Nyx (ON HOLD)

Aislingate, Part I

I never understood how something could loom like the spectre of death until I saw my grandmother's house for the first time. It hunched at the edge of the sea cliffs, gnarled as a witch's tree, three storeys tall and covered in fish-scale shingles painted black. The cursed thing even had a turret, and its triple windows glared down at me through the dusk like grey sisters.

It looked like an ornate coffin - one that had now become my home.

Two weeks ago I'd never given this place more than a passing thought. I'd never even seen a picture of it. Then again, two weeks ago Mom was still alive.

It wasn't until I was cleaning out her bedroom after the funeral that everything suddenly became real. Up until then it had all been so distant: a phone call, a coffin, an urn. I hadn't looked inside. Mom was gone; I didn't want to see what had been left behind.

Zoë arrived mere hours after it happened. She'd been just a state line away, and must've been Mom's emergency contact for her to have arrived so fast. I was sitting in this year's apartment in total darkness, not even realizing that the sun had set hours ago and I hadn't turned on any lights. It didn't seem to matter.

I usually thought of Mom and me as nomads, moving from place to place each year, but with the retro silver Airstream rumbling behind her battered, battle-scarred pickup, Zoë was the true gypsy. She looked every inch the part, with rich, raven-dark locks that fell to her shoulders in a torrent of untamed helixes, and strong, slender arms that were banded with intricately scrolled tattoos. She stared down nosy Mrs. Meier as she parked her house-on-wheels beside our end of the duplex, and though the old woman glared, even the white of her eyes yellowed from the cigarettes that seemed to alight on her clawed fingers like butterflies, she didn't dare say a word. Though she'd flaked on us a hundred times before, in that moment Zoë was my hero.

She was the one who found the photograph and showed it to me. We were onto the boxes by then, trying to figure out what could be salvaged, and what needed to be cut loose. Mom and I had so few possessions that I thought I knew everything she owned - but the photo slipped from the pages of Mom's Tennyson and spiraled to the floor like a pressed flower, utterly unexpected.

"This is it - your gran's house," she told me from somewhere in my peripheral vision as I stared down at the picture.

I looked away from the photo long enough to squint at her. Zoë was the first person Mom had met in the outside world when she ran away from home, back when I was three years old - but to the best of my knowledge, Zoë had never been to Marblehead. Not the one in Maine, anyway. "How do you know?"

She nodded at the shiny rectangle of paper clutched in my fingers. The black polish was mostly chipped away from my nails by then, but I couldn't bear to remove it completely, knowing who'd painted them in the first place. "Look at the back."

I flipped it over and was surprised to find Mom's familiar, cramped handwriting. Aislingate, 2002. Meaning, I was two years old when the picture was taken.

Meaning, Dad was still alive, too.

I stared at the house, trying to get a sense of the place. The building was too backlit by apricot and rose clouds to see anything properly, but I could make out the outlines well enough; the haughty tower, the brooding Victorian posture of the place. After nearly a decade and a half I was seeing it again - but if I'd been expecting any glint of recognition from ancient memories, I was disappointed. At the end of the day it was just an edifice, a place, yet another place Mom would never be again.

"Can't I just come live with you?" I growled, dropping the picture on Mom's bed. Correction: the bed that used to be mom's. The bed was on the list of things that I couldn't take with me, loose ends that needed to be tied up.