My name tasted like sour cherries, once upon a time. I savoured the tartness that pricked my tongue when people spoke it. A delectable name carried from the dark edge of the woods. Rosy with bitter juice, fragrant as peel. A name that went with cuckoos, witches, and cream.
In those days I let millipedes travel my palm. We had plenty in the house; they came up through the floorboards. My skin shivered at their ticklish march. Most evenings, I’d press my thumb into the soft blobs of wax Aunt Lina let drip down the mantel. Then I’d rub a clean finger into the textured grooves. Sometimes I plucked the dried wax from the icy marble and pressed its smooth underside to the dent between my nose and lip.
I wove an imaginary golden web from object to object. A web to keep me and everything I loved safe. I wasn’t afraid it would break, yet every day I wove new threads.
The cat’s bones felt tiny and angular under her sooty cloak. She liked to hide in the fireplace and I liked to cuddle her to my chest and carry her outside. Outside the sun cupped your cheek like a loving god. Why hide up a cold, black chimney?
Maybe cats are atheists, Aunt Lina suggested. I shook my head: cats are their own gods.
The burn behind our house gushed under the ivy in a slicing, silver spout. In summer its cool embrace cleaned sweat and spiky burrs from my legs, and in winter it felt like falling into a cold scream (Lina often dared me to dook my face in the water).
In this land, the water feels pure as air. The weather shakes and shrouds, pinches and pulls. The wind has a lot to say but it never seems to find the right words.
I always loved snow best. I’d ball cold piles into shapes, soaking the coarse wool until it softened. Wetting my skin until it became numb, savouring the curious tingle when the blood flowed back. I could wrap an entire afternoon in snow’s safe hush. Then a delightful sourness would curl my tongue. I’d swallow. Taste the wild cherries, and know I’d been called inside to tea.
On winter evenings I’d lie before the fire, its cold belly warmed by flames and free of cats. I’d see the cat hunker under Aunt Lina’s chair; it always preferred the invisible touch of shadows. My hair dried crispy, like parched moss. Sometimes I imagined it truly was a bird’s nest, and that sparrows lived inside. Their bones would feel even smaller than the cat’s, like a fish skeleton, but downy with feathers instead of slippery scales.
I’d spread my long bones on the sheepskin rug, limbs like gold ingots, bronzed and heavy from the fire’s warmth. If a giant picked me up, would I feel like a bird? Would he cradle my delicate bones with love the way I cradled the cat?
Lots of things in my world had bones. I ran my fingers down the cracked spines of the books in our library. After reading their innards I concluded that books also possessed hearts. I felt more doubtful about whether the cat had a heart. It often chewed and crunched at living creatures under my chair while I read.
Every day I wove gossamer-fine strands around our tiny kingdom. And every day the kingdom’s beauty touched me back, vibrating along the threads to the web’s centre.
Then one day, a cold hand brushed all the threads away.
Hello friends. This is part of a story I’m working on for ‘Fireside Ghosts’. It came to me yesterday when I left the hill at dusk. On the way down I touched velvety gorse petals and smooth birch bark. I wondered if ghosts could feel? And what small, simple sensations a ghost would miss most? Apologies for the lack of letter last week - I needed a little break! Now I feel refreshed and ready to share more glimpses of my inner world 🌙
Kate xx
Absolutely beautiful, I love this. Going to have to read it again to let the words all sink in!
So lyrical and haunting, I can’t wait to read more 🖤