Disclaimer: I still don't own Harvest Moon. Shame. :)

Note: My entry for the Writing Festival at the Village Square, the theme this time being Death/Mortality. I can't say why exactly, but I've gone for a similar - hopefully slightly sinister - idea as with my last entry. Took me ages to finish, though, I'll say that. I think I spent far too much time thinking up suitable names for the girls, haha! Well, enjoy! I hope it's not too bad... I really don't know.

Maybe Mummy Misses You

What kind of mother would willingly abandon her child?

Jack Crawley couldn't fathom it. But it happened, didn't it? Often - more often than you'd ever imagine. One of society's dirty little secrets, swept aside and rarely mentioned. Because that sort of thing wasn't natural, was it?

May What's-Her-Name, who lived at one of the other farms down the lane, was cared for by her grandfather. No one had exactly told him what the situation was, but he could guess as much. If she was dead people wouldn't be frightened to say so; it was a natural part of life. Sad, yes, terrible, yes, but not unthinkable.

Jack zoned in again with a shudder. He was sat, alone, at the kitchen table and his cup of tea had long since gone cold. He had two daughter's of his own and they were - excuse the cliché - his entire world. That was the way with kids, though. You had to structure your lives around them, you had to put them first. But lose them, and what did you have left?

His girls were identical twins. And yes, he could tell them apart, even when they tried to trick him - as nine year-olds inevitably would. If anything that just made the job easier. One was a born actress and charmer, the other a born worrier.

Unusual names they had, too; Merith and Morwenna. Both were dreamers, yet their approaches to life were completely different. Merith was his writer-to-be; she generally lived inside her own head and then came out with the weirdest things. Morwenna was as bold as her sister was quiet. Every plan she concocted - no matter how dangerous, stupid or downright impossible - was given a chance. Morwenna was an optimist.

Their mother was... but this was always where he hesitated...

Jack's gaze was glued to the window. Beyond the glass, it was still summer - just. In a few days it would officially be autumn, though you wouldn't have guessed it. The sun was still sat high in the sky at four o'clock.

Merith was planting a handful of seeds in a small plot he had set aside for her. They were Trick Blues, for the coming season. As she leant forward, her brow creased with concentration, a wave of long, dark hair fell across her face. Beside her, Morwenna was capering about with a watering can in hand, under the guise of helping. From where he was sat, Jack couldn't hear what they were saying to each other, but as always, it looked like Morwenna was doing most of the talking. Her mouth moved as if somebody had pressed 'fast-forward', and her green eyes were glittering, alight with excitement.

Green eyes, Jack thought. That was the one characteristic the girls shared with their mother. It was the only thing, and for that, Jack was very glad. Not to say his wife didn't love their daughters, but the situation was a minefield of complications. And to be honest, they barely saw their mother enough to even know that she loved them. Hell, he barely saw her these days...

He watched into bemusement as tiny flecks of rain began to appear on the window pane. Merith looked skywards in surprise, blinking away a raindrop from her eyelash. It had been a perfect day.

"Had," Jack murmured, pulled, by the sudden urge, to stand in front of the window. Light, almost fluffy, grey clouds were seeping subtly across the sky. "Too pale to be storm clouds, though..."

Just then, the second after he'd said it, the heavens burst open in a freak shower.

Suppressing a few worrying niggles - where the hell had it come from? Hadn't been forecast - he forgot everything else and simply bellowed at the girls to get inside.

Merith stood stranded at the heart of a sprawling jungle. She could feel steady waves of heat pulsing from the earth, up through the soles of her bare feet. Vines, branches and tree roots struck out in all directions, criss-crossing all around her. The sky was a fathomless blue, so vivid you couldn't look away. And white, wispy clouds spun slowly across it.

There was a heart drifting above her, but not a whole one. It was fragmented. They were just little, fluffy flecks, making up the bigger picture. You had to squint, too, but in Merith's mind, at least, it was so a loveheart. Of course, the one problem with cloud shapes was that they moved, and morphed, and changed too quickly before your eyes. The shape that first captured your attention would soon become something else entirely.

Merith's heart spread itself too widely across the sky above her. As it shifted, it began to break apart slowly, until it wasn't a heart anymore. Instead, it looked horribly misshapen, like someone had shattered it.

Like it had burst.

Merith opened her eyes and the jungle was gone. The tropical heat evaporated in an instant, leaving a chill to roll down her spine. There was no brilliant, blue sky and no pretty clouds peppered across it. She craned her head backwards, but wherever she looked, her eyes fell upon a suffocating blanket of dull, utterly even grey.

Sometimes Merith wished her imagination wasn't so wild. All it left was a reality all the more disappointing.

She sighed to herself. There were certain aspects of that fantasy that were, well... sort of true: her feet were bare and her dad had previously labelled their garden a jungle. Of course he hadn't meant it literally. He just meant that it was in such a dreadful state, that no mere human could even contemplate a task so mammoth. So he wouldn't bother.

