“When I am no longer a memory, just a name…” Florence paused, with the weight of 90 years’ memories, and blinked away the fog of what had already been forgotten. The idea of posterity was both a given and of no interest to her. What’s posterity when you aren’t there to know it’s happening?
An eternity of a painting, what would it be? In her minds’ eye, she saw herself, neatly dressed, in an overstuffed chair by the window. What the painter could read in her eyes she didn’t care, but from her vantage point she would see out onto fields, wind gently inciting trees to dance, a dusty pathway away from the house into the world. Dusk settling over the landscape, as the first flit of bats appear.
The first time a bat spoke to her was long after she had begun her explorations of the world outside what was expected of her. Wandering the rows of sick in the makeshift wardens of the Crimea, dim lamp lighting her way, a bat whipped past her, swooping into the dark corners and back around. She only saw him from the corner of her eye, not really minding while focused on her patients. The moans and rustling of bedclothes kept her attention.
It was a shock just before dawn, as she finally settled into a chair to close her eyes. The chair was tucked in between piles of supplies, a little haven for rest, she didn’t expect the voice that came from an even darker space behind her. “Don’t do it.” Her head swiveled abruptly, looking for the source, but all she could see was the tiny form of a bat, upside down, wings enfolding its body. “Don’t do it.” She had learned to listen to the voices no one else could hear, and to mute the world when it was time to rest. She closed her eyes, tucking her chin down.
“Don’t do it.”
There was to be no rest tonight. She sighed and picked herself back up out of the chair towards the light of the growing dawn. But as the day persisted, so did the voice. Call from god were not new, the cries from the universe to use her skills in service, to study and provide care, to use her position to make a difference. She heeded those calls. Yet somehow this was different. Bats were frequent in the darkness of the Crimea, were they not some representation of evil? Was there something fighting within her that needed to be addressed? When her life was devoted to doing all that she could, what would she or should she not do?
Officers were trailing behind her as usual, this time harping again on the need for advertising of her good works. It was so powerful, to be a woman and be chased by these men! Not for her hand, or for her attentions, but for her work. So why did they have to wrap these works in her image, insisting on a portrait to publish to the world, somehow unseemly in prim Victorian fashion and yet also the utterly wrong focus. If only they could portrait her brain, her intellect!
The bat flit through her thoughts again, the soft movement of wings in the darkness, the trappings of so-called evils, the picture of its path and its words imprinted in her memories. She wouldn’t do the portrait, she’d stay shrouded in the remembrance of her deeds. “Don’t do it.”
Worlds 