[Series] Tied with String and Sealed with Love

My grandmother was a kind woman. She was shorter than myself (although that wasn't hard, as my 5'10" frame is unusual for a woman), and squat. She was beautiful in her day, though, and spoke occasionally of her 24" waist and curled red hair that drove the men mad. Her hair was white as we begin this recounting, though. Puffed and curled and white as snow."My father was a cruel man," she said, sitting back in her leather chair. She always had a pillow in the small of her back to keep her sciatica from acting up. She fussed with it as she continued."he'd beat us within an inch of our lives if he caught us misbehaving. Me most of all, as I was the oldest. My brother Ernie certainly didn't get away unscathed, though, either. He was only six when we left." I knew already that her mother, an artist and violin prodigy, had taken her children and fled from Regina to Thessalon, Ontario, when my grandmother was a young teenager. There they lived under an assumed name, hiding from the abusive man who'd tormented them for years. The man who beat my great grandmother, beat his children and worse. The man who'd apparently chased them through a corn field with a shotgun the night they left. She'd sometimes make light of the move when she was in a story telling mood; in a largely French Canadian community, they'd changed their surname to a French one. When spoken to in French, though, they'd stutter and giggle, as they spoke no French at all.My grandmother paused in her story, briefly, and her eyes unfocused. She stared into the distance and suddenly seemed a million miles away. "My father raised homing pigeons. They were his pride and joy, and a menace to us kids. He trained them to bite us and flap their dirty wings at our little faces when we fed them, which was often. He'd get drunk and shriek at us to feed the pigeons, almost every night. Almost every night they'd coo contentedly while they drew blood from our fingers, our wrists." I was silent, engrossed. She'd never mentioned the pigeons, in all the years I'd spent caring for her. She took a sip of water and looked at me."Pigeons are filthy birds. The pecks to our bodies were infected often, red and swollen. He called them 'rock doves', said they were the messengers of the gods, but they were just pigeons. Dirty, smelly pigeons like you'd see eating garbage in an alley." My grandmother spent a lot of time shooing pigeons from her bird feeders in the yard, and I now knew why. My grandfather, before he passed, used to shoot at them with a BB gun. He wasn't a violent man by any means, though, and he loved my grandmother fiercely."Thessalon was good to us, in the beginning. It's so small, everyone knew each other. Of course, they didn't know our real names, but I suspected they had an idea of our circumstances. All the same, they were welcoming. I went to the local highschool, my siblings to the public elementary school. We made friends, my mother got a job at the pharmacy makeup counter and got involved in local politics. She was so smart, and such a fiery bitch." She laughed quietly, then stopped abruptly."The first pigeon I saw in Thessalon spooked me. They weren't at all common in the area, not back then. I was, oh, fifteen, sixteen. We'd been in town about two years. All those old memories came flooding back to me as it cooed, perched on my windowsill. It had black eyes, like all of them do, but I swear this one recognized me. It flew off after a few minutes, and I didn't see another until about six months later. It sat on my windowsill as I brushed my hair, and it gurgled its low coo with propose. When I turned, I realized it had something tied to its leg. It was a note, curled at the edges and tied with with a knotted bow. The pigeon nipped at my hand as I unwrapped the letter from its leg. On it was written a limerick I'd never heard before.*Tied with string and sealed with loveA message from the gods aboveFrom him to her, from pigeon to doveTied with string and sealed with love."*My grandmother stopped talking for almost five minutes at this point. I thought she was done speaking when she spoke up."I didn't sleep for three days after I got that letter. I knew it was from my father. I couldn't bring myself to tell my mother, as stupid as I now know that was. I didn't want to worry her. She'd been through so much. We all had. I hoped he'd give up and let us be, and for a couple weeks I thought he had. That was when Douglas died." Douglas was her youngest brother, in the womb when they'd fled provinces. He'd drowned while swimming, I knew, when she was a teen. She'd had to swim out into the river and retrieve the body, as her mother couldn't swim and she was the oldest child. "I saw him that day," she said, her eyes brimming. "My father. I saw him slide like a snake from the river and onto the opposite bank. He looked back at me for a second as he fled into the forest, and I swear he winked at me. Then he was gone. When I told my mother, gasping for breath and crying desperately, she ignored me. Her baby was dead. She thought I was delusional from grief. After a week I believed her.But then I got the second letter. It was scrawled in black ink and spotted with bird shit. The limerick had changed.*Tied with string and sealed with loveA message from the gods aboveYour eyes will be loosed by a rock doveAnd you'll pray to god to make it stop*".My grandmother, tears now sliding silently across her wrinkled face, looked me straight in the eye."A week later they found my sister Alice in the bushes behind her school, her eyes missing. Her skirt was up around her waist, they said, and there were three pigeon eggs broken on the ground around her." via /r/nosleep http://ift.tt/2sLWfSB