Brigdhe

She sat by the filthy edge of the White Cart Water amongst the ragged remnants of a thousand shopping bags and broken Buckfast bottles. She did not mind the squalor and sat silently dipping her icy fingers into the stream where they dangled like frozen reeds. She could sense warmth in the water. She could also sense the thoughts and voices of all the human lives snuffed out by her long dark winter shadow as they rippled beneath her fingers towards the ocean, like salmon.

Time was almost over again, it was coming and she had to be going. Cailleach decided she would be thankful for the rest. Still there was time left, a handful of moments. She wiggled her fingers in the water and sang. If all art could be said to aspire to the condition of music, all then music aspired to the condition of that song. A symphony of water, of the eternal ocean.

Her voice began as a sonata of rain, a busy allegro of sounds and words that filled the river, enchanting it with her spellbinding voice. Her song changed to a deep rolling thunder, became a melancholic choir of waterfalls and finally, finally ended in one long note, one existential coda of bliss.

Somewhere Cailleach became the words of her song. Her frozen skin finally thawed, ran, dissolved. In a billion droplets of rain she fell into the river and was gone. Her passing was witnessed once again by the young girl with hair of straw and stars in her eyes. She stood on the bank, the cool grass damp under her feet and watched for a moment before walking way from the river. White clovers sprung from the footprints she left behind.

Time had begun once more and Brigdhe felt the exciting tingle of the innocent facing a new world for the first time, once more.

She hummed to herself as she walked through the park, a song of morning bird call and spring rain which soaked the young joggers who ignored her passing. She was looking for someone, someone particular, though she could not say whom that person would be. Always young, a boy or a girl, preferably an only child.

Soon fresh little faces in school uniforms began walking through the park on their way to morning lessons. In ones and twos they came, then in groups. Over-excitable boys acted out action scenes from last night's movie for their mates, while gaggles of girls gossiped and sniped and thought themselves sophisticated. Others kicked balls or played with their tiny computer screens. Like the flowers and the lambs and the calves the children smelled of spring; fresh, hungry for experience, a bouquet of delicious ignorance and hope.

Eventually she found the girl she was looking for. A plump little be-speckled girl who straggled on behind like the runt of a litter. The Girl with the stars in her eyes cast a plain glamour on herself. Getting the costume just right before she approached.

Brigdhe convinced the child, whose name was Kerry, that she'd found a nest of ducklings, down by the river. It was that easy and almost as easy to drown the child, devour her entirely and take her form. All the knowledge of who Kerry was and all her experiences were digested by the Girl with the stars in her eyes until no one would ever know the difference. After that, Brigdhe went to school.

Though her classmates and teachers could not know that Kerry was no longer, they knew there was something different about her, a confidence in the way she walked, her head held up rather than looking at her toes. She spent the day altering people's perceptions of Kerry but it was mere diversion. The real work would start when she got home.

The Girl with the Stars in her eyes sat listening to the world grow around her and paying little attention to the nonsensical babble of the children or teachers. She could smell daffodils from a mile north of where she sat and used them to hear the crawling buzzing riot of insects and beetles, thawing out for the summer, filled with hungers. A scrawny mole scampered by and she slid in through its eyes for a moment. Just long enough to run it out of the grass and onto the heavy black tarmac where it was immediately crushed by a passing car.

All the eyes of the class were upon Kerry as she burst into a fit of laughter. She apologised and Brigdhe took a bit more caution with her behaviours. Every year was new, every year she had to learn her role.

The long day ended with a sharp bell sound and Brigdhe was finally free to meet her new parents. She skipped up the road, her spirits high as she led herself to the place she would call home, at least for a little while.

The oft lauded mother's intuition failed completely when Brigdhe walked through the door to be welcomed by Kerry's mother Maggie. “Hello dear.”

“I'm goin' upstairs tae do ma homework, mum.” Brigdhe said, looking at the young woman, thin, nervous and with cheap dyed blond hair.

Her mother smiled. “That's a good girl.”

Brigdhe walked up the stairs of the little semi-detached house and went into Kerry's room. The odour of the child was everywhere and her memories flashed into Brigdhe's mind like fireworks. She pulled the curtains wide open and unlatched the window, swinging the entirety of it inwards so she may fully perceive the outside world as she sat apart from it. This room would do, she decided, as the afternoon sun blazed in through the opening. She could hear birds and cars, smell chip-shops and carbon monoxide, taste the intangible energy of fecundity that throbbed throughout this part of the thawing world. The room would be a fine nest.

