise, proved to young Nancy that death was horrid, gruesome and foul. An evil, criminal thing that snatched her own mother from her in the night and left the carrier of her soul to congeal in her bed.
Oscar Wilde knew fucking nothing about that night. What would he know?
That night was six months ago, on a smoggy New Year's eve. Now it was a particularly wet summer midmorning and Nancy was sitting between two stones. One was a carved, polished gravestone with seasonal flowers (some winter snowdrops wilting in the back), and the other was a chipped, faded stone that had stood the test of time and English weather.
Ruth Anne Cochran (1885-1920) Mother, Daughter, Saint of Small Heath
Christopher John Cochran (1885-1916) Father & Husband, Son & Soldier
The fit between the two headstones was a tight squeeze, but Nancy found a way. This was how it had been since they laid her mother to rest by her father (in a metaphorical sense, of course, her father had been buried years ago in god-knows-where). Nancy would take her normal route from school, and instead of heading for Watery Lane, for her empty house, she would continue to the edge of town where her father's stables were. She'd sit between her parents and tell them everything - or nothing, if her day was particularly bad.
