Mother

The air inside the sunken library was wet and black with decay.

Its wooden floors were warped and uneven, buckled from the rainwater streaming down in rivulets from the ceiling. The ancient wallpaper peeled itself down in soft scrolls and joined with the scatterings of papers and magazines on the floor. Dried leaves mouldered in every corner of the room, blown in over the years. In the pale slat of light that made its way through the rafters, the rope she had used to climb down swung gently amongst the dust motes.

On a overturned milk crate, Katherine sat with her back against one of the blackened bookshelves, reading Moby Dick. At her feet, a small candle flickered in its teacup. The only sounds to be heard were the quiet dripping in the darkness and the soft turn of a page. In the silence, the imagined shape of a whale floated above her head, harpooned and jettisoning spumes of blood. She daydreamed about endless grey waters and the taste of sea air.

She tracked the passage of time by the circle of light in the middle of the floor. When the colour deepened, sank into a richer gold, she knew it was time to leave. She folded her page. Stood up and yawned, stretching to the fullest extent of herself. She put the book back on its shelf, a safe distance away from the silver lines of water falling from the open ceiling. In the winters she brought her collection into the house, safe from the elements. But in the more temperate months, she liked to keep them here. It gave her a reason to come back.

She lingered for a while, walking between the shelves and running her hands along the leathered spines. Then she extinguished the candle and returned to the world of the living.

~

The library was one of her favourite places. She had discovered it herself years ago as a child, angrily exploring the ruins of the small town after a fight with her mother. Had fallen into it, really, as she crouched over the exposed rafters to see what lay below. A misplaced palm, the snapping of a rotted beam, and then sudden, terrifying weightlessness. She fell into something soft and rolled off of it. Stood up in the blackness, wide-eyed. She took out the lighter she had stolen from her mother and the tiny flame illuminated the rows and rows of bookshelves, sagging under the weight of their waterlogged volumes. Above her, near the hole she had torn in the rafters, an ancient chandelier hung suspended in a cloud of spiderwebs and dust, glass icicles drinking in the light and twinkling softly with it.

She had turned in a slow circle, stupefied by the sight. The pain of the fall was quickly replaced with wonder. Then her foot caught the edge of the softness that had broken her fall and she looked down.

~

The ride back to the house was peaceful. The sun was beginning to burn through the early morning clouds and beat down upon Katherine’s neck. Beneath her, the horse began to sweat and the smell mixed with the leather of the saddle and her own sun-warmed skin. On either side of the highway stretched the overgrown countryside, the endless fields of grass and woodlands. The occasional barn or house in the distance, slowly retreating back into the earth. She led the horse off the road and onto the well-worn dirt path leading towards the farm. As the house came into view, its familiar gables and whitewashed walls gleaming through the trees, she frowned at the sight of a stooped over figure in the yard, crouched over a box.

She brought the horse up into a trot alongside the fence. “Mother, I told you I was going to do it today.”

Her mother looked up from scraping honeycomb into a pail. “You weren’t here. If I waited all day for you, it would never get done.”

“You can’t be doing work like this anymore. You need to rest.”

Her mother gently cupped a handful of bees and moved them aside. As Katherine watched them hum placidly in those gnarled hands, she was struck by the memory of those same hands, then smooth and unblemished, taking her own hand as a child and placing a teaspoon of honey there. Holding her as dozens of straw-like tongues lapped it up. She had asked about the missing tip of her littlest finger then, and her mother smiled her secret smile. I must’ve misplaced it.

Now her mother’s voice has none of that gentle humour. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I saved enough chores for you. Go feed the animals and help me with the garden.”

Katherine let out a huff but did as she was told. She fed the horses and cows and led the sheep out to pasture. Scattered seed for the chickens and ducks and cleaned out the hutches for the rabbits. Her rounds took her by the enormous oak in the middle of the yard and she relished each time she passed through the coolness of its shade. It towered above the house like a sentinel, armoured in grey bark as ancient as the stone walls that divided the fields. At its base lay the outline of dozens of graves, softly rounded hills outlined in rocks.

A family lived here before us, her mother had explained when Katherine had asked, her fingers reaching up to touch her silver, heart-shaped locket. Generations of them. When I die, bury me here too. After you go to the Facility. When Katherine had asked about ghosts, her mother simply ruffled her hair. The same blue-black as her own. Why do we need ghosts? We already haunt ourselves.

Lost in thought, Katherine finished the last of her chores. By the time she was done, her mother was already in the field.

~

After Katherine had fallen through the library’s roof, she had seen that the floor was covered in rotted sleeping bags. Human bodies sprawled out from within, dried and shrunken. Crudely mummified. Leather skin stretched taunt over the sightless pits of eyes.

