Battle Scars

“They’re not,” disbelieves Sadie, her small hands partly submerged in the warm, soapy water.

“They are, I swear. These are battle scars.” I run my left finger down and up my opposite forearm, fingertips trembling as they skim over its rows of ridges. Anxiously, my cheeks flush hot and my palms bead with sweat. “When I was younger, about how old your brother is, I—” pause for dramatic effect—“was kidnapped.” I lean down towards her and make a show of looking shocked. “Kidnapped—” pause— “by these goblin-slash-faerie creatures from another world,” I whisper, dishcloth slack in my grasp as I turn off the faucet. “I was in bed, in my bedroom. It was the dead of night and they came for me. They pinned me down and put a sack over my head and tied me up just like the Christmas goose.”

“Well why didn’t you scream?” my niece interrupts suddenly, auburn eyebrows furrowed with skepticism.

My laptop screen glares harsh and white, the email onscreen flooding my face as my mind echoes with its sentence. I’m failing one of my classes. I’ve never failed a class before. As my breathing speeds up, my pounding, racing heart drowns out the echo and fills my ears. Dark, fleeting spots flit around the edges of my vision. The tears welling in my eyes blur the words in front of me, turning the computer screen into a greyscale watercolor. I was reduced to just the feeling of my laptop battery slowly burning my thighs. Then I feel my shoulders jerk as a sob, breaking, escapes my chest. My lungs rip themselves apart in futile efforts to fill as I struggle and fail to get air. The swirling, vicious thoughts spinning my mind, out of control, steal my breath even more than the sobs that rack my body. In that moment, there is nothing except the sting in my eyes and the gnawing pit in my stomach.

I don’t know how long I’m there. I don’t know how long I sit on my bed, my upper body swaying forward and back with each beat of my pounding heart. My hands alternate between frantically wiping at tears and clutching desperately at my chest. I pray that if I grab tightly enough at the front of my shirt that somehow it would open up my lungs. That somehow it would make it so that I could breathe again. My laptop switches to its screensaver, and the word of the day slides smoothly across the screen. My eyes follow the motion, not actually comprehending the word or its definition. I continue looking left, gaze passing blankly over my rug, the dresser, and my desk. I blink.

Almost without conscious thought, I get up from the edge of my bed and walk to my desk. I still can’t breathe. I put one hand on the back of my chair to reassure myself that I’m not falling. My other hand fumbles with the knob of my desk drawer, fingers trembling and weak. The contents clatter quietly against each other, but the noise rings loud in my ears. I grab a box of tacks. Through the tears, it just looks like a box of colored smudges. My fingers feel clumsy as I fumble with the plastic lid. I finally get it open and reach in, taking hold of a single tack with two fingers. I sink to my knees and the rest of the tacks rattle inside the box as it glances off the desk onto the floor. I close my eyes. My breath stutters, shaking and forced. Salt seems to glue my eyes closed. I pull against it and open my eyes, the world still out of focus. I put the point of the tack against my skin and press.

“I guess I was too scared,” I admit to Sadie. “They were so quiet that I didn’t entirely realize they were there until they were already on my bed.”

“You saw them? What did they look like?”

I pause for a moment, tracing up the wall with my eyes towards the ceiling, and modulate my fingers over the soap bubbles like they’re piano keys. I start, quietly, “It was really dark so I couldn’t see them that well. I do remember that they made this sort of quiet scratching noise, and a hissing one like a really fast stream of air. They smelled a little bit like—” I pause, the phantom smell of Vaseline and antibacterial gel filling my nose—“sunscreen or hand lotion or something for whatever reason. But mostly I just noticed the occasional sound of fabric rubbing against itself and muffled thumps whenever they jumped.”

“They could jump?” Sadie swells with astonishment.

“Oh yeah,” I confirm, nodding emphatically. “They jumped. They could jump from the floor all the way up to the top of that shelf!” I send my finger arcing across the room to demonstrate the impressive nine or so foot leap. The scars on my arm gleam white in the afternoon sunbeams; my face falls into shadow as I drop my arm and push my sleeve back down.

