Colored Blankets

By Sean Ferrier-Watson

You wrap me in colored blankets every night, muttering to yourself in an ancient tongue, the words falling from your lips like a desperate prayer, like a spell that never finds its mark. You are a mother at heart—just not my mother.

I watch you empty the basin at my window, careful not to spill. Even the tiniest drop which might disrupt the illusion could send us hurtling back to reality, to the cold earth. I often try to tip the basin, lifting it at the edges with all my might, but it never moves so much as an inch.

It is like everything in the tower: it only moves for you.

When you finish with the basin, you start to cut my hair, clipping long golden strands with the shears you use to prune the roses.

You only need a few curls to weave blankets of rainbows, softer than down and brilliant as the morning sun. They are your little gifts to make up for pushing him out the window, for watching him fall to the cobblestone below, shattering like a little porcelain doll. I still hear his voice in my dreams, calling out to me from some distant shore, some forgotten land just beyond my reach.

You keep my hair shorter now, never letting it grow more than a few inches, terrified of what it might do.

But you cannot protect against everything.

You have left a thread undone, dangling from the blanket just tossed across my lap.

You see it a second too late. I already have it clutched in my hand and wrapped around my little finger, ready for a tug. It only needs a little jerk to send the magic tumbling all around us, collapsing like a house of straw caught in a summer storm. You try to pin me with your gaze, the one that drove my parents away, the one that can wither even the liveliest flower, but it is already done. Your power over me has faded, dissolved like the magic holding the walls together. I pull the thread and let the night in all around us.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sean Ferrier-Watson writes poetry, fiction, and non-fiction on various topics and within many genres, but he especially likes to write fantasy and horror. He has pieces published or forthcoming in Lovecraftiana, Borderlands, Better Than Starbucks, Hawk & Whippoorwill, Hellbound Books, and Illumen. He has been a finalist in Crystal Lake Publishing’s Shallow Waters Flash Fiction Contest and in other contests. His book The Children’s Ghost Story in America was published by McFarland in 2017.

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