Pink plaid skirt

She looked at the plaid skirt hanging, far back in the closet. It had been there hanging now for years..totally untouched. Probably something like a decade or more, she could not really recall, exactly. Gingham pink plaid. She had found it down in the Southeast. She could still remember the day like it was yesterday. That skirt was the most powerful one on Earth wasn't it? Just one touch of that thing and everything has changed..altered. At the time she had not known. At the time it had happened entirely by accident. But oh how it had happened and oh how everything had changed so radically & it was that whole that one single skirts fault. It was like the sword of Zenfire, or the waters they say are up in the mountains of Swedens northernmost tip. It was imbued with strong magic. Magic she did not understand, that she was petrified of even trying to understand.

She was all alone down there in the deepest cellar of the castle just staring at the thing, feeling absurd. That was how far down she had stored it /-"contained" it, as though it was a weapon. None of her husbands had ever seen it. Her boyfriends. Her fiancés. None of them. Not since the beginning, at least. And of course neither had her children, who she could hear above her right at the moment, waltzing around as they did in the mighty fortress. None of them had ever gotten so much as a glimpse of the potent skirt. The gingham pink that had, in fact, given birth to their mother. Created her. Oh yes. 

She brought her hands up to her forehead beginning to rub. For weeks now bad headaches had been coming to her. She felt tense and terrible it seemed, all of the time, like she could get no relief no matter how hard she tried. She hadn't cooked nearly as much as usual, hadn't sung or danced, done her hair, her nails, the hair of her daughters...her own dress making..skirt sewing...none of it. Instead she had tried to swim the tension off - but it was not working. Old memories, real weird ones, kept bubbling up to the surface of her mind. She didn't understand from where they were coming. The memories felt like they did not belong to her; but of course they did. Otherwise where were they from? And she felt like it had something to do with the gingham pink skirt. The first one she could ever remember wearing. Had it been too long since last she wore it?