Come to think of it, Merith couldn't remember the last time her father had bothered about something.

Her eyes swept across the landscape, which was oddly desolate. The earth that had once bloomed with crops was now rocky. Weeds were sprouting up everywhere, much too fast. She could just about recall her dad collecting baskets full of carrots and corn and tomatoes - a whole rainbow of vegetables. Those days seemed so distant already.

Their land was bordered to the south and east by a river. Merith had always found it beautiful. Whatever the weather, whatever the season, the sound of the river rushing south towards Mother's Hill could be heard every morning. One of her earliest memories was of helping catch a fish - a fat, silver one, that glistened in the sunlight - and then screaming like a banshee when she realised her father had no intention of throwing it back alive.

At least, Merith thought as she skipped daintily over the rocky ground, the fish were safe now. But the fence her father had erected at the river's edge was still an eyesore.

He insisted it was just to keep them safe. Why hadn't he cared about that when they were little girls, then? She was eleven years old, now, thank you very much. Maybe there was such a thing as too safe?

"Oww." Merith gasped, her ankle coming into unwelcome contact with a jagged edge. A bead of blood trickled all the way down to the sole of her foot. Following her father's shining example, she alternated between hopping about and swearing. Neither helped much.

"Merry, over here!" Morwenna, who had one of those voices you just couldn't avoid, was yelling at her.

Merith answered without even glancing up. "What?" she muttered, knowing full well that her sister wouldn't be able to hear her. Morwenna was lingering in the furthermost corner of their land, trying to coax their cat, Kizzy, out of a patch of nettles. She'd been at it for an hour now.

"Merry! Merith!" She was waving crazily, with both hands. "I think Kizzy's nose is bleeding."

"I think she'll live," Merith called back. The old tabby was nearing thirteen years of age; a scratch was not going to kill her. Rolling her eyes, Merith turned her back on her sister's reply which was heated and colourful, to say the least.

Merith continued to walk alone, staring up at the sky and hoping to see anything other than the same mid-grey. Then, she stopped abruptly. She had to. There was a narrow, dusty lane beside the farmhouse, leading into Mineral Town. She had walked along it, once.

A long time ago. Distant, now.

Now, a tall gate was spread across the width of the entrance. The padlock their father had instated was made of heavy, ugly iron. Merith had always known her family were a bit different, viewed as weird by outsiders; and how could they not be?

That gate screamed recluse.

"Hey!" Merith leapt from her reverie. She heard the door to the derelict barn swing shut and saw her father stride towards her. He seemed to have a forced a smile onto his face. In his right hand, he was gingerly carrying a sickle so rusty it looked diseased. Merith cringed. She was almost sure it had been shiny and silver only a matter of days ago...

She made to skip away again, but her father's strong hand grasped her wrist suddenly. His head was tilted to one side, his deep brown eyes confused. "What, dad?" she blustered, possessing none of Morwenna's confidence.

"Merith," he sighed, "where the heck are your shoes?"

Merith bit her lip. If she admitted they were broken, he'd only ask why. The answer was obvious: they'd been worn out, it was as simple as that. The family couldn't afford new ones, either, so what was the point in telling him? Bare feet weren't a problem; people managed in the olden days, didn't they?

"You're bleeding," he pointed out, when she dithered too long over her reply.

"Not anymore. Look, it's dried."

Strangely, he mustered a smile - albeit a very watery one. Just then, playing with her sister seemed like a rather attractive option to Merith.

"Got to go," she muttered, pulling away. "Wenna's calling me." Before she scurried away, Merith twisted around to father one final time, and asked, "Are you missing her?" She could only hope that the thought of her would cheer him up, if only a little.

One evening, just another in the never ending bleakness, Jack lowered himself into his usual chair at the dining table and let his head drop into his hands. He was vaguely aware that he was trembling, quite badly. Somehow, he had allowed himself to be drawn into this magnified game of cat-and-mouse. This nightmare was exactly the kind of scenario he'd believed would never happen. A scenario where he realised how weak and powerless he truly was. In his heart, Jack knew that if this custody battle was played out legally, in a court of law, he could win it. His daughters loved him; by contrast they scarcely knew her.

But this was a battle on another plane entirely. In this confrontation, his wife had everything, every weapon, and Jack had nothing.

Slowly, he turned his face to the ceiling. "Why," he croaked, as if she was hovering right above him, "would you give a gift, only to try and claim it back?"

As Jack expected, his only answer was deafening silence. He tried another plea: "You know I'd never stop you from coming back more often" - how the hell could he? - "or from seeing them. Just please leave them be, they're happy. Please."

More silence.