Sadie gasps in awe, almost dropping the utensils crammed into her small fist. “All that way? But you said they were tiny!”

I continue as I reach forward and rescue the silverware from her, rinsing them under the faucet on my way to put them in the dishrack. “They were tiny. They wouldn’t even reach your nose if you stood right next to one.” I bop Sadie gently on the nose with one finger for effect, and she scrunches up her face, hazel eyes fluttering. I straighten. “I couldn’t see them very well, they were mostly just yellow and red and blue eyes out in the dark. Like when you see a racoon outside at night but you can only see its eyes,” I add to help Sadie understand, seeing her eyes squint.

“Where did they take you?”

“I couldn’t really see through the bag they put over my head. I could tell that we went up and down and over and through every kind of terrain. We had to go in a boat for what felt like a really long time. The planks of the boat were all curvy and wavy, and none of them were the same shape. I don’t really know how we didn’t sink.”

Sadie giggles, my expression of shock at not sinking amusing her.

“And the wood was the color of eggplants. When we got to land, sand burned my toes and I tripped over roots and so many rocks, and, at one point for a while, I was being whipped by some kind of tall grass. I couldn’t tell north from south by the end. It all smelled like fish that’s been left out on a hot day,” I glance up and see Sadie chewing her bottom lip in confusion, so I add, “like it smells down by the docks.

“Wherever ‘there’ was, was really dry and hot and there seemed to only be rocks. The goblins tugged me along behind them so I kept tripping and stumbling, but they didn’t seem to care. Sometimes the bag would shift a little and some light would poke through the bottom or the sun would manage to shine a single beam through the sack.” I waggle my index finger back and forth at my niece and smile, chuckling a little. “Wanna know the weirdest thing?”

Sadie nods vigorously, sponge bobbing in the sink where she had absently dropped it.

“The light that came through, it was this super strong orange! Picture, umm, picture how orange a pumpkin is, and then make it even oranger! That was how orange the light was.”

Sadie nods, lips tensed in a suspense-fueled grin.

“And then we sort of just, arrived, at wherever it was they wanted to take me and we stopped. One of them pushed me forward—I could feel its nails in my back—and I almost fell over. Before I could get my balance back, one of them roughly pulled the bag off my head. I blinked a few times to let my eyes adjust to the light, looking side to side, but before I could get a good look at the goblins, they were gone. And then I was alone in this little cave with nothing on the floor but little pebbles and bars across one side.”

I shouldn’t have done that. Oh god, I can’t tell them. Why did I do that. What’ll they say? No, no, I know what they’ll say. Goddamn it. I really should not have done that. Oh god. What do I do now. The pencil sharpener blade falls from my fingers, the scratching it was just making still echoing in my ears as it hits the covers. My heart keeps racing even as my breathing starts to even and come to me more easily. The butterfly I had drawn so painstakingly the day before was crisscrossed with new marks. Shaking, I hesitantly raise my head and look at my room through glazed-over eyes.

Tissue, I tell myself. Tissue. It takes me three tries to stand after my feet touch the floor, my head so lost in a fog. I pick up the tissue box from my dresser and see the red beads forming on the inside of my forearm already. I fall back onto my bed heavily, the box loose in my grip on my lap. I look blankly at it for a long minute before finally pulling a tissue from it and pressing it to my arm. I need another but can’t find the will to get one. My breath comes in sluggish, long draws and yet slower exhales. My heartbeat pulses in my ears and through my chest. I can feel it slowing incrementally with each intentioned breath I take. I start to cry again. Not sobbing. Not this time. Just tears that burn as they fall. I wipe my cheek and pick up another tissue. Or maybe it’s two. I press it to my arm. Them. My grip tightens until my knuckles almost go white. I loosen only after I see my entire arm start to blush and my fingers quiver unevenly; my muscles slowly relax and start to dully throb.

I sit on the edge of the bed, toes barely brushing the rug. Any other time it would tickle. There I sit until my phone lights up on my bedside table. I rotate my head towards it as though through molasses. Its screen darkens before I can blink the world into focus.

