Starlight

It was well past four in the afternoon when Alice finally gave in. She laid down on the worn attic floor and let out a breath that had felt lodged in her chest for at least the last half hour. She had been working since early that morning, steadily sorting through boxes and discarded furniture, setting aside what could be sold or donated and what needed to be thrown away while the June heat in the small attic became more and more cloying. Now, as the heat finally began to fade she found herself covered in sweat and dust and wincing against sore muscles all through her legs and arms and into her neck and shoulders. Truthfully, the ache she felt settle through her body as she finally paused in her labors felt like a blessing. It felt like relief. For the past few weeks, ever since her mother had called her to tell her of Aunt Agnes’s passing, Alice had been so terrifically, terribly numb. Rationally, she knew that she was grieving, but as hard as she tried she couldn’t access that grief. Instead, her body and her mind had gone into sleep mode while they searched for the bug, the faulty wiring, the pain that was there but wasn’t. So she lay there, dirty and sticky and aching, and let herself feel at least that until the last of the midday heat seeped from the room and the slightest chill made itself known along her forearms.

Alice looked up and realized that the light in the room had also started to change. As the afternoon waned, the sun pouring in through the dormers had gone golden and honeyed, giving the last of her careful organization a sweeping almost cinematic flair. But now the light had almost fully faded, and what remained had taken on a white or almost silver hue. It seemed half shadow already as did the attic it illuminated. Aunt Agnes used to call this the witching hour. She would say that ghosts weren’t really born in the dark, but in this last gasp of daylight. After all what were ghosts but creatures who thrived on the in-between, neither alive nor dead, neither here nor there, living in the darkness but only seen in the dying light. With that thought Alice turned her head towards the last trunk in the room. If there was ever a time to face her own ghosts she supposed this must be it.

She got up off the floor slowly, her joints now stiffened from the extended rest, and reached up to pull down the string that would turn the overhead light on. It was just a bare bulb really, but it flooded the room with a warm gold and what had just moments ago seemed a room full of spirits struggling to take shape was once again a small, run-down attic filled with nothing but debris and dust. The trunk itself also seemed less ominous now than it had just a moment before. In truth, it wasn’t something anyone other than Alice would have ever deemed sinister. It was simply a small trunk, painted a cheerful blue with her name, Alice, stenciled across the top in white. It had seen better days certainly, the paint faded and chipped in places and the side obviously dented, but it was otherwise inoffensive and almost sunny among the rest of the moldy cardboard and broken furniture that populated much of the space. But Alice knew that this trunk was the reason that her aunt had wanted her to be the one to sort through her belongings and set the house to rights. She felt the carefully stenciled letters of her name like a reproach. “Why have you been away so long?” they seemed to say. So Alice, with one last bracing breath, kneeled down and lifted the lid.

The inside of the trunk read like a museum of Alice’s childhood. There was a construction paper crown covered in glitter that had shed on almost everything else in the trunk right at the top. Then, just below that, was a cape made out of an old tablecloth next to a paper airplane, a long necklace of plastic beads in rainbow hues, and a stuffed elephant inexplicably missing one foot. All along the bottom of the trunk were a collection of smooth stones. Alice was struck suddenly with the memory of collecting them from the bank of the creek in the backyard, mining for them over days and years like they were precious stones and keeping them all tucked safely beneath her bed in the guest room in an old coffee can she had salvaged from the kitchen. Aunt Agnes must have found them and boxed them away carefully with everything else she had left behind before she stopped coming. Alice set back on her heels and let out a long breath. She felt a sharp, ripping sensation behind her breastbone. Here was the grief, she thought, as a sob followed the path of that rupture up into her throat. It just needed to be unearthed.

