Nemaiza
Stories & Illustrations
Mother
Tonight, I lie beside my mother and listen to her imitate the slow breaths of one who is fast asleep. She knows I am not fooled. Neither of us speaks. We both prefer to maintain the illusion of dormancy - her the sleeper, I the watcher.
I will know when she truly begins to doze. Her breathing will become more natural, for a time, and after that the shakes will follow. Slowly at first, then growing in violence until I rouse myself and hold her steady. It is a routine in which we are well-versed.
For now, though, she is still. Quiet. Outside the surf is a soft boom against the cliffs and the black rocks at their feet. Silver moonlight falls through the gap in the shutters and glides across the bare floorboards.
In her half-wakeful state, Mother conjures the spirits of fishermen long drowned to walk the periphery of the overgrown garden. Their heavy boots crunch along the gravel path. I expect the slither of moonlight to darken as each one strides by the window, for their shadows to blot out the light, but it never even flickers. The moon’s eye pierces their ghostly forms.
I reach out and cover her cold hand with mine where it rests on the blue quilt between us. The footsteps die away into nothing. Once more the only sound outside is that of the sea, and the odd gull returning to its cliffside-nest.
In the morning, cold and grey, we walk the length of the dour strip of sand and loose stone we generously call a beach. It is our daily ritual. An attempt to blow away the metaphorical cobwebs, but my skin always feels so thick with them that only the fiercest gale could ever cleanse me.
I pause halfway between the wrecked ship to the south and the rockpools in the north to take in the bleak view. Mother walks on, eyes downcast. She stops now and then, stooping to scoop up whatever oddity she has found among the shingle and the driftwood and the sand. I watch her from the corner of my eye. For every ten, shuffling steps she takes, I take one to make up the distance. If I let her wander too far, I will lose sight of her in this grey landscape. With her slate-coloured clothing and her hair like smoke and just as intangible, it does not take long for her to blend in with the world. That is something I have been battling since childhood - my mother’s tendency to just…slip into the air around her without realising. One day soon I know she will escape reality for too long and be lost among the grey dunes, perhaps scattered by a stray gust of wind off the sea.
I keep her in my sights for good reason. Still, I allow myself a few moments here and there to look out over the pewter and iron expanse. Away from the cacophony of the rest of humanity, and with nothing on the horizon but endless cloud and cold water, it is easy to feel like I am standing on the edge of the world. Perhaps I am. It seems madness to think there would be anything beyond that hazy, grey line.
This stretch of sand is surely all there is. The rush and sway of sighing waves are the living lungs of this place, the standing stones along the clifftop its broken bones, and the sound of unworthy pebbles dropping through Mother’s fingers its heartbeat. It is disjointed, discordant.
I shake these thoughts from my head and turn back to find my mother gone. My heart leaps into my throat and the waves come in faster in my mind. I blink. Then the breeze catches on her frail figure, and I can again distinguish the grey of her ratty shawl from that of the sand.
She remains with me, for now.
​***
Dead flies lurk behind the curtain. Their curled bodies pepper the sun-bleached wood of the windowsill. Mother counts them every day after our walk. It is a safe activity - or so I thought, until one day I realised their number had dwindled. It happened gradually, starting with seventeen. I knew there were seventeen because she told me so every day, and I knew it remained seventeen because she would make a great fuss about sweeping fresh bodies out of the window for the cat we did not have.
Seventeen. And then suddenly there were only nine. I passed the window one day while Mother was dozing, and chance bade me look behind the gauzy curtain. There were too few bodies. I counted them to learn the damage. Eight flies gone. Eight worlds my mother has swallowed like Chronos eating his ill-fated children, except this time there is no younger brother to cut them from his belly.
When Mother wakes, she knows I know. She says nothing, as always, and shuffles to the chair beside the window to resume her counting. I remain in the room, forgoing the time I usually reserve for staring at the grass sea beyond the garden in favour of watching the fate of the flies.