They can’t find out.

That single thought cuts through my fog and sends fresh anxiety coursing through my veins despite how leaden my body feels. As though on autopilot, I stand and walk over to my trashcan. I sink to my knees beside it and reach in for an earring box I’d thrown away the other day. I open the box, bottom half obscuring the tainted tissue crushed in my fist. I drop the lid into my lap and pull the tissue from my hand. The lid slides down my thighs and onto the floor. A corner of the tissue pokes out from under the lid when I close the box. I rip it off. I place the box back in the trashcan and adjust my feet beneath me, ripped tissue corner from between my fingertips sticking as my hand pushes me up off the rug.

“Was it like the cave in The Croods?” Sadie interjects.

I chuckle and shake my head minutely. We had just watched it for the first time the other day, and now she’s obsessed. “No, actually.” I smile at her. “The rocks were blue, really dark blue.” I lean down towards Sadie and open my eyes really wide for effect. “And the bars—” pause while I exaggeratedly look left, then right, then back at her with only my eyes—“were diagonal!”

Her mouth drops open and her astonished hands splash down into the suds. Eyes sparkling with anticipation, she entreats, “How did you escape?”

“A lot of work and a little bit of help.” I smirk, reach forward, and turn the faucet back on.

“Aww, Auntie Jo, you can’t not tell me. Please you have to,” she pleads, tugging on the bottom edge of my shirt with small, dripping hands.

“All right, all right, but we have to keep working,” I compromise and nod towards the dishrack, pushing my sleeves back up. I let my right hand continue up to itch my collarbone. I push down the lip of my neckline just a bit to let my butterfly tattoo poke out. I trace its outline—its wings, its antennae, the flower it sits on—and allow myself a bittersweet smile.

Sadie, occupied herself, grabs a mug from beside her and starts to wash it, hands slowing and pausing each time she glances up at me.

I place both my hands lightly over the edge of the sink, the granite and steel decidedly cool beneath my sweating palms as I resume. “The first thing I had to do was figure out where I was. So I inched forward towards the bars of my cave, knees and hands scratching on the rock. When I looked between them, all I saw was darkness. Sometimes the gremlin creatures would pass by like ghosts or shadows but I could never see them coming until they were already super close. I don’t know how long I stayed there. The wind sounded almost like it was whispering when it would gust. After a long time, or at least what seemed like a long time, I noticed that there was this little purple flower that was growing in what was sorta the corner of my cave—” I put my hands out in front of me and make an almost square curved shape to show what the cave had looked like, “—and it glowed. Just a little bit.”

Sadie’s eyes grow wide and a smile starts to dawn.

“So I decided to try and take care of this plant. It grew taller and taller and bigger and bigger, little by little. It grew all the way up to my ears and it had hundreds of the tiniest little lilac leaves. They looked like little butterflies. The wind would rush in and try to pull off its petals, so I’d sit around the flower, like this,” I demonstrated by wrapping Sadie in a gentle hug. “I must have been there caring for it for weeks. I figured out a way to use the flowers to see where I was after what seemed like forever, even though it was windy outside the cave, out in—” I adopt the same spooky tone as before, “—the abyss.”

The cold bathroom tile raises goosebumps along my calves. Whimpering haltingly, I sway back and forth, sweat and tears stinging the scabs I scratched off. The salt burns my eyes as much as it does my arms. Roughly, harshly, I rub and pound the heels of my hands against tightly closed eyes in a vain effort to rub away the pain. The friction of skin against skin feels like rug-burn, but it’s okay. Hands falling to the floor, I drop my head and rest it against my legs, one knee pressed into my right eye. I sit up to take a deep breath, panic and tears stealing my air, and can see the salty droplets left on my knee by soaked lashes. Closing my eyes, I make a conscious effort to sit up straight and breathe out roughly. I grip my forearm with salty, slippery fingers and my pruning skin is hypersensitive to the stinging dips and ridges of my barely healing cuts. My grip tightening, I clench my teeth against the friction of my fingers on my arm; my scabs are bent and cracked apart, and the sweat and oils on my skin are smeared across the broken cuts, stinging each one. Breathless, I pick my phone off the tile, both cold against my flushed skin, and unlock it.

