Freedom

No one will find me. I tell myself this, huddled in the cold. No one will find me, and if they can’t find me they can’t hurt me. I’d rather be lulled to sleep by the winter’s breath than taste their righteous fires. Even more, I prefer the whisper of the tree’s branches to that of their scathing tongues.

I am no witch. I am no wicked woman. I am to die because I have loved. I am to die because for the first time, a man reached out to me with gentle touches and affections, and I took them hungrily.

I never wanted my husband. I was sold to him. I was sold to him and my parents got the sum, and he took me in every way. I was fifteen. There was nothing in it but fear and pain.

When it was found that I was barren, when his passionless nightly visits proved unfruitful, he beat me. It began with a slap, but progressed to more. The blows were a ceaseless shower, every evening. He came home and he brutalized me and then I was forced to sleep beside him, listening to his still-ragged breath from the excitement his abuses brought him.

And then Nathaniel came.

Nathaniel, with his gentle, warm eyes and kind smile. With his calloused hands that were somehow soft. Nathaniel, who would cradle my bruises and hiss with anger through his teeth. I only made love to him once, but oh, that was a beautiful thing. We hadn’t intended to do it. It was unavoidable. The coming of rain to dry land.

“Run away with me,” he’d said. “Run away, run away.”

I’d agreed to do it. I wanted it more than anything. Freedom is a sweet, sweet song. We were to leave tonight, a week since our coupling, a week since I broke the vows I never had a choice in making.

Somehow, my husband found out. The consequences were grave. My nose still aches, broken. My left eye is too swollen to see out of. He had his hands wrapped around my throat, strangling me. My vision was going dark when my hands found salvation: the metal stopper I used to hold the door open when I swept out the dust. I grabbed it and hit him as hard as I could. It shocked him more than anything, and he tumbled off of me, holding the side of his head with a dazed look.

I choked, wheezed, and stumbled to my feet. I ran.

They will burn me when they find me. Or hang me. Either way I shall die. They shall cast the first stone, and the second, and the third. They shall do it sneering and pious, knowing they are better than me, confident that they have denied themselves happiness and have been victorious in that denial. I am now the whore, tainted and loathsome, and unworthy to live amongst such sacred eyes.

“Olivia.”

A chill ran down my spine. My eyes clenched shut, and I sent a prayer to God. I didn’t know if he’d join them in their accusations, but I hoped, I prayed, that he knew and understood enough to still love me. Surely he wouldn’t approve of his son beating his daughter. Surely.

“Olivia, sweetheart.”

A hand on my shoulder. So strangely warm in the cold. I felt soft lips press against my ear to whisper lowly:

“We don’t have much time. Follow me.”

Nathaniel. I turned to him without hesitation, groping in the blackness for his hand. He took mine and we moved forward, through the trees, further and further away from their hatred and closer to a new life, waiting on the horizon.

And they will never find us.