Mother organises them into neat rows of three, nudging them gently with crooked fingers that bear no strength in their brittle bones. After a time, she forgets that I am there. Or rather, she forgets to remember. I watch her pluck a black body from the sill and pop it in her mouth. She is gone. Her chair becomes one of those chairs you are utterly unable to use, despite it being seemingly unoccupied. I can still see the impression of her in the thin cushion that supports her back.
The moments pass. I have no fear. The body of a fly has little power as a means of transport between worlds, between this grey illusion and the numerous others my mother has scattered herself across. I wonder if she will return with some lost piece of herself, or whether she will have left another behind.
The wait is brief. She is back as quickly as she went, as soon as the fly’s body gives out. Without missing a beat, she returns to pushing its gravefellows around the windowsill.
I watch the faint traces of colour leech out of her thinning hair. Whatever world she visited, it was clearly filled with life and dreams. I hope she has left no grey nightmares behind.
I leave her to her travels and step out onto the porch that wraps half-rotted arms about the cottage. I stare out across the waving grass towards the cliff edge and beyond, to the horizon where clouds heavy with rain are gathering over the sea. It will storm tonight. The thunder will keep Mother from her nightly wanderings – that at least is a blessing.
A fly zips past my ear and through the open door. I wander absently if Mother has called it to its doom.
When the chill at last overtakes me and the first fat raindrops strike the ground, I return inside. Mother is rising from her chair. I ask her how many flies there are today.
“Seventeen,” she says.
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Part Two
​​​​Night arrives in the crescendo of a storm – in a boom of surf against rock and shore, and a thunder of tumbling rocks in the sky. Back home, those words are mere metaphors. Here I have looked out and seen the silhouettes of boulders cascading behind the clouds. The world outside our cottage is so loud I barely hear the equally thunderous fall of Night’s boots upon the shore, and struggle to distinguish them as separate from the storm.
It is my mother who feels his presence first. She stirs from her armchair – close enough to the hearth that she might feel the fire’s warmth, but not so close that she can reach in and pull-out fistfuls of flames. She has her eyes though and has occupied herself this evening by changing the colour of the fire from orange to blue, to red to green, and back again just by blinking. It makes it hard for me to concentrate on my book. If anyone were to pass by and see the unnatural light, they might think the place haunted. I suppose it is, in a way, with my mother occupying its whitewashed walls.
No demon would dare possess this cottage while she calls it home.
At the arrival of Night, she quits her game with the flames and crooks a finger at the door. It swings open and cracks against the wall, forgetting that it had been locked and latched by my own hand not an hour before. Much of my day was spent pulling to the shutters and bolting them closed in preparation for the oncoming storm. Wasted time, of course.
A fierce wind bursts through the doorway. It howls about the small room, lifts the curtains from the wall as if playing hide and seek with ghosts, and tries to skip ahead the pages of my book. When it reaches Mother’s chair, the wind turns about and whistles straight up the chimney in fright. Rain makes tentative steps over the threshold but gets no further than that, having been brought in by the blustering wind and then abandoned there.
And then the doorway is no longer empty. There stands the Shadow of Night with his iridescent eyes and his dark cloak untouched by the firelight. The fabric is pocked with tiny pinpricks of white. I cannot tell if they are stars or holes.
Mother nods her head, and he takes that as leave to enter. I would rather he remain outside and continue on his way. I pull a frayed blanket tighter about my shoulders and stare fixedly at my book.
Night barely acknowledges Mother except to give her the briefest of bows before he turns his full attention to me. He opens his mouth to speak, and I tell myself I cannot hear his voice, though I know his piece by heart. He asks for my hand. He professes his undying love and adoration. He begs me to end his suffering and join him in the heavens.
I turn the next page in my book and decline, as though he has offered me nothing grander than an oat biscuit, and not the entire world.