I start to inhale. “One, two, three,” I mouth, failing to actually speak. I keep counting, scrolling sideways through my apps. “Four, five, six, seven, eight.” I pause for a moment. Panicked thoughts threaten to invade my concentration. I push them away. Click, I open the app. “One, two, three,” I start again, this time exhaling. “Four, five, six, seven.” I purge all my air. And then I take another breath. And another. I sync my breathing with the app, with its opening and closing lotus flower. The whirlwind in my mind loses its momentum, its slate grey clouds dissipating and fading to almost white. I close my eyes, the flower’s rhythm internalized. My tears slow to an uncertain stop, their wells drying up. I hear footsteps pass the bathroom door. My breath catches, but I let go of my arm and remind myself to count. I wipe gingerly at the sweaty outline of my fingers with the backs of my knuckles and tug firmly on the edge of my sleeve, wincing slightly from the friction until it covered down to my palm. As I stood, all I only hope that my eyes hadn’t gone red.

I stood back upright and mussed Sadie’s hair. “I tied a few leaves and some of the petals from my flowers to a rock and threw it out into the abyss. I watched this little purple Tic-Tac-shaped light bounce and roll erratically away from my cave. All—”

“Yeah but what did you see?” whines Sadie impatiently, fingers tapping rapidly on the edge of the sink.

I sigh, consciously letting my irritation go, and continue. “All it showed me was that there was a lot more of the blue rock in that direction. But since nobody seemed to notice or mind that I’d done that, I threw a few more of these ‘light-rocks’ in other directions and saw a whole lot of—” small pause to add tension—“nothing. Because I didn’t see anything that looked dangerous, and because I had a lot of the flowers already gathered in my hands, I burst out of the cave and started running. I kept having to toss the—”

“Hold up.” Sadie stops me and shakes her head vigorously.

“Yes?”

“There were bars on your cave. How’d you get out?”

“Oh, right.” My hand flits forward and grabs the yellow and green sponge from her hand. “Did I forget to mention that the bars were made out of sponges?” I shake the sponge jokingly in front of her.

“Yes!” exclaims Sadie, exasperated by my information-withholding. She flails with both hands and flings suds across the kitchen. “You skipped over that!”

I laugh playfully and hide from the flying soap. “Yeah, all I had to do was slip out through between two of the bars and then they just sort of wrinkled and squished out of the way as I pushed my way out.” I reach up to wipe bubbles from my cheek, eyes flitting briefly to my sleeve to where my scars are hidden.

“Then why didn’t you leave earlier?”

My dad is yelling at me for the third time this week.

“Why aren’t you spending enough time on your school work?” He gesticulates furiously at my backpack by the table, the test pages clamped in his fist snapping through the air. “A C? Again?!”

I flinch.

“We don’t pay for you to go to private school for you to get a C on yet another test!” He slaps the test down on the counter with a sound like a cracking whip. “The school told us about what’s been going on. We can’t afford for you to be failing classes like this.”

Tears prickle my eyes.

“There shouldn’t be any reason why you aren’t getting A’s in all your classes. We pay for you to get tutors for a reason. Are we just wasting our money on you?” His voice rises to a crescendo, and he exhales sharply, closing his eyes, to reset his volume. The momentary silence that followed was dense and suffocated me. My father started again, “You are grounded for the next week. No going over to your friends’ houses after school, no more dessert after dinner—” he counts off each item on his hand, each finger firmly punctuating each punishment—“and absolutely no TV during the week. None.”

I nod in deflated resignation, fingers harshly rubbing the rug-burn on my knees. I shift my arms so that I’m grabbing my left forearm. Breath ragged, I trace the outline of a butterfly on my wrist. Raising my gaze to look at my dad, my voice stops in my throat like a bird caught in a cage.

“Well?”

“Yes, okay,” I croak. I want to tell him about how every bad grade feels like a knife in my gut, about how I spend the time between classes panicking about every wrong, about how I lie awake at all hours of the night struggling to focus enough to study for the classes I no longer enjoy. These words grow into a lump in my throat, cutting off my air and rendering me mute. I keep trying for a few tense seconds.