For a while she sat on the child's bed and opened her existence to this new territory. She wove Kerry's memories with her own inner impressions of the environment in which the child had thrived, better to understand how the girl had been cultivated. For it was within that knowing, in that understanding of Kerry's place in the grand scheme of things, that Brigdhe could manipulate causality, to channel it like water, in a direction of her choosing. It would be a small thing, a seed of an alternative narrative which would bloom into being and change the course of history. After all she had already convinced many people that Kerry still existed with a mere glamour, they were now living in her fantasy.

As she thought of what action to achieve she found herself coming over and over to the same rather mundane decision and regretted her rash choice in devouring such a plain, uninspiring child.

The available narratives she could eke out this domestic scenario were limited so she chose the most dramatic, Murder. It was slim pickings and she was not happy about it. Still as her worshippers had been fond of saying “Blood maketh the grass green.”

She decided, if she took her time, if she somehow brought it to a slow catastrophic boil, she might savour the experience.

This was made much easier by Kerry's father, Derek. A long drip of a man, who looked twenty years older than his actual age, Derek was little more than a ball of rage so suppressed that it teetered on the edge of collapsing in upon itself and turning into a black hole that tore everything near it's gravitational pull apart. It was just what she needed. Derek was like a book to her, his stresses were written into his flesh like a guide on how to break a man apart.

As they sat eating dinner and watching The News, Brigdhe trawled the child's memories for something to weaponise. She wasn't looking for a nuclear bomb, just a needle, something to jab and wound with. She found something perfect, a harmless but mean spirited joke between her mother and aunt.

Brigdhe started crying. Both parents turned to her. Her mother asking “whit's the matter?”

“Ah don't want daddy ta die.” She exclaimed.

Derek looked horrified. “I'm no gonny die, whit makes ye say somethin' silly like that?”

“Mammy wis talkin' tae auntie Jean an' said that ye'd cut yourself shavin' and she wished ye'd cut your throat.” She gasped through sobs.

Derek looked at Maggie, his face a picture of surprise and hurt feelings. “Whit did ye say that fur?”

“Och it wis only a wee joke.” Maggie said dismissively.

“Wisnae very funny wis it? Look how upset she is.” Derek said, clearly upset.

“I didnae mean it Kerry, it wis jist a joke, I'm sorry sweetie, I don't want yer father tae die.” Maggie's apology was sincere and Bridghe thought that for the moment, that was enough. Resentment now hung in the air like a fragrance. A sweet contempt, laden with scents of dread and fatality.

“I'm goin' up to my room.” Bridghe huffed and stormed off just like a child of Kerry's age would. She was smiling when she ran up the stairs.

At three a.m. she shed her form and slid out into the night amidst the howl of cat and wail of ambulance. It was cool but there was a promise of warmth in the morning to come. Over the suburban rooftops and T.V. ariels flew a flock of starlings which she decided to leave alone, instead she sat upon the roof of some high rise flats and stared up at the stars. In nine thousand years it was the one thing she had not yet grown tired of. The one great mystery that she longed to unravel, the infinite, endless night.

The sun was slowly burning away just below the horizon when she returned to her vessel and joined it in a few hours of sleep.

The next day brought violence and blood when at school she broke the nose of a senior girl with the heel of her shoe. It was quite deliberate, though the circumstance of Kerry being bullied had been more fortune than planning. The parents were called, there were stern words in the car and she had cried and apologised. That evening she spent in her room casting doubts through the floor and into the minds of Kerry's mother and father. She could already feel the cold tension spread throughout the house, the beginnings of an icy indifference, which she would thaw and boil into rage.

Her father drove her to school the next day and on the way there she said “Do you hate mum as much as I do?”

Derek seemed horrified by the question and sat staring out of the windscreen unable to respond. After a few moments he got a hold of himself and asked “Whit do ye mean you hate your mother?”

Brigdhe took a few seconds before answering, looking out of the window onto the street before saying. “She's a pure nag, never stops moanin' an' bossin' everybody about an' it's no like she does anythin'”

“What do you mean she doesnae dae anythin', yer mother works.” Derek said putting up a weak and insincere defence of his wife.

“If ye call gossiping three mornin's a week at the hairdressers a job. When wis the last time you had a decent dinner an' no some crap oot a packet?” Bridghe asked. It was a provocation but Maggie's inability to cook a simple meal offended her.

“Haud oan Kerry, its no yer mother's job tae...”

“Whit is her job then? Cos if she's no sittin' flappin' her gums at the hairdresser, she sits on facebook aw day readin' a pile o' shite.”

“Watch your language!” Derek warned but the fight had already gone out of him. “Nae mere of this nonsense, we'll talk about it later.”

“Fine.” she huffed like a petulant child. The car drove up near the school gates and she collected her stuff and went to school for another day.

