WELL CHILD.

There is a girl at the bottom of the well. 

Of that he is sure.

He hears her whimpers late at night. 

At first, he thinks it must be a kitten, for all the soft and breathless mewls. 

But one day he lets his curiosity get the better of him.

On tip toes he stands at the side of the well.

Even so, he is barely tall enough to peer over the edge.

He teeters,

Grubby fingernails clinging on to the webs of lichen and moss,

Covering the century old structure. 

A string hangs in the centre of the well.

One he hasn’t noticed before.

Or perhaps it is more of a rope?

The end of the rope is knotted and tied

Such that it reminds him of a noose. 

Not that he’s ever seen a noose, mind.

But after the order for whole pastures of fat cows and fluffy lambs to be burned,

One of the Eastern farmers strung himself up to the barn rafters

And dangled above the milking machines.

The boys at school traced one in the playground in powdery chalk

that refused to wash away for weeks after.

The wooden beams supporting the rope aren’t strong enough to hang a body from anyway.

They look brittle and rotten and riddled with bugs.

And who could blame them?

No one has cared for this house since his Great Aunt Matilda

Who patched up the holes and tended to the gardens

Who thatched the roof and mended the awnings

Who whispered to plants and spread love into paint.

His own mother sighs as the house crumbles, 

And floats off to bed. 

He hears her most at night, through the cracked glass

Of his windows which face the orchard

And all its wizened trees

Which have born no apple in the days he can remember. 

She is calling him.

Or is she singing?

He down the pillow over his ears 

And tries to block out her lonely song.

Now the boy grows braver too,

As boys of his age tend to do. 

Up to the rim of the well he clambers

Peering precociously over the edge.

For a brief moment he wonders who would come to rescue him

If he were to fall in.

It certainly wouldn’t be his mother. 

Nonetheless, the brave boy hoists himself up

Bearing the weight on the flats of his hands

And squints down the tunnel.

He thinks he can see a pale face

Lit up by a portion of the moon.

But the boy looks back and sees that it is still daylight behind him

The sun peaks at its highest over the bowed apple trees

And he knows he shall soon be expected for the afternoon wash.

So he turns on his heels

Making off for the washing house,

But he doesn’t dare forget the pale moon-touched face. 

Now you’d think that the boy might forget the girl at the bottom of the well.

Boys do after all have a lot to think about

From slugs and snails to newts to balls to spinners to diablos

From cuts and scrapes to scratches to very unfortunate broken arms

From bedtimes and wake-ups to sisters and cousins and babies

From lessons and tutors to lonely walk homes and slightly too small shoes

From anger and embarrassment to getting pink-cheeked when sat beside the girl with plaits.

But this boy remembers

And waits for the dead of night

When he knows that the moon will actually be up to guide his way

And light up whoever lingers at the bottom of the well.

And so he sneaks out

On timid feet

In undersized shoes.

But why he is sneaking, even he doesn’t know.

He could burn the house down and his mother would still stay as she is

Head buried in the pillow 

Vegetating in the sheets.

He slips out into the dead of night.

Outside it is quiet

As it tends to be when you inhabit a space in the country so deep

That the boy could walk for all the hours of the darkness

And still not come across another house.

His footsteps are muffled in the damp and dewy grass

The silence is in fact stifling.

He reaches the well, and hoists up his limber body

And peers back down into the unforgiving darkness.

He wonders if he should have brought a snack.

Perhaps she likes jam sandwiches?

But it is too late to dally and consider a strawberry sweet peace offering.

He swipes at the frayed rope, and catches it between clammy hands.

One deft tug, and it tells him that it will carry his weight

Down to the well floor.

The boy and the girl do not run into one another’s arms

For why would they, they are not acquainted.

Instead, the boy having landed on his hands in knees

In an inch of putrid well water,

The girl sits at a safe distance and watches him warily.

He can see that there is little left of her

Soft flesh stripped away, leaving milky white bones.

Her hair remains.

It even seems to have grown down here

In this dark and desperate dungeon,

And hangs in clumps and tangles, embroiled with lichen and weeds.

Now for her face.

He cannot tell if she is smiling or grimacing

For undressed from flesh and skin and organs,

All that remains is a skull, tilted to one side

And gazing at him with what he supposes is a perplexed expression

(but this is hard to tell without cheeks and lips

and in place two dark vortexes where blue eyes once sat).

