FIGMENTS OF THE HEART Moriah Lee
The death of her mother was Eleanor’s first encounter with the real world. It was cold, hard, bitter, and real. Painfully real. Her mother had been sick for some time, but Eleanor had believed she would recover. There couldn’t be a world in which young girls lose their mothers, the ones who tell them stories of princes and princesses, play with them for long hours in springtime meadows, and braid flowers into crowns to place in their hair. And yet it was. It was real in the form of the stiff, lifeless hand that she had clenched in her own, hot tears falling upon the chilled skin. The only thing that had been left of her was a pair of her mother’s slippers, golden silk, embroidered with the most delicate thread, yet it could never be anything compared to her mother. Almost as astonishing to her was her father, who had buried his wife under the hazel tree behind the house, dried his eyes, and remarried in a month. He was “providing for her,” he had said. She was “too young to 1