Things in the
Attic (short story)
She
pulled the ladder down from the ceiling, cringing as it groaned in protest. The
general rule for sneaking into the attic in the middle of the night was to be
as quiet as possible, but she wasn’t practiced at it, and the ladder wasn’t
aligned with her mission. No matter – her parents were pretty sound sleepers
and generally preoccupied anyway. She pumped her foot on the bottom step to
make sure it would hold her weight. Once she felt it was secure, she placed a
flashlight in her mouth and shimmied her way into the ceiling, shuffling across
patches of insulation and strategically placed floorboards, stray nails,
cobwebs, and things that crawl. God, how she hated that attic.
The
storm had woken her – a large blast of thunder that shook the whole house – but
it was her grief that kept her awake. Something strange happens when death
takes up residence in your home; the atmosphere somehow becomes thicker –
heavier – and everyday movements feel like you’re doing them through water.
Even mundane chores like taking out the garbage require a new level of effort.
She was learning about the strangeness of it all, like how she could be
exhausted and wide awake at the same time. Maybe that’s what death does; it
forces some kind of juxtaposition of contrasting things: all of your greens are
framed by reds, you’re hungry but you don’t want to eat, and you’re alive but
you wish you were dead.
She
swung her flashlight in an arc to clear away spider webs. In the middle of the
night, the sounds of the house were more pronounced, and even more so from the
silent attic – the hollow plunk of rain hitting gutters, the whirring start of
the sump pump kicking in. It felt like a lifetime had passed since she was a
girl scout, but, even so, she counted the seconds between flashes of lightning
and clashes of thunder. What was the point of that anyway? It was clear the
storm was on top of the house and not happening miles away.
Her
beam stopped on half-torn boxes, plastic bins, and large shapes covered in protective
cloths. Flares of lightning lit the attic in wholesale flashes. As a little
girl, she would have been frightened by what could have been hiding under the
cloths or behind the boxes – by what might be watching her from the darkest
corners of the room.
Another
crash of thunder rattled the things in the attic and shook the floorboards
under her slipper-covered feet. She moved the beam from one cloth-covered
mountain shape to the next. Her parents had a tendency to hold onto things long
past their due. We bury our people in the
ground and their things in the attic in this family, she thought. She made
her way past tall vertical stacks of newspapers and magazines and found the
specific cloth-covered mountain she was looking for.
She
hunched over to avoid the beams in the ceiling and waddled towards a tall, thin
shape covered by a white sheet. It was easy to spot not because of its size and
figure but because the white sheet was the cleanest in the attic – not yet aged
or concealed by dust or cobwebs; her light appeared to bounce off of it when
she found it. As she approached it and raised her hand to reach for it, she
considered her horror if a hand were to reach back at her. She scoffed at the
idea but shrank back with the slamming of another sharp crash of thunder.
“Oh
my God, Ash, get it together,” she whispered to herself. She reached back for
the cloth and tore it away in one motion, revealing her grandmother’s antique
cheval mirror. It looked just as she remembered it – standing tall and proud with
its clouded glass mirror plate secured in its mahogany frame. Looking into it
now, she could have just as well been a little girl again wearing her
grandmother’s rose-colored shoes and pink scarves. A smile formed with the
memory and began to quiver. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes and her
throat swelled with sadness at the realization that her grandmother no longer
and never again would stand behind her in its reflection. She knew that, but
somehow seeing her solitary figure gave her a felt sense of that loss –
something that she would later struggle to find the words to express to her
friend Val. She would have begun to sob if not for becoming distracted by
seeing herself cry in the reflection of the mirror. The loss of her grandmother
was her first real confrontation with death, and it became something she had to
wrestle with – negotiating how much she allowed herself to experience her own
sense of mourning and how much she allowed others to see her grief.
She
wiped at her eyes with her wrists, noting that her hands were covered in dirt
and grime. Rain continued to rail at the roof above her, and somehow in this
moment, she felt all right. She uncovered another one of death’s strange
juxtapositions; the most normal she felt in the three days following her
grandmother’s death came during a thunderstorm in the middle of the night as
she sat on a cracked plywood board in the attic by her grandmother’s old
mirror. The realization reminded her of something she had just read on a
message board for New Agers. Someone had posted something along the lines of
saying that with all forms of art, we try to create externally what we feel
internally. As a little girl, she was forced into piano lessons by her mom, and
she approached the instrument with the same excitement she had when she was
given a bag of socks on her ninth birthday. “Well, you need them,” her mom had
assured her. What she really wanted was to play guitar in a punk band. But her
mom had a way of silencing those aspirations with her scoffs, eye rolls, and
the scripted, “Ashley, please.” So, maybe her real calling was in performance
art. She made sure to make a mental note of that as a point of discussion for
drama class.
Alas,
she found what she was looking for – an item connected to the person she lost,
which also happened to be a mirror (the second thing she needed), and a quiet
space to try to contact the dead undisrupted. She sat down with her legs folded
and placed herself in front of the mirror with the flashlight shining upwards
from the ground. In that position, she could see her face reflected in the
mirror and not much else. Following the instructions from the website, she
began the process with an invitation for spirits to reveal themselves to her.
She
rested her hands in her lap and allowed herself to relax.
With her eyes closed, she took a deep breath and stated her intention, “I am
here to speak with my grandmother. I will only receive messages from her. I
will not see, hear, or acknowledge any other spirits.” With her intention stated,
she opened her eyes and gazed upon her reflection in the mirror.
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