“What do you have to say for yourself?”

“Nothing. I don’t know, I’m sorry. I think that I studied the wrong material by accident,” I lie, tensing more with each word. I drop my eyes, eyelashes glistening, and brace as if for a physical blow. I blink tightly a few times and timidly raise my gaze—but only to my dad’s chest—and plead, “And I’m doing well in the discussions so that’ll bring my grade up,” in a desperate effort to placate him.

He scoffs, letting out a short burst of exasperated air from his nose. “I’m disappointed in you, Jo.” He shook his head.

I hung mine in response, heart pounding in my ears. “I’m sorry, I’ll do better on the next one.”

“Good,” barks my dad, decidedly ending the conversation.

I take a moment’s pause, learned anxiety building in my throat, then redirect her. “Well, I…it was—wait, you don’t want to hear about the vines that could think?” I let my attention linger for a heartbeat on the white stripes carpeting my arms and absently put a fork in the drying rack as Sadie grows increasingly excited about this next adventure.

“Before I encountered the thinking vines, though, I had to go through—” I adopt a spooky tone like a Halloween ghost for the name, “—the Chasm of Gloom! The Chasm is a dark place from which not all can return.” I reflect for a moment on how the three AM shadows dancing on my walls looked those nights I lay in bed, kept awake by fleeting, flashing suicidal thoughts. “It has tall cliffs on both sides with scraggly broken rocks up and down them. And there were other ways I could have gotten back, but I went that way.”

“What do you mean?” Sadie’s inquiry disrupts the flow of the story.

“What do you mean what do I mean?”

“Were there other ways?”

“Did you think that I’m the only one who’s even seen one of these goblins?” I feign incredulity and put a slightly damp hand to my chest.

“You forgot to mention that too!”

She’s so adorable when she’s angry. “Sorry, I thought I had.” I apologize untruthfully, holding back a grin. “But regardless, after the Chasm of Gloom I came upon a place they called the Plain of Interminable Fog. It was worse than the darkness that had been outside the cave because at least there I was able use the flowers to shine the way. The mist in the Plain swallows up all the sounds and all the lights so I basically just had to stumble around and hope that eventually I’d get out.” My mind flicks back to sitting in class taking quizzes, frustration at myself building as each productive, test-related thought turned to smoke.

I keep talking and glance down at Sadie’s face to see if she’s still listening and my eyes flit anxiously towards my cousin as he comes into the kitchen. “And I did get out, took a long time though. Finally, after I went through the Chasm of Gloom and traversed the Plains of Interminable Fog, I reached the Vines of Torment.”

I count off one, two, three on my fingers for each place; a fourth beat is added by the sharp closing of the refrigerator door to my left. “These are vines that can think for themselves. Each one is covered in long black thorns sharper than any knife. They whip and whirl and try to catch you. The vines are all super long and thin, and they grow to be a hundred feet long!” I lean slightly back as I talk and reach both my arms out sideways to emphasize how big they are. I can feel my cousin’s eyes on my scars and I curl my arms downward self-consciously, ashamed. “Those thorns are where I got some of these,” I say, leaning back in and offering my arms to my niece, turning them over and back again.

The motion of the chef’s knife is uncomfortably calming. My eye traces its edge as I slice sweet peppers for my mom. Each slice makes a satisfying sound and each stroke ends with a soft knock against the wooden board. Translucent yellow juice gathers and pools around each slight indentation on the cutting board’s surface. I continue slicing. The rhythmic nature of the knife tempts darker thoughts. My arm tingles. I think about every mistake I made that day, the ones from last week, and the ones from when I was ten years old. I think about all of them. And I blame myself for each and every one. Each passing thought of self-doubt and guilt is pinned in my mind by the weak thumping of the knife. I add these thoughts to the hundreds of others already teeming in the back of my mind.

