Offing the Heroine

Yes.

It was that very moment when the first leaf
of fall came twirling like a ballerina, landing just
a step or two in front of her,
still golden and full of succulence... it was then
she decided to kill her heroine. After all, 60 years
of writing words that became sentences and chapters
in (At the moment she couldn't even remember how many.)
best-selling book after book were taking a toll on Angelique.
She was often tired; her character's adventures always brought
her to a strange alliance, her pen or keypad already tormented
with unholy acts by some unseen hand that seemed to write
through her, as if in that exact same moment, just words away,
someone was writing her.

She shivered a long shiver that took her body and soul
into that fearsome place that no one can hide. Yes. This
was it...This underworld from where she always started every
beginning, like Penelope weaving a reality that would yet be lived
in minds so hungry for any adventure in their lives of unfulfilled
excitement and passion. Oh, the passion of Anna, so raw, so
deliberate! Angelique smiled just thinking about her. Yet she
knew she must do what she intuited a few minutes earlier.

And she knew her readers well; mostly young women who liked
to phantasise about God and St. Joan of Arc,
dying in that moment when wood and fire and holy
skin blacken the sky with the stench of burning flesh.
Although for some it's a kinder and gentler story of a mere
heavenly-tressed maiden captured and imprisoned in a castle,
the dream dragon guarding her escape.

All some kind of mnemonic crucible where love is always resurrected...

Yes it was time to kill her heroine... the question was
how... even as the beginning had begun, her fate decided,
Angelique's hands already writing through the advancing clouds
of unknowing, of uncertainty.

A bright red cardinal flew across her path, arguing in some philistine
and intriguing language.

A smile danced in her eyes.