The Secrets my Mother Kept

Alexander shut his bedroom door and waited, listening to his grandmother's footsteps fade down the hallway. The sound of her favorite soap opera drifted up the stairs - she'd be occupied for at least an hour.

He pulled the notebook from under his mattress, the leather warm from being hidden there. This time, when he opened it, the loose letter slipped right out. His father's handwriting seemed to swim on the page:

"My dearest Alexander," it began. "By the time you read this your mother..." Alexander tear stain soaked the page interrupting Alexander who had gasped and skimmed past it. "Wherever I am right now, I know about these books... and if you ever come across them, I hope you're safe within these walls" Alexander listened for his grandmother again, maybe he should tell her what he found. Alexander read on, not noticing the language change to the strange symbols from before. The symbols shouldn't make sense - they weren't even letters, not really. But as he stared at them, they seemed to shift and flow like the water droplets had in his palm.

Some of them he recognized from… where, where did he know these words? Alexander reached into his bedside drawer and pulled out the first notebook.

There.

In the margins of some of the pages. Words. Phrases.

And he could read them.

Not all of them, but enough. Words emerged like shapes in clouds, becoming clearer the longer he looked. Words like “water”, “deep”, and “change” began to to hum sending him in a meditative state. The words dancing along the pages as he read.

The humming grew stronger, like the sound of waves against a distant shore. Alexander laid both notebooks side by side on his bed, the leather-bound one still warm from being hidden. The symbols seemed to pulse now, keeping time with his heartbeat. Or was his heartbeat keeping time with them?

More words emerged: "tide," "current," "pull." Each one felt like remembering something he'd always known but somehow forgotten. Like the way he'd known, without knowing how he knew, that he could make the raindrops move.

The meditative state deepened. The room around him felt far away now, underwater-quiet. In this silence, he could almost hear his mother's voice in the words, as if she'd written them knowing he would one day read them this way. As if she'd left them like breadcrumbs, leading him toward something.

The more Alexander read, the more a pattern emerged in the symbols. His mother had arranged them in a way that only made sense if you read them in this state - pairs of symbols that matched across both notebooks, creating new meanings when combined. Like a code, but one that lived in the spaces between the words.

His finger traced along a series of repeating symbols in the margins: "beneath" + "home" became "secret place." "Water" + "door" became "passage." The humming in his head grew stronger as the meanings clicked together.

There was something hidden in the house. Something his mother had concealed where only someone who could read these symbols - someone who could feel the water like he could - would be able to find it.

And based on the urgency in his father's letter... she'd hidden it for a reason.

“Lochlehm” Alexander interpretated. This was the word that meant home, he felt his stomach warm and then his chest, Alexander felt a cold chill slither along his scalp as tears started to fall uncontrollably from his eyes. He bit his lip and tightened his jaw as the walls began to shake gently “Inca, Lochlehm”