Alice had spent a week every August at this house with her Aunt Agnes when she was young, but the tradition had stopped suddenly the summer before she turned 13. Well, maybe not so suddenly. When Alice was young coming here had been the best part of every summer. The creek and the woods and Aunt Agnes herself, with her wild hair and her slow raspy way of speaking, all felt like something out of a fantasy novel. Aunt Agnes was some mystical fairy queen banished to this realm, but able to bring just a little bit of that magic with her, and here Alice could run wild and free and find that magic for herself while Aunt Agnes laughed and encouraged and made them lavender scones for breakfast and blueberry pie for dinner. But then Alice got older and year by year the cottage started to seem less enchanted and more run-down. Alice started noticing the peeling paint and broken floorboards instead of the climbing ivy and lavender bushes, she began to wish for air conditioning instead of relishing the heat as an excuse to run barefoot through any water she could find. Even Aunt Agnes no longer seemed like a fairy queen. With the insight of a girl on the cusp of adulthood, so very desperate to fit in, Aunt Agnes suddenly appeared to Alice as an old woman, an old woman both lonelier and stranger than Alice wanted to be. She didn’t want to end up alone in the woods, not now that the magic was gone. So she asked her mother if she could go to summer camp with the other girls in her grade instead of her aunt’s house, and her mother who always seemed to worry that Alice wasn’t socializing the way she should agreed without question. And so Alice saw less and less of Aunt Agnes and each year she grew further from her and from the wild child who had run free at her house in the summer, so convinced that magic was real and hiding just around the next tree.

Tucked against the side of the trunk were two items that seemed just slightly out of place, a small black notebook and a large manila envelope. She withdrew both carefully, trying not to disturb the rest of the fragile remnants of her past, and set aside the envelope to study the notebook. It seemed familiar somehow, although it definitely wasn’t hers. She cracked it open to the first page and started to read. “Once upon a time, there was a beetle who lived in a garden full of tomato plants,” the first page began. Alice immediately felt a lump form in her throat where a sob had just been as she continued reading. She flipped to the next page and the next, reading story after story about beetles and butterflies and ghosts in the attic. They were all her stories she realized with trembling hands, all the stories she used to tell Aunt Agnes. Suddenly she could place the notebook. She used to see Aunt Agnes at the table in the kitchen pen poised over this book as she trooped in wet from her creek exploration or covered in pollen from rolling through the wildflowers on the hill. She must have been writing these down all along.

They used to sit out on the porch on nights when the sky was clear, Aunt Agnes with a mason jar full of sweet wine and Alice with a lapful of clementines. The sweet smell of citrus still made Alice think of cricket song and sticky heat finally gone cool enough to enjoy. Aunt Agnes would cross her legs on her splintered Adirondack and tilt her head towards where Alice sat perched on the stairs. “Tell me a story, starlight,” she would rasp as the stars themselves steadily blinked on in the August sky. And Alice would oblige. She had always been a quiet child really. So much so that even now her mother sometimes still remarked on it, how shy and retiring she had been. But Alice knew that wasn’t the whole truth. As long as she could remember she had been telling herself stories. All of her play and her silence was animated by her own steady stream of consciousness as she created worlds and kingdoms and adventures with dolls and stuffed animals and imagination. It's just that nobody seemed to notice and so those stories, those words, stayed locked up inside her head keeping her company through what otherwise might have been a rather lonely childhood. Aunt Agnes has somehow always known, though. Maybe it was the silence of her own life that let her see the way her little niece would walk through the garden mouthing words to herself, or creating whole worlds in the living room with construction paper and scissors. But Aunt Agnes noticed, and she knew, and she asked. “Starlight, tell me another story,” she would always say, knowing somehow deep down that everything becomes so much more real, more important, when you can share it with someone else.

Alice turned the page again to find something that wasn’t a story at all. “Starlight,” it read, “I think you might have forgotten the little girl who used to tell me bedtime stories, but I never have. I have thought of her everyday, usually several times a day, and everytime I did I put a dollar in a jar for you. I ended up needing a suitcase, darling girl, and today I took that suitcase to the bank and had them give me some more manageable bills for you. There is $20,000 in the envelope you should have found with this notebook in your chest (I rounded up a little when they finished counting as it seemed like such a good number to leave you). It’s yours to do with as you wish, but if I could make one last request it’s that you use it to write a good story, just for you. It’s ok to live a little creatively every once in a while. I know life has a way of making us scared sometimes, scared of ending up alone or strange or lost. But life is going to do what it does no matter what you do so take this and live a little fearlessly just for me, Starlight. Tell me a good story.”