The Summer Her Shadows Festered

Every July, the women returned home. The old house lied at the edge of the marsh and got filled with a sour scent of the herbs drying in the kitchen. The women were always there, even if only in spirit.

This year, Norah also went back. She had taken a sabbatical from her real job as a data analyst. She parked her compact old Fiat Regatta on the side of the wooden fence. It was partially hidden due to the wild grasses that have grown since couple of months earlier. She used to ask Mr. Lajos to cut the grasses, but he had passed away recently. She made a mental note to visit his grave, if only just to thank him for the years he had been faithful to these grounds.

She went towards the house with reticence in her steps, yet she stopped for some reason. She lingered in the doorway. Her city hands, used to mixing colors and create surreal illustrations for her Patreon fans, were too delicate for the chapped doorknob. Her Patreon account was a side hustle, a hobby, because her other real job was too technical to satisfy her creative cravings.

One thing was clear, though. Her city heart was simply unprepared for the house’s hunger. And everything that was yet to be revealed that summer.

She hadn’t wanted to spend the summer here, alone with her sick mother, but she’d run out of reasons to refuse. Her sister Jana was in Australia, had five kids and a booming fashion business that wouldn't allow her to even visit. Noraah wondered if Jana would come anytime, even though her promises have always turned to be empty. They hadn't seen each other for 15 years.

Norah went inside and kissed her mother's forehead. She was in bed and seemed to be asleep, yet every now and then some wild hushes and hums would be heard.

Norah made herself a cup of mint tea and went out on the portch to write. She just wanted to spill her thoughts on paper, about anything really, but whenever her pen touched paper, her mind circled back to the dreams.

Silent women in black, some of their faces familiar from Norah's childhood. Rapidly shifting from one ancestor to another, memories and unclear shadows intermingled. The women stitched words inside linen, hid them behind loose bricks, pressed fear into recipes and warnings she now carried in her marrow.

Norah woke each morning with a taste of smoke in her throat, she couldn't explain it. It was as if she’d been breathing bonfires meant for burning more than weeds. It was puzzling, even insane, for those to be just simple dreams. She'd always had a mind of her own, ever since the women first spoke in her dreams when she was three years old.

In her mother’s attic, Norah found a carved box, centuries old, with a golden crescent moon on its lid. Inside were blotched scraps of paper, faded to the color of old bones. Lists of herbs, invocations written half in Latin and half in desperate phonemes. It had the feeling of a survival language. At the bottom of the box she found a ragged, bloodstained ribbon. That's when her mother stepped in, somehow had climbed the ladder searching for Norah.

“Dear girl, we never talk about those things. We need to leave the past to its own,” her mother murmured softly. She had swiftly brushed aside the words, and her voice trailed like smoke in the wind. “It kept us safe. Silence was survival. It always was. Maybe we should burn those old things. My dying days are coming anyway, no sense in leaving all this burden to you.”

Norah felt the unspoken cost. That night, her dreams turned fevered: a line of women forced to flee unseen pursuers. The circle was broken, women had been accused and exiled, their stories somehow gpt buried with them. Her own hands burned in her sleep, fingers twisted by a pain she didn’t earn. Each morning, she checked for scorch marks on her skin.

Summer days stretched. July became August. The heat was almost unbearable, yet Norah kept to her tasks: brewing nettle tea, scrubbing floors, reciting family proverbs that sounded less like wisdom and more like spells against disappearance.

Norah began stringing bunches of lavender over the windows, half-remembering the stories of herbs protecting homes from intruders. She wasn't thinking of humans specifically, but rather of the memories that seemed to devour her. Memories that weren't even hers. She hadn't lived them, at least not in this life.

One stormy evening, Norah decided to ask her mother for the truth. “Why did we leave the old country, Momma?” she asked, though she knew the answer. Witch, they had whispered, pointing across the Atlantic. Why had the women in their family always been careful, always silent, always halfway to running away?

Her mother’s voice quivered, tears streamed down her wrinkled face. “They took everything but our stories. We didn’t dare speak them aloud.” Her hands shook. She remembered the blows, neighbors’ stones being thrown, accusations around fires, and old men's counsels. “The world punished women who knew too much and spoke too true.”

Norah stared at the box: the ribbon, the names, the stains, some invisible yet still feelable. All the summers were unmade before they began. That night, she wrote everything she’d learned. She wrote about the herbs, the exiles, and the women chained to silence. She felt their cries and silence in her burning skin. She wrote it as a spell, an inheritance, a lament. She needed this pain to feel alive again, to heal the generational inheritance that had been passed on from generation to generation.

When the end of August arrived, nothing was healed, not really. The house still creaked under the weight of centuries, the walls still spoke about the dreams and hushes. Her mother had accepted to be taken into an old people's home and seemed more at peace with everything. Norah hoped and breathed more easily after the notebook was filled with her writing. She left her story nestled beside the box, where the next daughter (perhaps hers, she hoped), or the next mother, or sister might find the courage to speak.

It was not a full healing, just a beginning into a long process of pain and acceptance. There were so many regrets told through the whispers! The hush was broken, just enough for hope to slip through the cracks, somehow smelling like lavender, and forever edged with regret.