Adelaide had a tendency of penning her sad stories first. Immediately upon hitting the paper, the ink in her mind began to hiss upwards in a violent evaporation, freeing her of the weight of memory. Her worst memory was very much like a pensieve, because she had stepped into it. She had stepped into the doors of that tiny white church with a crowd of black clad women behind her. The door shut between them and for one second, Adelaide was alone in the pitch black, buoyed by the space. She pressed one hand blindly in front of her and felt the resistance of thick black velvet. She ran her fingers down it and then plunged ahold, pulling the drape to the side. In that same second the women burst through behind her pushing her forth into the domed room full of people.
The arches of the room pulled up short overhead, glowing from the candles a short distance beneath them. Bright red graffiti sprayed elegantly across the ceilings, gold and black and blue and green detailed- pictures, old pictures of saints and gods and stories with which
Adelaide was not familiar. She looked down at the old priest before her, the hunched wrinkle in the holy cap, who looked to the ground while teetering side to side, swinging chains with tinkling balls of incense at the bottom.
Adelaide peered through the smoke behind him and felt an instant sickening compulsion to run. The casket was propped open.
The entire long summer after,
Adelaide periodically suffered from swollen eyebrows, her face mildly distored, her brow jutting out on one side or sometimes both, her face unnaturally pale. Oh, Diana. On the morning
Adelaide awoke to these minor monstrocities, she would spend the better part of the morning powdering her skin, pushing her hair into her eyes, avoiding mirrors and wearing sunglasses, just like a regularly beaten woman.
