The Wooden Rail of Memories

As soon as the Sun had gone below the horizon I was in my favorite rocker on the porch swing.

It was the day of the year again.

It was a sort of ritual for me to have burned a candle tonight. I stuck it in one of those old mason jars that we used to put pickled cucumbers in and placed it on the smoking table in front of me.

As if it were a prayer to return my sister home. But it did not. And now, on the porch where I had spent my childhood, I regretted that I had tried to flee in summer, and was blaming myself for my sister's disappearance.

I said nothing to her and how she'd vanished for a frightfully long time. I couldn't. I was under sanction at a sanatorium when I tried it. I have become dotty in my dotage, but the recollection of the day torments me with precision like yesterday.

I draped my backpack over my shoulder and walked home and slipped off, unaware my sister trailed after me into the woods. Our cousin Marcel trailed behind us as well, too afraid to guide us into danger.

We entered into a circle of mushrooms that glowed when I sent him away— but not my sister and me. I awoke within her, and she had vanished. Marcel never spoke to us again.

Reflecting, I see now why people never gave me the time of day. But quiet did not prevent it from happening, and quiet did not restore my sister.

Tears overflowed my eyes, and eyelids grew heavy as I rocked myself into hypnagogic*. A quiet corner of calm — and mine was filled just as much with sorrow.

It would have been nice that the air smelled because it was due to the rosemary smell which filled the garden. I just simply did not realize that they should be pruned this year. I just simply needed to make sure that I get the brownies prepared on time.

I must watch my energy today. I can no longer dance in and out of this home like I did when I was young and aunt Gabrielle ruled over me with that authoritative voice when my siblings and I would spend summers here as children.

I now own her house and I allowed it to become all that my aunt hated — dirty, disorganized and down at the heels. My sister would love it. I did everything for my sister.

I even left on the brownies, as well as a tin box which I never go without. They always had to sit in conjunction with the directing flame of the candle.

Was it the scent of the brownies baked tonight that blended with the rosemary, as strong as the patchouli that welcomed the fireflies tonight?

They appeared to have dropped into my backyard by the millions, dancing like string lights. Or was it an illusion that I saw beyond the veil of my eyelashes?

I would swear I did glimpse something out of the corner of my eye, where the brogans was in bloom. I couldn't say. I heard a crack, but couldn't even open my head. I had a queer, old-fashioned sense of being watched but it wasn't frightening.

It was a sort of a sensation I recognized. I let my eyelids drop for five seconds, but didn't open them up again afterwards.

I awoke to my own snoring sometime later — by the blackness surrounding me and how low the candle had burnt. Fireflies had taken flight hours prior but I still couldn't feel that I was alone.

A different creak came this time from my left. When I turned around in its direction, a chill, small hand laid on top of mine.

"Marie."

Either my friend or someone who recognized me yelled out my name.

There was this enormous ring of light around me, the same kind we had that afternoon in the forest.

That was when I last saw her.

And here she is now, standing before me.

She did not change for a single day. She was still as I was when she was gone.

She grinned at me like we'd just come in from a trip together in the afternoon. How do I know her in this version of decrepit hag, anyway, all these years later?

She'd been so solid, so alive, there. But I must have been dreaming. She tightened her fingers around my hand, as if figuring the same and not wanting to lose it remembering me reminding her she is.

"Marie," — she said, bending her head as she used to do — "you've waited long enough."

"I never thought I'd see you!" — I myself broke out in hot tears again. The words felt awkward on my lips. I did not know how to welcome my own little sister after so many years.

To see her, though, was to converse with my own younger self. She was me — small twelve year old girl with her braids, in my white blouse and my brown poodle-specked dress playing along the hem. But she was. My little sister, Elisabetta.

"I wasn't far." — she gazed at the ring of softly radiant mushrooms that hemmed us in. — "I never ceased coming back, you just never realized. I was here the whole time."

I could sense only how far back into my bones the pain of having lost her has receded as now it started to recede.

"Why did it take you so long to come back? I searched for you for so many years."

Her smile quivers.

"Because I couldn't get here until you were ready to jump."

I tried to laugh, and it was dry and ended in a cough. "Ready? I'm seventy-seven years old, Elisabetta. I can't even spring off the bottom step of the porch-step bottom step. Do you hear that?"

I crossed my legs so she could hear the groan of my knees, like walnut shells under that little hammer with which we used to break them open.

She flung her head with years that seemed to mean time went over her too. "It's not for your knees. Marie. You know that."

We sat there in silence, staring at the candle flame that trembled between us. I could smell rosemary again, but under it something damp and earthy, as if the forest floor had seeped out under the porch.

"Do you remember the rhyme?" — she asked.

The words gagged my throat and stuck there with that scalding, bitter taste— the same vile rhyme we'd shared a million times that summer. I did not speak it.

Her eyes shone with evil, or perhaps with hunger. "Say it, Marie, and I'll take you with me. Once."

I grasped her bony little hand. She had a small scar on the palm of her hand, a one I recognized. I'd received it climbing an apple tree.

— "What if I go?"

"Then the summer never ends" — she replied in seven-year-old wide-eyed awe. What she actually was, to me anyway.

"Still, what if I don't?"

She smiled gently with a soft smile on her face.

The brogans flowers danced in the candle-lit vase, but I did not feel the wind.

I looked at my hands — furrowed and rough, dotted with brown freckles just like our Nona's. But it was not really my hand; it was to be Elisabetta's.

I didn't know how to make her understand. I was too worn out and old for all the summers, but all that I could do was pray to see her again. She didn't need to tell me anything, I already knew what would come about if I stayed.

She put her head down once more. "Then come over and spend the night here. We'll sit beneath the old weeping willow that stands near the creek. We'll eat the brownies and tell Aunt Gabrielle's ghost to for once leave us be."

It laughed at me — a great laugh, the kind I had not heard in decades. The kind that rolls the weight off of your chest. Or at least, half of it.

The still rhyme sizzled at the back of my throat. I was tired and old. I promised I'd never do it again ever. But if I tell it again out loud.

Elisabetta came close, crazily shining eyes. She didn't utter a single word, but kept on nodding in the same way.

The night hung suspended in mid-air. The fireflies returned again, crawling slowly in a circle around the mushroom ring.

I opened my lips—

The words escaped, slow and deep at first, then suddenly burst out in the same cadence as for so long. My voice was harsh, like autumn gales through dry leaves.

As I recited the final line, fireflies flitted around us in a ball of gold.

The screen creaked behind me. I heard the soft thud of bare feet ascending the weathered planks, and a light touch on my shoulder.

"Aunt Marie?" — the sleepy voice of my niece.

I had emerged from my eyes by fractions. The candle had dripped into wax and iced over atop the mason jar hours before. The brownies were gone from the plate. The dawn was breaking on the horizon.

I turned my head to Elisabetta.

A patch of wetness persisted on the cotton of the worn cushion of the swing, with the aroma of rain and moss.

"You're gonna catch a cold." — and draped a knit blanket over me.

I saw my niece's face, before my eyes fell. Rosemary and damp moss scent shut over me, like a shawl.

In that heat I could have sworn I heard my sister laughing, commanding me to follow her.

I was tugged by a soft tug off the porch, through the garden, into the woods, into that summer world that knows no end.

~~~

NOTE:

*hypnagogic: act of sliding away from wakefulness into sleep.

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This is related to two other projects I've created.

You can read Elisabetta's disappearing story here

The Summer That Never Ended

and nursery rhyme of the children:

Instruction For Disappearing