by I.D. Blind
23. At the Cemetery
“We need to visit her grave,” Electra told her sisters in the morning.
At noon, with small nosegays in their hands, they crossed the cemetery and came upon Miss Prizzi’s grave. The funeral had been held recently, and the tomb resembled a small mound of flowers. Coming closer, Electra sat down in front of an inscription with the name of the deceased, where a tombstone was soon to appear.
“Please forgive us.” She put the flowers on the ground. “I didn’t want this to happen.”
She covered her face with her hands and sobbed. Cassandra sat on a bench under a willow, still squeezing the magnolias in one hand, while sweeping away the tears with the other.
Medea wasn’t crying though. She knew that most of the blame was on her, but something stopped her believing it. Something was wrong.
“Please forgive us,” Electra whispered amidst sobs. A teardrop rolled down her face and landed on the thin layer of snow. Medea saw how a sprout crawled out from under the snow, but thought it was just her imagination, until another teardrop fell to the ground, and another stem climbed out.
“Electra, did you see that?” She sat down next to her sister. “On the ground, look there.”
Cassandra came up to them, and all three looked at the ground in anticipation. Once again a teardrop fell to the ground, and a green sprout made its way out. The girls gawked at the three slender stalks.
“She’s talking to us,” Medea said. “She wants to tell us something.”
“And? What shall we do?” Cassandra asked.
“We need to talk to her.”
“How?”
All three became silent.
“How can we know what she’s telling us?” Electra asked.
“Let’s bring her back to life, I mean, call her spirit. Invoke her.”
“No! Medea, that’s enough, stop!”
“Then how can we talk to her? We can’t speak to the corpse, but she’s obviously trying to tell us something. She won’t mind being invoked.”
“No. Ghosts, Demons, Spirits. Enough already! Everything that we do is wrong and has bad consequences.”
Medea couldn’t be convinced so easily. When her sisters were leaving the cemetery, she took a handful of earth from Noemia Prizzi's grave and hid it in her pocket. At night, she went to the library in search of the spells to call the spirits of the dead. She chose the method, which intended that the spirit of the deceased would appear to the person who had killed its host. So, if Miss Prizzi was killed by the Demon which had been evoked by Medea’s spell, then her spirit would come to her, and she’d learn what old Prizzi wanted to tell them.
Medea spilled a handful of the sepulchral earth on the table, lit up candles, uttered the spell three times, and waited for Miss Prizzi's spirit. At five in the morning, she had to accept her failure. She put everything in its place and went back to bed.
Doesn’t matter, Medea thought. If not today, then tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, then the day after, but she will still appear.