“I told the ghost of my mother I was sorry. She smiled and disappeared.”
forgotten ask meme / no longer accepting / @alyssium
outside, the sky has lowered itself into a single unbroken sheet of iron-gray. clouds press low and heavy, gathering as if drawn inward by shared intent, their undersides bruised darker still, thickening toward storm. the color drains warmth from stone and leaf alike. even the distant treetops appear muted, subdued beneath the weight of it. the wind moves restlessly through the forest, not yet violent but sharpened —— long, testing gusts that bend branches and comb through the grass in uneven strokes. the scent of wet earth seeps into the room through the cracks near the windowsill before the rain has even fallen, that metallic promise that something is about to break open. shutters tremble faintly against their frames. loose gravel skitters across the courtyard in short, nervous bursts.
there is a pause in the air between gusts that feels charged, and alice breaks it the way children confess to breaking porcelain —— quiet, careful, almost proud of her courage.
no thunder answers. no wind rises in omen. the world continues in its indecent indifference. glen feels, nevertheless, as though some ancient bell has tolled beneath his ribs, where something old and buried tears open —— a fissure, slow, deliberate, intolerable, through which memory bleeds.
her. lacie.
he did not simply kill her: death, in its common aspect, is an extinguishing —— a single blow, a silence, a stillness. blade in hand. resistance of flesh. one final shudder. what he did was of another order. he struck not only at flesh but at that which grants the spirit its immortality. he felt the rupture as one feels fabric tear beneath too great a strain. there had been a brightness —— wrong, splintering —— like glass catching the sun as it shatters. and then fragments where a soul had been whole, and a scream that did not belong to lungs.
he has told himself, because he had to, that nothing remained after that. because if something remained long after, then what he did was mutilation incomplete.
in the months that followed, he saw her: a figure at the corridor’s end when lamps burned low, a reflection lingering in a mirror beyond the span of his own, the faint impression of flour upon a cheek when no kitchen fire had been lit. he would turn, and she would not be there. he would listen, and laughter would dissolve into the wind.
guilt is fertile soil. it breeds spectres with terrible industry.
he accepted those visitations as punishment devised by his own conscience: a mind seeking retribution where the law of men had none to offer.
but alice never saw her mother. memory is not inherited entire: it requires repetition, the daily engraving of presence upon the mind. the child had been too young to retain the curve of lacie’s voice, the warmth of her hand, even if his sister’s soul survived past judgment. what she possesses are not even portraits but stories, the fragile scaffolding of remembrance offered by others.
glen kneels before her, because he cannot afford to loom. he searches her expression for fever, for that peculiar vacancy he glimpsed in his own reflection during the darkest of nights, but there is none. she stands before him with the unshaken solidity of youth. no tremor of madness animates her. only sincerity.
“ and how, ” he continues, steady as a man walking a narrow precipice, “ did you know it was her? ”
silence descends, heavy as earth upon a coffin lid. his mind runs in circles. if the soul be shattered, is it annihilated —— or dispersed? he assumed dispersal into nothingness. it was the most merciful hypothesis. yet the abyss is seldom so obedient to theory. fragments may cling as dew clings to grass, gather where blood calls to blood. a child is a vessel of lineage. perhaps some splinter of lacie, driven by instinct older than death, found its way to the one being in whom her existence endures unbroken. or else ——
or else alice, raised amid absence and cold stone walls, fashioned her own consolation. children are architects of impossible tenderness: they people the void with forms shaped from longing. perhaps she constructed a mother from hearsay and hope, and the smile she described was her own need reflected back. yet if this were illusion, how cruelly specific it was. he recalls the nights when he himself perceived lacie in shadow. were those mere delusions? or abortive efforts of a fractured spirit striving toward manifestation? did he dismiss her presence as madness because the alternative, that he had not granted her even the finality of oblivion, was too monstrous to contemplate? if alice saw what he saw, then the haunting is not confined to his conscience, it is legacy. a soul torn asunder may not die cleanly. it may linger in the interstices of those who loved it, caught in threads of unfinished emotion. apology may serve as a key where violence could not.
alice apologized —— for what? for not remembering properly? for surviving? he wonders, with a clarity that feels almost surgical, whether he condemned his niece to the same deprivation he once believed himself strong enough to endure. but what does a child require more: a flawed mother, or none at all?
the wind slams against the shutters, harder now. a fine tremor passes through the stone beneath his boots. the storm draws closer: the air inside the room seems to shrink with it.
he imagines alice as she must have been in that moment: standing before an apparition she cannot possess, apologizing to a face she has never seen.
he never had the chance to apologize.
glen then lays a hand upon her shoulder with caution that borders on reverence, as though she too were composed of fragile light liable to fracture beneath his touch.
“ if she returns, ” he says, each word weighed as though it might tilt the world, “ tell her i am sorry too. ”
it is insufficient. it is all he can bear.
“ and… know this. i am sorry to you too. ”
and somewhere within the roar of rain, he confronts the possibility that the girl’s apology was not meant for a ghost alone. it may have been meant for a mother who never had the chance to remain and for an uncle who chose that fate for her.