This one involved theft and ritual animal sacrifice. In a moment of irresponsibility the biology teacher left the class -and an open drawer filled with scalpels- unattended. Several had went missing by the time the teacher returned but the lesson went ahead anyway. This involved the dissection of a frog. Though this was deemed a science lesson, there was no scientific value in letting a bunch of children clumsily hack apart the bodies of several frogs. Brigdhe knew it was an initiation ritual into that church which refused the name. The church of reason and the holy average, with its faith in empiricism and evidence. The very church that had blinded the humans to her presence. Its neophytes in the class could read nothing from the remains of those frogs, nothing not discovered a thousand thousand times. From hers Brigdhe read the echoes of its moments in the shapes and textures of its innards. She learned it would be a wet summer, that it would turn hot and humid, that the city would suffer from the pressure.

She arrived home that evening to find the fight she had predicted would take place that weekend was already in full swing. Maggie was screaming and slamming doors upstairs as Derek stood in the kitchen in a fury and shouted up through the roof. Bridghe had been home less than two minutes when the police arrived. Bridghe made Kerry look like she was terrified and said to the officers “He's my daddy, please don't hurt him.”

That was enough for the police to do the opposite though Derek's violence towards them led the police to forcefully subdue him. He was slammed into the floor, cuffed and then taken away. It could not have gone better and she faked a weeping and retired to her room.

Maggie sat downstairs smoking and sobbing and bitching on the phone to her mother and friends. The Girl with the Stars in her eyes slid once again from her borrowed shell and her consciousness unfolded out into the city like an evening mist. She sensed the cats tear at birds and rodents, the dogs snap and bite each other as they fucked and fought. She sensed the buds blooming from the saplings and the rats raiding through the bins. The city smelled of blood and birth, the perfumes of Spring. As a pack of wild dogs in Carntyne she howled at the waning moon. Through the eyes of a drunk in Yoker she witnessed his death, kicked over and over in the head, by three feral children in track suits, until it cracked open like an Easter egg. In Drumoyne she felt the agonised burning in the mind of an unstable woman who'd crushed 162 paracetemol into a bowl of mashed potatoes which she served to her new boyfriend and four children with sausages more rusk than meat. She inhaled the scent of copulation from the whores and doggers at the Glennifer Braes. In an alley off Hope Street she felt the brutal rape of a polish teenager by three men much older than he was. She tasted the suicides, appeared as the apparition of dead relatives to the dozing old folks in nursing homes, tormenting them will tales of eternal damnation and hatred.

Brigdhe had a wonderful evening.

The next day involved a visit to the Headmaster and a false claim of sexual abuse at the hands of Kerry's mother. She had burst out crying in registration and was taken, with a comforting arm round her shoulder to see the Headmaster. Her lurid lies were taken as gospel by the jaded and yet horrified Headmaster. Such claims were not entirely unusual. Predictably the social services were called. Kerry was taken into a little room where Brigdhe spouted the most foul and outrageous nonsense about Maggie. Consequently, their was an intervention.

Maggie could not believe what she was told when confronted by the accusations from her ersatz daughter. Her angry protests convinced the already biased interviewer of the “truth”. Kerry was taken away, as her mother screamed and begged both her and the social services officer not to. Inside Brigdhe smiled. Once, long ago, she would just drag drunks and slatterns into the woods but society had become more complex, more elegant and this had made it so much easier to ruin lives.

She was taken to a care home, which was a temporary measure while they assessed Kerry's safety. It didn't matter. Once again Brigdhe just locked herself in a tiny place and slid out of the girl and out into Glasgow but this time her intent was specific. She haunted the home Kerry was raised in, watched Maggie sit in tears and waited until Derek got home, waited for the inevitable fireworks.

Maggie's explanation fell on ears stuffed with contempt. Derek snorted and called her a “disgusting bitch” before picking up a bag and stuffing it with clothes. Maggie's desperation to be believed by her husband turned to fury as he decided to leave. She grabbed him, he pushed her away. She stumbled and nearly fell but Derek did not even try to catch her. All reason left Maggie then. Derek had marched towards the front door and was unlocking it when she ran screaming towards him with a kitchen knife. She never meant to do anything but threaten him, that was obvious, but the rug had other ideas and she staggered forth. Her momentum pushed her right into him as he turned but as he did the knife and his wife flew at him and the blade ran into his ribcage on the left hand side. He dropped, the knife was still in him as he fell. Maggie screamed and screamed and screamed until she was sick.

Brigdhe laughed and laughed. It had been a good Friday.

She left then, going back to the warm dark of her subterranean realm under Clochcore Woods. Spring had come, it was time for her to grow up, become the Queen of Summer. She wondered, as she finally fell asleep, what the social services would do when they found a long dead and strangled little girl in one of their safe houses. The Girl with the stars in her eyes smiled as she drifted from the material plane.