Dedicated to @oliviacat3 <3
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I put the record on
Wait 'til I hear our song
Every night I'm dancing with your ghost
-Dancing With Your Ghost
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The relationship between my mother and grandmother had always been strained at best. For some reason, no matter what situation we were in, whether we were driving to the doctor's office, or eating dinner in the evenings, or the rare occasion where we would sit and watch movies together, there was always some kind of underlying tension.
Initially, you could draw it down to their very different personalities. My mother was a beautiful lady, with a tall, willowy body and soft blonde hair flowing down her back. Her smile could light up any room she was in, her charm and charisma making it easy for her to find conversations whenever we travelled out of the grounds. Both men and women seemed to drop at her feet within moments of meeting her, charmed by both her maturity and childish carelessness.
My grandmother on the other hand, was far more stern and down to earth, with permanent worry lines imprinted on her forehead. She was the quiet authority kind, with a strict air that never seemed to leave. If you could describe them both with one word, my mother would be 'free', and my grandmother 'sensible'. She was a sensible lady, with sensible goals and a sensible life unfortunately for her, the trait not being passed down to my mother.
When I was younger, I used to just think that they didn't like each other. I would either spend time with my grandmother or my mother, but very rarely together, which worked far better than trying to talk to both of them at the same time. But as I grew older, I began to realise that it wasn't a clashing of ideas or habits, it was something that ran much deeper within them.
It was always easiest to pick up when they were either sat close together, or late at nights when I was supposed to be sleeping. The former was due to my mother almost instantly tensing and growing visibly uneasy whilst grandmother almost looked to be physically leaning away from her, the latter being the arguments they would have, the shouting and screaming that for some reason, they believed that I wouldn't hear, all about why they were annoyed at each other that day, but never explaining the hatred that ran between them.
The subject of why they truly hated each other had always been a bad topic to approach. I had only ever asked my mother twice – the first time, she brushed me off, laughing and asking why I thought they disliked each other, denying the emotion between them and claiming that they loved each other really, that they were just having arguments because that what families did, they argued because they cared so much. The second time I asked was when I found her sat on the steps outside, crying into her hands after a particularly loud argument. I must've only been ten or eleven, but the look on her face was something I could never forget.
Until that point, I had never even seen my mother cry. She just wasn't the type to dwell on misfortune, simply brushing off her troubles with a pretty smile. She had never let the arguments drag her down, only ever waking up the next morning with a painted face and the same glowing confidence that never left her. But, when I asked her why, the look of devastation that struck her face was heart breaking. It was as if I had ripped off the delicate mask she had tried so hard to keep, forcefully revealing the truth with no warning.
She had pushed me away and started sobbing, swearing and cursing me out. Frightened, I had leapt away and ran back into the house, locking myself in my room until the next day. I had never even tried asking her again, nor did she bring it up, appearing at breakfast the next day with that same mask back on her face.
My grandmother on the other hand, I had only asked once. It had been a summer evening and my mother had left and was spending the evening in the town, leaving me and my grandmother at the house. We were both quietly sat in one of the living rooms, me scribbling away in a notebook and her reading one of her books, when I had quietly asked. She had looked up at me, and for a second, I had seen her look at me with the same emotion she always looked at my mother: suspicion. She looked away and sighed, the look disappearing before she looked back at me and explaining.
Almost immediately I had felt shivers trace down my spine, despite dismissing the story from my mind. That's what it was – a story. There was no truth held within it, and no matter how seriously she told me, I couldn't bring myself to believe her.
Many years ago, when my mother was a child, she had run into the woods one afternoon, disappearing for months until, after countless hours of searching, she came stumbling from the trees and into the house, where she almost frightened my grandmother to death. The news had been involved, a national search for her, and yet here she was, wearing the same clothes as she had been wearing when she disappeared, with no memory of what happened. Strange, yet believable, as I later discovered a box full of newspaper clipping that could back the story, depicting pictures of my grandmother pleading with whoever had her to return her home, to let her little girl go.
No one had ever come forward with any clues or theories as to what had happened. There was no one to be suspicious of, with barely anyone really knowing who she even was, as my grandmother preferred to stay away from people. With a lack of evidence of foul play and no leads to follow, the police decided that, as there seemed to be no physical or mental trauma, there was nothing that they could really do, and so the case was put away, and life returned to normal.
Or, as normal as things could be. My mother had always been a pretty child, but now, she seemed almost unnaturally charming. Her blue eyes were just a little too bright, her blonde hair always a little too soft, her skin too smooth. She was unnervingly well spoken too, completely losing the stutter she previously had, her now silky voice smoothly able to twist truths and always paint herself in a bright light.
All of these changes threw my grandmother off into such a state of unease, that, in her mind, she began to disown this child that had appeared on her doorstep, began to differentiate between the daughter she once had and the daughter she now had.
My grandmother told me that, when my mother was young, she had wondered into the forest, and it was someone else who walked out in her skin.
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YOU ARE READING
The Fae
Fantasy"When two worlds collide." ------------ My grandmother had always hated my mother. Once, she told me that this was not her daughter, that one day she had been lost in the woods and it was something else that stumbled into the house months later. I a...
