Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Thirty
Act II
Three years later, almost to the day since the night that changed Felecia’s life forever, and the rain and wind were just barely winding down so that she could manage to step outside and see to some of the days chores. There were a great many sleep-in days come winter and this was certainly one of them but Felecia never could manage the idea of sleeping in, or sleeping much at all beyond what kept her alive from one day to the next.
Felecia woke early, the sun had just barely managed to work its way through the dense clouds enough to announce that it truly was day time. She laid on her cot and contemplated the day for a while. The cast iron wood stove got tended to first, even before she dared to use the simple bucket that served as her chamber pot. Chicory and cinnamon with a generous dollop of honey was the drink of the day as it was every day. Two fingers of whiskey added would make the morning cup even better but no one in the village had whiskey to trade anymore. Even the low grade and dangerous wood alcohols had run dry in the village the summer before.
There was nothing of Felecia’s old clothes to recognize her by, none of her old temporary encampment among the stand of trees either. She only barely caught a glimpse of herself in the small polished mirror that hung near the door of her cabin. Her hair came in darker and redder these last few years, the stuff grew and curled and became an impossible mass until she paid one of the girls from Rotary house to braid it the year before. Three fresh fish and an entire basket of mushrooms from the forest, a kingly price but the girl had a point. “If your Nana catches me doing you a favor I’ll be stuck in that awful village, eating rats and the dead.” No one in the village was eating their dead, not that Felecia had heard of yet but surely rats were becoming hard to find.
Felecia’s scales had come in full around her temples and behind her ears down her neck. She felt them scrape the blankets at night and so she knew they had come in along her back and down her sides as well. When her scales got sun, they turned all manner of yellow and red but now in winter they were the proudest silver of the Conway line. The rest of the family features were showing now too, the high hair line, the sharp narrow nose, the high cheek bones, the delicate jaw line that finished what many considered a heart shaped face.
In part, Felecia loathed her polished mirror because time was telling her that she truly was a Conway and worse, one of Nana’s own. She saw a proud ghost when she looked in that mirror, a fitting sisterhood to the old paintings in Rotary house that still showed Nana in her prime. Worse though, the polished mirror showed her scars, the constant reminder of the night that nearly killed her. Both of her lips were split wide open that night, first by the blow that came from Mullens’ collected stolen goods, then by the lout’s fist as he hit her, again, and again, and again.
Over time those lips healed of course but not without leaving a permanent ridge of scar tissue that looked almost like one of those plains Indian tattoos Felecia saw in the books in the Rotary house library. Her bottom lip healed offset to, leaving just the slightest droop on her left side. Worse than just marked for life, worse than just ugly, disformed. Felecia’s smiles looked disturbing and her face at rest made her mouth look like it was always forming a restless question, one that had no answer, and if it did, surely one she wouldn’t like to hear.
No, Felecia never spent long in front of the mirror and only kept it as she did so many things inside her cabin. The women of the village gave her gifts and something inside of her, some stubborn, willful bit of the child she used to be, refused to decline them or dissuade the givers from making their select offers.