Jane suffered in silence, and her mother would never know.
It was ironic, really. There was no ‘divine intervention’ for Jane, when she wandered too close to unseen danger. When she got too close to the watering hole, and a crocodile leapt from its depths, grabbing her in its jaws and dragging her into the water.
She never meant to get that close to the crocodile. If only she had heard it right behind her, stalking her while her back was turned to the water. If only she had heard her mothers warning shout, screaming for her to run. But that was the problem; Jane couldn’t hear a thing, she was completely deaf.
Her deafness was her downfall, and the crocodile lunged for her, clamping her between its jaws and dragging her into her watery grave.
Divine had rushed into action, spurred by sheer panic for her child whom she loved dearly. She fought the crocodile off valiantly, earning her more than a few scratches and bites in the process. But it was too late for the little cub, who was floating in the now bloodied waters.
Divine, in her desperation, grabbed her cub and used a divine item, a canopic jellyfish, on her only cub to bring her back to life. Jane had sprung back to life in pain, coughing up the water in her lungs. Each breath she took was agony, as her body worked to slowly mend the damage done to her, to seal up the holes in her throat that spurted blood each time she coughed, or the gashes over her stomach that wept pinkish water.
“It hurts.” She had sobbed. Or at least she thought she did, she couldn’t tell what she was thinking and what she was saying. Her mother tried to sooth her, tried to calm Jane down as she spluttered and choked on the water in her lungs, but Jane couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t be soothed by her comforting words because of the very deafness that had brought here there. Her eyes were too blurred by tears to make out what her mother was telling her, and she was in too much pain to feel the lioness curling around her protectively, trying to do anything to ease her child’s pain.
Jane wonders if her mother would have done what she did, if she were aware of the consequences.
The injuries left Jane forever mute, unable to speak from trauma or injury, she doesn’t know. In her dreams, she relives the moment over and over again. Every time she closes her eyes she’s back in those waters with the crocodiles jaws around her throat. She can still feel everything that happened to her even long after the scars have healed.
Not only that, Jane will never grow old, either. She will be stuck as she is, forced to watch as the others around her move on with their lives, forgetting about her, living their lives around her, and eventually dying. And she will be there, long after all her loved ones have passed on, far too old to be able to connect to those around her, still looking exactly as she does.
Jane suffers in silence, and sometimes, she thinks her mother should have moved on.
(Written by
stringworms #233091))