She knelt down beside the closest one and stared, fascinated.

She didn’t know to be afraid. She had never seen another human besides her mother. Once, she had seen pinpricks of light in the darkness outside her window. Distant fires in the fields. Her mother had hidden them both in the cellar for days, terrified to make a sound. They never saw the fires again.

Now, holding the lighter to the desiccated face, she saw that its hair had sloughed off in a small pile around its head like a nest. From its skinless lips, its teeth gleamed like ivory. Beside its sleeping bag was the blackened remains of an ancient fire, a rusted pot sitting off to the side. There was a small pile of what looked like animal bones, and then a small, rounded skull that did not belong to any animal.

Katherine almost dropped the lighter in her haste to climb one of the bookcases. She reached the top and clambered through the hole in the rafters, uncaring of the splinters and scrapes. She could hear the pounding of hooves on the road, her mother screaming her name. She ran towards the sound. Her mother leapt off the horse and seized her in a choking embrace.

“Oh my God. Oh my God I thought I had lost you.”

Katherine never told her what she had found. Later, when she had recovered from her fright, she came back with a rope.

~

Her mother was acting odd.

They toiled side by side in the fields, adding new rows in the freshly turned soil. “You remember what I said about the Facility?” she asked.

Katherine rolled her eyes. “Yes. You’ve only been telling me about it for years. That place in the city that you never want to visit.”

“It’s not for me. It’s for you, after I’m gone.”

“Well, you’re not going anywhere yet. There’s too much work to do, right?”

“You remember where it is?”

“How could I not? You literally have it tattooed on your arm.” Katherine paused in her work, squatting on her heels. Sometimes they unearthed bricks in the garden. Splinters of wood, fragments of bone. Remnants of the past. “Are you ever going to tell me about that place?”

Her mother smiled that secret smile. The same thing she did whenever Katherine asked too many questions. Like what happened to her father. Gone and good riddance, she had replied, the last time Katherine had asked. Men are the ones who did this to the world.

So Katherine asked the same question she had countless times. “Do I get to keep the locket?”

“Of course. Everything here is yours.”

“Why don’t you ever put a picture in it?”

Her mother laughed. “Why would I? I’ll always have you.”

~

That night, Katherine woke in the dark with a start. She didn’t know what had woken her, a sound or dream, yet the feeling of unease remained. She turned on her side and listened for the crickets in the yard, but they were silent. The unease turned to dread. She threw off the quilt her mother had stitched and paced in darkness like an animal, eyes adjusting to the darkness like a cat’s.

When she couldn’t stand it anymore she went to her mother’s room. Slid under the blankets like she hadn’t done since she was a child. Her mother reached out an arm and held her and she was comforted.

In the morning, she was gone.

~

The Facility was a laboratory. Katherine made her way through the ruins of the city until she stood at its doors. There was a distant humming, like a machine slowly waking up from deep in the earth.

An automated voice rang out. “Please hold for DNA scan.”

Threads of blue lights danced before her eyes, roaming up and down her body. A ghostly apparition appeared before her, made up of the same electric light. A woman with her mother’s face, with her mother’s locket. The same locket she now wore.

The blue lights turned green. The apparition disappeared.

“Welcome, Doctor Wong.”

The doors slid open. She walked inside.

~

The air inside was dry and stagnant.

She was guided down blinding white hallways until they reached a room with a glass tank. There, suspended in fluid, was an infant.

Katherine recoiled from the sight of it.

The voice rang out again. “Initiating revival. Please hold.”

To her horror, the fluid in the tank began to drain. She stumbled backwards until her back hit the wall. Turned around to see that it was covered in hundreds of names in black marker, faded over the years.

Distantly, it occurred to her that her mother had never shared her name. She was only mother to Katherine.

One of the names stood out to her. Its ink darker than the other. Most recent.

Emma.

Katherine’s eyes stung.

“Before leaving, you must provide a digital sample,” said the voice.

She turned to see that a tray had appeared in the center of the room. Remembered her mother’s missing finger. She didn’t have her knife with her.

But she did have her teeth.

~

The first night with her daughter in the house she did not sleep. She sat at the kitchen table by candlelight with her mother’s sewing kit laid out before her with all its intricacies. A jar of ink made from charcoal and vinegar. She closed her eyes and thought of the map on her mother’s skin and on all of the mothers before her. The humming of bees in a child’s palm. A horse’s patient breath. The soft downy hair of her daughter’s head. All of them connected.

She held the needle to the flame and then dipped it into the ink.