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Micro-fiction 051 – Chrysalis (Echoes series)

The curious tale of a mother, a wardrobe and the night-time terrors of Gabe.


Chrysalis

“Well why don’t you want to go to bed?” My Mother kneeled, her lovely eyes peering at me, in that way, you know, I knew should would love me forever. She was everything to me, and I used to watch her move through our wood paneled house, gracefully, purposefully as though she was part of its framework, animating all life within. She was my world.

“I don’t know, I just don’t!” I returned her look, pleading to go up with her, like I used to when I was a really young boy.

“You know what your father would say.”

“Yeah, but he’s out chopping wood, he won’t be back for ages.” I paused. “Anyways, he doesn’t know.”

“Know what Billy?” Her kind smile stroked my spirits, and I quietly sighed in response. I couldn’t explain. I didn’t have the words for my night-time fears, for how different I felt, how my so-called friends would taunt me, how lonely I felt. And how, going to bed in that room, plunged me into despair.

She reached out and hugged me, one of those moments in the day I longed for, and we both knew I would do what she asked. It was simple really, I just had to go upstairs, get into bed, and sleep.

“Okay.” I drawled, surrendering. She gripped my shoulders gently and pushed me away slightly, nodding her head, tipping it in that way she had, as though she could see around and through me at the same time, a special skill that mothers have, I suppose.

I turned my upper body slowly, my feet planted to the floor, then snapped back quickly to give my mother a kiss on the cheek before fleeing to the wooden stairs, hesitating at its foot, then trudging upwards, climbing to my personal hell.

At the top I looked down briefly and saw my mother kneeling still, but in the flickering lamplight she seemed to float slightly above the floorboards.

I ran the short distance to my room, yanked open the door, then slammed it shut. I knew that was the only way to enter, otherwise I’d linger so long my father might see, and humiliate me for being a weakling.

Part of me thought he was right.

I brushed my teeth in the little bowl by the big shuttered window, my head down, unable to bear my reflection in the aged mirror, unable to look at myself for fear of agreeing with my father. And to avoid the sight of the doors of the slim wardrobe in the corner of the room, opposite the window. My heart raced at the thought of it.

As I wrestled with clothes, irritated by the need to remove them, and their resistance to being removed at all, my eyes fell on the small window in the apex of the room. The little curtains there wafted gently in the night-time breeze, from the gap left open to allow some ventilation. As always, they were my saviour. They transfixed me, distracting me from the terrors of the dark.

I crawled over to my bed, keeping a careful eye on the space underneath, checking for hungry eyes, and teeth before clambering up and slithering in. For a moment I stilled my thumping heart, seeking the delicious sensation of cold corners in the sheets.

“Keep them shut, keep them shut!” I squeezed my eyes closed, scrunching my face into its usual bedtime agony.

“I’m not a cry-baby, I’m not a cry-baby.” Berating myself rarely helped, but thoughts of my father haunted me.

“Oow!” The exaggerated clamping of my eyes hurt my forehead, so I flicked them open again, and found myself staring straight at the wardrobe.

“I know you’re there!” Faint moonlight amplified the patterns on the doors of this, the oldest piece of furniture in the house. During the day it was innocuous, packed with my hanging clothes and some of my mothers, but at night it transformed into an object of terror. My father said the wood had been created from separate crosscuts of a tree, so there were huge eyes towards the top of the doors and shaky lines of age interrupted by small knots and smaller eyes falling outwards along the length of each door, down to the base. But they just looked like giant wings to me, folded, and pulsing in the light of the moon.

“Try and get me now!” I whispered. I had reached out with my right arm and checked for  the hockey stick resting and ready against the wall. Its familiar presence lending some boldness to my unsteady tone.

“I don’t know what you’re waiting for.” A little louder this time. And I swear the wing doors quivered, as they did, every night.

Soon, my eyes were ready to burst, my jaw was rigid, so I flung myself out of the bed and launched myself at the wardrobe, battering it with my small fists, kicking and kneeing it.

The doors crumpled. They folded inwards, and a rustling, like dusty old skirts shook the air around me as I fell in behind, flailing and thrashing, fine hairs pressed against my face, and into my mouth, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see, my eyes were scratched and flapped at by a thousand tiny wings and tearing at my nightclothes I collapsed to the back of the wardrobe, screaming without sound and crashed my head.

***

The next morning my mother walked softly into the room, the sunlight fighting with the gloomy air. She opened the main window, and swung the shutters wide before turning back to smile ruefully at the bed. She rested her eyes, clasping her hands, feeling the rough paper of her ageing flesh, and remembered their beloved son who had died one night in this room, suffocated, choked by a swarm of moths. Decades of grief had passed but the mystery lingered.

I looked down at her from the little window at the top of the room, feeling the gentle strokes of the curtain around my ankles, looking forward to the next night’s wanderings where I could remember the last moments, forever to relive the touch and the love of my beloved mother.

[End]

Part of a new series of micro-fiction stories, released as These Fantastic Worlds SF & Fantasy Fiction Podcast on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, and Stitcher  and more. Also on this blog, These Fantastic Worlds.

Text, image, audio © 2020 Jake Jackson, thesefantasticworlds.com. Thanks to Frances Bodiam and Elise Wells,  Logic ProX, Sound Studio, the Twisted Wave Recorder App, and Scrivener.


More Tales

There are many other great stories in this series, including:

Some background on the science behind Hunter and Bain’s adventures: Concepts of Time

And a carousel of 10 audio stories from the podcast with information about submissions.

Here’s a related post, 5 Steps to the SF and Fantasy Podcasts.