He supposes she wouldn’t have enjoyed a strawberry sandwich after all

As she seems to be missing all the necessary organs.

Nonetheless, he squats in the murky waters at the bottom of the well

And extends a hand.

An act of peace and welcome.

She has little to offer in the way of hospitality herself

With no seat nor bed nor food at the bottom of the well

And only the company of newts and slugs and the odd rat who has gladly avoided drowning

But yet she extends her hand to match the boy

Though the joints creak and groan and weeds fall away from her ulna.

So they sit, the two children at the bottom of the well

One bright and buoyant boy

Although his rosy cheeks are subdued by the watery greens and greys

And one skeleton girl.

A leader of a lonely life,

With only the accompaniment of his mother’s soft whimpers in the dead of night,

The boy is somewhat lacking in the friendship department.

He hasn’t been to school in months now anyway,

But his classmates conceded him were a series of nicknames and snickers. 

So, the boy is obliging and open hearted. 

He meets the skeletal fingers that extend out to greet him,

And makes as not to look at the rancid water that drips from her bones. 

Now the girl cannot speak.

She lacks the flesh and the blood and vitality to speak.

In fact, her voice box decayed decades ago.

But somehow, through her touch, she tells her story.

Is that so difficult to imagine? 

More so than a skeletal girl living at the bottom of the well?

She spreads out her digits, scraping against his soft palms,

And tells him her tale.

Now I must prepare you, for it is a sad account

For whoever heard of a girl who lived at the bottom of a well

Who lived a happy story, 

A happy life?

She was once so very beautiful,

A thick dark mane that once gleamed free of the lichen and newts that now lived within,

Soft white skin and rosy cheeks.

She looked like her mother, who was known around the parts 

Largely for her wayward spirit.

She prayed to the old gods, and taught her daughter

Never to mix wolfsbane and nettle

And that a fox seen at sunset cautions of a broken heart.

They kept to themselves, largely at the edge of the moors,

For the townsfolk didn’t understand her potions and prayers,

And how she whispered to the ghosts of the undead, 

Who at night roamed over the marshes.

Yet sometimes in the dead of night,

The townswoman crept over to the little cottage,

And asked for a milk thistle paste to cleanse the body,

Or a tincture of basil and borage to heal the heart.

The wild woman of the moors never turned them away,

Despite the way they turned their faces from her in public

And the spits and sneers with which their husbands greeted her.

She greeted these women stragglers with few words,

Ushering her own children into the corner of the dimly lit cabin, 

And pressing the desired tonic into wanting hands.

She never accepted any of the coins they tried to return.

And though she minded her own ways, 

And though she gained a quiet respect from the village women,

Soothing their aching heads and ailing stomachs and cleansing their corporeal corruption,

The men still hounded her children.

At first, with glances.

This quickly followed by catcalls.

Once, they chased home her eldest,

The lithe girl with the mane of black curls.

She was lucky, on this occasion.

On the second, her mother’s rose quartz lacked the luck to bring her safely home.

They traversed her with callused hands

Still dirty from the fields.

She ended up red and black and blue

But these marks marring her soft white skin were hard to see

For there was hardly any light at the bottom of the well.

She wonders what happened to her mother.

Of course, she is by now long dead.

But whether she stayed, tied to the log cabin with the kindling fire

And the rows of herbs and roots and seeds.

She misses the sweet, earthy smell of those four wooden walls.

Or whether the loss of her eldest daughter proved too much to bear.

Her mother would have known,

Surely.

A child of the marshes, she knew never to stray too close to the bogs

Or to dare cross the swamps past bedtime. 

Did she look for her?

Did she walk into the village,

Bare foot as she went, with her raven hair and sun weathered skin

Did she scream and cry and beg the townsfolk to bring her back her baby?

Did she ever peer down into the dark and cavernous well

And see the broken white body that lay below?

All this the well girl tells him 

And all the while the boy listens.

He offers to take her

Or what is left of her,

And bury it above ground

But she refuses.

For what would she be now

A dead girl amongst the living?

She presses something into his palms.

A silver bracelet encrusted with muddied charms

A pretty thing that doesn’t belong in the shadows. 

She bids him farewell, and hoists him up

So he may clamber up the slippery wet walls

And return to the land of the living.

Gradually,

The boy forgets.

He forgets the girl that lives at the bottom of the well

And perhaps in his forgetting,

She ceases to exist.

Nonetheless, he grows up

And marries a pretty girl of his own