Weekly Writing – September 28 2024

Trina dusted the mantle as she did at the same time every day, with the same movements. Lifting the same trinkets for a quick left-to-right-and-back-again beneath them, willing herself to drop one of them, just to prove she could.
Just to shatter the suffocating normal that she swept and polished every day. But her mistress’s will ran thick in the manor’s air, through the bodies of all who served in it. It filled her lungs with every breath and nourished her muscles as oxygen should have, saturating them with irresistible purpose.
Clean, sweep, keep order. Some of those who served in the manor had free movements they could make, decisions on behalf of their mistress. Not her – her purpose was as constant as the slow settling of dust on the furniture. She carried it out with the same will and spontaneity as a straw broom, and screamed only inside as she placed a crystalline statue of the mistress’s wasp-winged goddess back in its place.
She walked the track she had worn ever so faintly into the foyer’s floor, wearing the benign smile her mistress had picked out for her – and stumbled.
One step, just one moment’s powerful startlement at the knock echoing across the foyer. A knock at the front door, and there was never a knock at the front door.
No one ever came to visit her mistress. The other servants brought supplies from somewhere else, some village, the same way she swept the floors. No one who didn’t walk under the mistress’s will ever set foot on her land.
But there was someone at the door, and a powerful nudge of will was pushing Trina towards it. Pushing her from her path, her inescapable routine, to answer it. She trembled, crossing the floor she hadn’t yet swept or mopped, as if she had been shoved off of solid ground to walk on the air, borne up only by faith in her mistress. It was everything she had wanted, happening at once, something new, but still, not even that overpowering will could stop her hand from shaking as she reached for the door.