I tell him what I always have and always will; that I am not destined to be so prominent in his story, or anyone else’s for that matter. I am in my own narrative and my written destiny is to watch my mother and keep her from herself.
Night bows again and leaves without another word. He has the sense to take the dying storm with him and as soon as his shadowy feet cross the threshold he and the thunder are gone. The rain stops tapping on the roof. The world beyond our walls falls into silence.
I stand and close the door, not bothering with the latch this time. The door, like most things in this cottage, listens only to my mother. I know that when I turn around, all the shutters will be open, and the fire will be blazing red.
Those red flames are the only indicator that Mother is angry. She takes the poker from the hearth and scrapes another line across its stones. The floor about the fireplace is covered in scratches. More have been carved into the wooden mantlepiece. Every one of them marks a declined marriage to a god. I stopped counting after a hundred or so.
I shrug at her and go back to reading, my smile smug.
***
I watch the copper pot glow with heat. The lid is chattering away, barely closed at all and is only just able to contain the boiling liquid within. I sigh heavily.
Mother is angry with me. Again. Everything I reach for turns too hot to touch or flies across the room. Our humble breakfast crumbles to ash in my mouth before I can swallow while she sits by the window eating flies. Their numbers dwindle over the course of the day. Each black body takes her elsewhere for a few moments, and every time she disappears, I wonder if she consumes them just because she can’t stand to be with me.
I give up on the tea for now and start sweeping the floor instead, after a brief battle with the broom in which it nearly succeeded in firing itself out of the window before I caught it by the bristles. The scratches on the hearthstones are hard to ignore. That fresh line is the source of Mother’s new wrath. That her daughter could so boldly refuse the Night once again drives her mad with fury, and she has no desire to contain it. Or perhaps she has forgotten how after I have failed her so many times. Failed…thwarted – it is all the same to her. I tug the threadbare rug closer to the cold hearth to cover up a few more of the gouges in the floor.
She tells me that I am fast running out of chances. Night will not wait forever – though here we disagree. Night has all the dark hours in the world for the rest of eternity to play my suitor, and I know he will play that part until I give in or, if I have my way, until I die of old age with no gold band around my finger.
What Mother cannot seem to understand is how disinterested I am in becoming queen of the Night. When I look up at the dark sky, I do not see myself among those cold and distant stars. Courting a god, becoming their consort – these things are more likely to end in my death than anything else. And what of the time before my end inevitably comes? All the hours of the day taken from me. Cursed to walk forever in eternal darkness and neither see the sun again nor feel its warmth upon my skin. That is not a path I would choose for myself.
When once I tried to explain this to her, she scoffed and invited Day into our home to court me too. I thwarted her on that. Even if Day arrived on the threshold in a ray of bright sunshine, I would not go with her. For then my world would be constant light and I would never again enjoy the quiet dark of the night-time. To go with either god would be to cut away some part of myself and I have already sacrificed much.
It would also mean leaving Mother unattended for a full twelve hours. Perhaps that is her true desire – for me to be away and unable to keep her doing harm to the world beyond our grey coastline. It would not take long for her to vanish entirely and set out on a path of havoc-wreaking.
Knowing her regained freedom is an omen for the end of days, I remain close. I allow her musings with the flies – their magic can only give her the ability to view other worlds for mere moments. It is never tangible enough for her to do real harm. Even were she to eat more than one at a time, she would only succeed in splitting herself between multiple worlds and coming back in pieces. That is something she will not risk and so I do not fear it.
But I am tired of my constant vigil. I lean the broom against the wall, reach for the pot, and clasp my hand around the handle still glowing white. Mother’s blood protects me from the worst of the heat but still it burns. I pour molten tea into a mug and set the pot down. My palm and fingers come away an angry red, already blistering.
Then a cool sensation wraps about my hand, soothing. The red fades to a healthy pink. The blisters heal over. I am surprised at this sign of Mother’s regret. She is still facing the window, her back to me. When I open my mouth, she swallows another fly and vanishes before I can speak.