But he didn't really need a reply, did he? He knew from the way she had ravished his farm and livelihood, from the way she was slowly starving the life out of his daughters, that his estranged wife was enacting a terrible vengeance. She would have no sympathy, no one would; Jack had meddled in something no human ought to. He certainly remembered registering Pastor Carter's obvious doubt at his infatuation with the Goddess. He also vividly, and often regretfully, recalled ignoring it.

"A wedding?" Carter's pale face broke into a smile; there had not been a new marriage in Mineral Town for years.

Jack didn't smile. He waited, instead, for the inevitable veil of confusion to fall between them. Sure enough -

"But... Forgive me, I may be out of touch... I had no idea you were even dating anyone... Jack?"

"Before you say anything else," Jack explained, swallowing nervously and running his hand along the polished wooden pew, "bear in mind how much I love her. This hasn't come from nowhere, okay? And, yeah, she took some convincing, but if anything I think that's strengthened us."

Carter was frowned worriedly now. "Go on," he prompted.

So Jack did. He told the priest everything there was, charting the dizzying, dazzling and exhausting journey of the past months. When he finished, Carter's expression was both unwelcome, yet exactly what he had expected.

"You've got to believe me," he reiterated. "I really do love her."

Finally, Carter recovered his voice. "Oh I don't doubt that, Jack." He coughed awkwardly, and looked away slightly. "It's just that sometimes, quite often, even love can't make a marriage."

Nevertheless, Jack went through with the ceremony. The Goddess was everything the human girls of Mineral Town were not. While they were judgemental and gossipy and expectant, she was simply serene. Put one way, he was just a scared kid in a new town, who needed to get away from it all.

And she was right there, waiting.

Her hard-to-get act? Just what he needed, as it turned out: something for him to focus on. He poured his energy into obtaining her; the girls of Mineral Town and their idle gossip went totally unnoticed.

Jack sent a fleeting glance towards the window and smiled weakly. The marriage didn't stay perfect for long, of course. In reality, he soon came to realise, it had never been perfect. Because once he'd finished chasing after her, what did he have left?

An absent wife and an empty house. A lonely heart and an empty bed.

She gave him the girls later. A gift - or so he'd thought. She created them, carried them, bore them, even named them. The greatest gift she could have given them was humanity, and she gave them that too. They were mortals.

Jack had never been more grateful in his entire life. But, again, he was wrong. He never considered that she might miss them, might be jealous of their mortality... that there was only one way she could bring her babies back into the comfort of their mother's arms...

He suppressed a sob at the kitchen table, holding back his emotions with difficulty. That was not even the worst of the story:

Because you'd have to be mad to betray a Goddess, wouldn't you?

Yet eventually, his empty life took its toll. Jack had learned too late what real love was. Real love, he discovered, popped up in the places you least expected to find it. He encountered it in a quiet library one day, whilst looking up plant names. She was the sweetest thing, and just about the only female in town not to judge him for his choice of wife. So what, if she started paying the odd visit to the farm? So what, if he gave her free jars of honey? As a librarian and aspiring author, Mary was Merith's ultimate role model. The girls came to adore her.

Even when his farm became a dusty, deserted wasteland and the honey had dried up - his wife's bitter revenge - Jack could not tear himself away from Mary. And now... now everything was beginning to crumble from the inside out.

He dared one glance out of the window, only to have to look away immediately, pricked by a sting of guilt. The girls were playing happily enough on the front lawn, but they were not alone.

Clutching her beloved notebook, both feet planted firmly on the ground, Merith observed Morwenna sitting proudly in the crook of a tree branch. To the right of the scene stood Mary, his beautiful Mary. His. How he wished that part were totally true. Even though the sun rarely shone over Mineral Farm anymore, her charcoal hair seemed to shimmer as she moved.

As if she knew she was being watched, she looked up, right at him. Mary waved enthusiastically, gesturing for Merith to do the same. The scene made Jack ache inside; they looked like a proper family, but never could be. When they looked away, he squeezed his eyes shut, determined to imprint the image on his brain forever.

CRACK-

Merith. Morwenna. Merith. It was her gasping attempt at a scream which went on and on, that brought Jack to his senses.

The tree branch - his mind was moving much too slowly - it had - had snapped. Morwenna...

Jack felt a swell of sickness rising from the very bottom of his stomach. He was shaking as he threw back his chair; Merith was still howling like a wounded dog. An accident, they'd say. Tragic and unpreventable.

Only someone could've stopped it. Someone could have shown mercy.

The door flew open, sending Mary staggering over the threshold. Tears had streaked her ghostly white face. "J-Jack!" she cried. "I - I don't know how it - I don't know what happened - " When he didn't move or reply, she impressed the urgency with another shriek, "Jack!"

Mary held out her hand, but he couldn't bear to take it, striding straight past her instead.

Jack knew it was futile to hurry. He knew long before he reached her, that Morwenna was dead.

He knew. He knew...

What kind of mother would murder her own child?