She Left Her Mark

She was old, and she figured she had not long left. In the cast-iron pot, the water slowly came to a boil, writhing and popping. God, if she had a few years left in her, she'd fancy her chances on the desolate moorlands of Derryveigh, for she knew the land well.

She knew where to look for water, and she knew where to look for shelter. But she wasn't fit anymore, she could hardly walk the length of herself, her bones seized with a dull, whirring pain. God knows, she thought, god knows how I'll manage to lift this pot when they come. She figured she had the rot in her lungs too, an horrible stabbing pain had awoken her from her sleep this past few months on many occasions. Even now, as she watched the water bubbling and drumming in the pot and the steam rising, there was a rattling wheeze in her every breath.

The village stood in the arsehole of nowhere, a huddled mess of ill-shaped cottages that drooped and leaned eastwards in the wind. It was her son that had caught wind of the bailiff and his men, trotting horseback yonder across the sweeping marshes. She figured herself bright and she still had her wits about her, so she knew what they had come for. How, lord, how was a starving heard of peasants expected to pay their dues when the potatoes were black with the rot? Never did she know a true market for potatoes that looked like lumps of coal and tasted like a handful of dirty shillings.

So the men approached outside her cottage and she could hear the horses trotting and sniffing and the footsteps of soldiers as they crashed onto the blackened grass from their steeds. So too, with a sickening clarity, hear the clanking and tapping of rifles as they readied themselves to rid the village of the peasants. 

She was going to die, she'd be shot, but she was dead already.  What would scare her about a burning hole blasted into her chest and a few moments of blood-choking haziness? For if she could leave her mark before leaving this hellscape of death and starvation, she would. 

Shouting outside now, tempered, people scattering from their cottages and scrambling across the ground. Crying children, angry men, the cocking and clicking of rifles.

She'd leave her mark on them. And it was time. So with feeble, skeletal arms, she put her arms around the pot of water and lifted it up. She coughed and spluttered and her legs trembled beneath her. The iron pot burnt red and purple botches into her forearms, her body sang a symphony of hunger and pain.

And when the lieutenant crashed through the door with his rifle, she flung the pot at him. His face was no longer that of a man but of a melting, screaming wax sculpture. He fell on the ground in hellish wails and his chest and face and arms sizzled as the boiling water seeped through his skin. 

And with that, she had left her mark. She dropped the pot with a clatter and sat in the corner on an old, splintered chair with her eyes closed. His screams of pain was the sweetest tune she had ever heard. He writhed and snaked across the ground, blinded, and she knew that would be the last time she would ever close her eyes. And lord, that was just okay, because she had left her mark.