Requiem [COMPLETED]

Just Confirming Our Trauma, Thanks

During our years in the cities, as the Twin Cities metro area including St. Paul and Minneapolis are known, I have many vivid memories, including several of the phantom-like figure of my grandmother, whose mysterious visits seemed unplanned and rare. For reasons unknown, my grandmother was allowed to visit us at the Hansen's home; perhaps some quiet understanding had been arranged between grandma and them without social services being informed. It was one of many things that I've never found a good explanation for.

Her visits were few but memorable. She was a medium height woman, with an overall thinness that belied the broadness of her hips; her small waist and shoulders made her seem more petite than she really was. She had silver hair with occasional dark strands, a strong nose, and long-fingered hands that were still beautiful despite wrinkles and folds of skin. I can't remember how I knew it was my grandmother; I just remember being ushered into the kitchen by Mrs. Hansen and very formally shaking her hand like I'd been taught. We gazed deep into each other's eyes, and then wordlessly, I knew her; maybe there was a strong resemblance with my mother, that as a young child I couldn't completely understand even though I recognized it. I'd crawl up into her lap and sit there the rest of the afternoon as she rocked and talked to us.

We never had conversations. Neither Sven nor I can recall one time where we had what could be called a normal conversation. She would sit in the rocking chair next to the window, chain smoking a pipe, and tell us stories completely deadpan like a newscast, like Orson Welles relating War of the Worlds to a terrified audience. They were not fairytales—they never ended well—but it never occurred to me that they were strange. That was much later. At the time they were just stories meant to enthrall us. She always repeated the same ones each time. Between us we were able to recall them even after twenty-some years: a creation myth about people living on an underground lake and climbing a vine, like Jack and the beanstalk, out into the above-ground world; stories of the lone woman who was the first woman, wandering the world and braving perils. And then the story of the changeling, the troll-child changed out for a human baby, and how it destroyed an entire family.

After she finished the stories she didn't speak again, but sat rocking by the window until the grandfather clock down the hall chimed the next hour and Mrs. Hansen got up and started to fuss over supper. Grandmother had us come stand in front of her and in turn looked deep within our eyes as if making sure of something. Then she hugged us and left.

I remember not being able to sleep at night after hearing the stories until Sven reassured me they weren't true. Grandma never told us normal fairytales, the kind that end with good triumphing over evil or children learning to mind their manners. They always sounded like something between a bible story and a horror movie. She repeated the same stories as if she was intent on us learning by rote. There was something important that I was missing in those stories, like a coded document without a key. Was one of us the changeling child? She couldn't possibly be aware of our joint nickname, as the Hansens had dubbed us.

Grandma was always restless, switching her legs, crossing to one side and then the other or pushing the rocking chair in an uneven tempo. When she wasn't smoking, her hands rubbed each other restlessly, smoothing and smoothing the wrinkles as if trying to massage them away. She had a restlessness, an urge to constantly be doing or saying something, fidgeting as if sitting still was a punishment.

Her last story was always the most disturbing; it seemed that towards the end, the story became too much too retell, so she would segue way into vague pronouncements of impending doom and irreparable damage already accomplished as the dawn arose on a changed world, a skeleton of its former self. I don't remember it all exactly, but the main storyline was something like this:

There was a man once, a man who was very unhappy. His family treated him very cruelly. They believed that he was a swapped child, a changeling, and not their own son. It was believed that if a human child was taken that the parents could force the return of the child by treating the changeling cruelly, using methods such as whipping or even inserting the fake child into a fire. The child was so ugly and sickly that his mother had come to believe he was a troll's child. She believed that brutalizing the changeling would force the trolls to return her true son to her. She was so angry at the loss of her own child that she took glee in mistreating the changeling.