Sia’s feet were being shoved into shoes too small. She remembered the feeling. It was a frequent one during her childhood. Her toes would become red from the friction against the cheap, tough leather. Sia opened her eyes as she felt her feet finally slip into the shoes completely. The laces were tied, so tight she lost a bit of feeling in her feet.
She remembered the shoes she was wearing, little heeled boots with flowers embroidered on the sides of the leather. Laureline always wore ornate shoes. She’d started wearing heels when she was only eight years old, and Sia was expected to follow in her sister’s stumbling, unsteady footsteps.
Like most of the things Sia owned, her shoes were also Laurel’s castoffs and the things she had outgrown. The shoes were custom-made for Laurel, on top of being too small, and they were torture to walk in, especially as a child.
She hadn’t seen the pair she was wearing in years. She looked up as the door closed. She was in her bedroom again, but it seemed larger than before. No, it was the opposite. Sia was smaller. She was closer to the ground, and was wearing the gowns she’d worn as a child. Her chest was flat, her limbs short, and nothing made sense.
Sia had never wished for a mirror in her room when she was a child, but she wished she’d had one at the moment. But mirrors were expensive, and the family wouldn’t waste something with so much silver on her.
She stepped out of the room and went down to the garden. In the early mornings, after waking her up at dawn and putting her in whatever dress was clean, the maids then proceeded to go to Laureline’s room. Laureline was pretty enough to take time on. Her long hair needed hours of brushing and careful arrangement into ornate styles. Her outfits had to be coordinated and accessorized perfectly. In the past, Sia had sometimes looked in through the half-open door during the mornings, wondering at how beautiful her sister was. Now, she rushed past Laureline’s rooms and down to the garden. It was the sole place where she could see herself without being chastised for vanity, or mocked for wanting to see a reflection that everyone else in her family had found disappointing.
The reflection she saw of herself in the water of the garden’s pond was never accurate. She did not know the exact lines of her face, but it had been an approximation she could work with. Now, the approximation was that of herself, but as a child. She could not be older than ten years, meaning she was fifteen years in the past.
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Her childhood had not been a good time for her. Sia realized she had never really had good times, only times that were not terrible and times that were. As a child, she had been left alone in the estate more often than not. Her brother and sister’s development was carefully monitored. If they were prize rosebushes that their parents carefully watered and pruned each day, Sia was the wildflower that had accidentally grown between the cracks in the garden path. Sia smiled at her reflection. Calling herself a wildflower was a kindness. In truth, she had been treated like a weed.
It was a dream, or one final delusion from her starved, dehydrated mind. One final gift before death. Perhaps if she was lucky, this was death. She would have expected the afterlife to offer her something more, but no one had ever given her what she expected or desired. The afterlife, it seemed, was no different. If she could just spend the rest of eternity repeating days of her childhood, where at least she had the freedom to roam their estate without worry, she would be happy with what she was given.
At least it was an age where her food had not been restricted. The moment she had started to bleed, her mother had started to notice her. At first the attention had been welcome, as her mother bought her a new wardrobe of clothing and beauticians to see what could be done with her youngest daughter. The beauticians had instead flocked towards Laureline. There was no fame to be gained from transforming an average girl into something a bit more pleasing to look at.
But if they could work on Laureline, shine a light on her already luminescent beauty, they could grasp some fraction of the admiration that she would earn from society. So they had left Sia’s room and congregated in Laurel’s chambers, had added even more to her already stunning appearance. Her mother had lost hope then, and Sia was only left with her criticisms. A girl without a pretty face and without charm could not afford to be fat, was her mother’s reasoning.
So her meals became rationed, she was denied sweets, and she was subjected to random checks. Sia knew there were peasants who had truly starved. She was given enough food, she knew. It didn’t help her forget the nights she had gone to bed hungry, because she had failed one of her mother’s checks.
She was glad she would live for eternity as a child. A child’s life was so much simpler than an adult’s. It was somehow a world with other people, or her delusions of them. She slowly walked back into the manor, trying to be silent. At least the afterlife could have been generous with her, given her shoes that fit. She had to cross Laureline’s rooms to get to her own small chamber, and by habit, Sia held her breath as she walked by the door. Surely, neither delusion nor death would be so detailed as to create a replica for her sister.
“Sia!” her sister yelled, and Sia flinched.
If Laureline had followed her to eternity, Sia wondered if she could die again after death, and try to escape to some other place. She heard Laurel before she saw her, and Sia stopped mid-step. Perhaps she was being stupid, thinking she would be so lucky to get into some kind of neutral afterlife. She was in hell.