(This an extract from The Good Witch Film Stars and Butterflies. )
Michelle
Mother’s Letter
One memory is in her room.
It was one of the last days of summer, where rain lightly poured down on the windows, clinging on in humidity. I sat cross-legged on the floor watching the droplets, enjoying their shadows dancing on my skin. When two droplets joined together I imagined that they had fallen in love; then sometimes I noticed, when they had gotten too big they would split in two again. All of a sudden, I heard muffled shouting. Something had been wrong in the household lately, though I just couldn’t figure out what. The floorboards were thin, so I laid down to listen.
“You send that letter and it will be nothing but trouble! You’ll regret it. Darling please you’re being paranoid again.”
“I can’t do this anymore. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.” I heard a shuffling around, and a lot of heavy breathing, crying and screaming. Whether that was solely from my mother I did not know. But by this age of 6 I had learned that, as a child, I was not expected to know certain things. Or more so, that I was expected to not know certain things. It went quiet, and I heard my father go out the back door. I climbed up to look out of the large window, where I could see him light a cigarette. He promised me and Mum that he was going to quit, but I figured that I should ignore it this instance. Suddenly the room seemed darker. It didn’t take me very long to realise that the dark shadow laying across the windowsill didn’t belong to me.
“Why are you in here?” my mother said quietly. It wasn’t angrily or intimidating, in fact it was rather empty.
Mum’s room was off limits, not her bedroom; that of course she shared with Dad, but her room. Where she kept her things, her stationary, her books. Everything was spotless, it was like looking at a Victorian Painting. I was never allowed in there, but of course, mystery was far too enchanting.
“What have you seen?” She said more firmly.
“Nothing.”
“What have you touched?”
“Nothing.” I murmured, stood still as a statue, only my eyes moving to everything I had indeed seen and touched. Mainly over at the bookcase, I wanted to count them all. Then I watched the shadow follow my eyes, as my Mum pulled out a handkerchief and brushed the books with it. She instantly seemed more relaxed.
“Why do you read so many books?” I asked.
“A life without books is a riddle without a solution. You can tell more about a person by the books they read than the words they speak.”
“Is that why you don’t speak much?” I realised I may have spoken out of turn. There was a long pause. I had noticed how quiet my mother was from quite a young age, though I was always scared to question it. After school when she would pick me up, she would be with the other mothers, enjoying their conversation, but never joining it. She would laugh at Dad’s stories, but never add to them.
“Come here and help me with something.” She said.
“With what?”
“Writing a letter.”
“You mean from the alphabet?”
“No. I mean to a person.” She took my hand and pulled me over to the large oak desk. “Do not open any of those drawers do you understand?” I nodded. I watched as she carefully opened the third drawer to take out a pen and paper, and smoothly closed it again. This was the closest I had ever felt to her, sitting by her side, doing something together. Suddenly I saw her hand shaking. She seemed so fragile.
“Who is the letter to?”
“The monsters under your bed.” She said. I felt butterflies in my stomach, bad butterflies. Parents were supposed to tell you that monsters weren’t real.
“Daddy said that the Good Witch was keeping them from getting me, she put a spell on my bed and on this house so that they couldn’t get me.” I watched her expression, the look of concern mixed with disdain grew. She left the world of fantasy to the greats, Dickens and Shakespeare, not my dear old Dad.
“Well let’s say that this is a goodbye letter then, since they shouldn’t bother you anymore should they. Besides, letters are the proper way to deal with these matters, not spells.” She gave me the pen and taught me where to put the date and address, and how to start the letter with ‘To Whom it May Concern’, followed by ‘I am writing this letter to…’
While she began writing the rest she would chant,
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it
I later found that this was a quote by Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam’s poem with over 50 stanzas. Each stanza can stand on its own to mean a new thought provoking concept. After this moment in my life, that stanza was always the one that stood out.
“What does it mean?”
“It means that when you write your thoughts, they are fixed, you can’t take it back so easily. Spoken words mean nothing Michelle, nothing. They can seem real, for a while but they fade, the written word is permanent. These are my final words to some people I knew a long time ago. And people’s last words are almost as important as the books they read… almost” She said with a painful expression. Then she took a candle that was on a shelf by her right-hand shoulder.
“Is this the letter that Daddy didn’t want you to write?” I muttered, suddenly hoping that she hadn’t heard me. She paused, but then nodded. She lit the candle and pointed to the bottom of the letter for me to sign it. I signed my name.
I tried to read it but there were too many words I didn’t understand. I gazed at the letter as she did, she re-read it and re-read it, then suddenly, she took the candle to it. The small flame on the bottom right corner began to grow and my eyes grew with it.
“Why?” I said in shock.
“As I said, the written word is permanent.” The room began to feel warm, although Mum felt cold.
“Don’t the monsters under my bed need to know what it said?” I murmured. There was a pause as we watched the flames grow to the top, and Mum let the paper drop to the desk, tapping pieces with her pen to break it up into ash.
“I know what it said. And that’s enough.”
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