Beautiful Lady

Beautiful Lady




She lived in the house. Who, I didn't know. Not until she wrote her name in my mother's garden one night; Belladonna.
         I assumed it was the feral animals that uprooted my mother's rose bushes every night. I blamed the leaky pipes on bad plumbing. I told myself that the poorly spelled words in the dirt were drawn by the seven-year-old boy that lived next door. I ignored her presence, and it only made things worse.
         She breathed her name into my ear one afternoon. I was home alone, my mother at her office down the street, working. We had just moved into the house two weeks prior, and my mom dismissed my worries as a rustic charm that came with living in such an old home. She convinced me that there was nothing in the house that would threaten me. So, I let her in.
         We played cards and wrote letters to each other, mine in cursive and hers scrawled in a form of English I could hardly read. We spoke to each other, and she often told me what to do. First, she instructed me to do silly things, like throwing stones at the neighbor boy's window in the middle of the night. Then, she asked me to do more serious things.
         My mother was my best friend. She had been a single mother her entire life and we did everything together. Now, as I stand over her lifeless body peering at the bloody knife I plunged into her back, I realized what my newfound friend had made me do.
         Mother always warned me about the poisonous plants of the garden. I should have noticed that once the black berries began to thrive, Belladonna appeared. Now, it was all too late.