A scoff makes me start slightly. I look up to see my cousin shaking his head at me with narrowed eyes. I flush and look away, eyes prickling. Sadie traces a few of the parallel white lines, entirely in her own little world. Her fingertips tickle slightly and raise tiny goosebumps on my arm. We stand in silence for a moment.

“What about the rest of them?”

“Hmm?” I swallow the lump growing in my throat.

“You said ‘some of them.’ You said the Vines only gave you some of these.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Good listening ears,” I praise out of force of habit. “The rest of these I got from the goblins’ claws as I swam away. They have nails like you wouldn’t believe, long and sharp and arched.” What feels like legions of ants runs down both arms at the memory of a blade. “When I was running away from the Vines of Torment, I looked ahead of me and saw silver sand and a green ocean going up into the sky.” I laugh and rewind to reassure Sadie’s look of shock. “I also didn’t believe my eyes, don’t worry. But there it was.” I pull one wrist from her gentle grip to gesture vaguely at the air between us to show how the waves stretch into the sky, water dripping from my fingertips and down my forearm. My hand drops back to my side and I pause for a moment to ponder the logistics of my metaphor.

“Is this where you were on the boat from before?”

“It is, yeah. Great guess, Sades.” I glance down at her, reclaim my other arm, and smile. “I tried to look for a boat but I didn’t see any in the water, and I couldn’t really stop to look for one. So I just ran straight into the water. The waves almost knocked me over. After a minute, the scratching and clattering of the goblin-faeries chasing after me faded and then changed into frenzied splashing. I turned around and saw dozens of them behind me. I had to try and run faster, but it’s hard to do that in the ocean and I ended up looking like this—” I exaggeratedly lumber in place. “Just as the water was reaching my armpits, the goblins caught up to me. I dove into the waves and started swimming. They all reached up for me from behind, scratching and slashing and clawing. Finally, the water got too deep for them and I managed to swim away. And that’s where I got the rest of them.” My gaze falls back to my arms, still outstretched to Sadie. My mind’s eye overlays the way my arms used to look, smooth and clear of any marks, before reality fades back in and my scars reappear on my skin.

Sadie reaches out again and her soft fingers pause, fluttering and warm, over one of my deeper scars and she looks up at me and asks, “What happened when you got home?”

“When I got home?”

“Yeah. What did Nana and Poppa think?”

“What is this?” My dad’s words fall like hail.

My mother cries and my father puts a hand on her shoulder, eyes still trained on me.

“I asked you a question. What the fuck is this?” He’s shouting now. I can see his neck pulse with every heartbeat and his face redden. My mother sits silently beside him, stiff.

“What do you mean?” My voice trembles.

“I mean this!” He reaches down and snatches my mother’s wrist from her lap, pulling her arm towards him as he snatches something from her hand and shakes it at me violently. Instantly my stomach drops.

“Oh.” I fight to keep my emotions out of my face. Instead, it pales of all color. My palms tickle from the trails of sweat beading on them and nausea turns my stomach.

“Well?” he demands, still shouting. He throws the tissue back into my mother’s lap and she recloses her clasped hands around it delicately.

I take shallow, shaky breaths, eyes trained on the floor between me and him. I want to defend myself, to argue that I haven’t even done it in almost a week.

“Why would you do that?”

The sound of my mother’s voice startles me.

“What did we do wrong? What did I do wrong?” Her voice breaks and my father pulls her in closer to him.

“So?” His single syllable cleaves the air.

I blister under my father’s disapproving glare. Barely louder than a whisper, I plead. “I…I didn’t mean to. It’s…” I look desperately between him and my mother, my voice choked into panicked silence. “I don’t…know…I…I’m sorry.”

He snorts. I don’t look up to see him leave; I only hear the door slam behind him.

I jump at the sound. “I’m sorry,” I say again, slightly louder this time.

My mother stands and starts to follow him. Her frame stands so much frailer than it did this morning. I can see her wringing her hands, the tissue still caught between them. As she reaches the doorway, she pauses, one hand resting on the knob, and looks back at me. The tears still forming in her eyes told me enough. Then, still silent, she turned away and kept walking, slippers padding ever so quietly on the hall carpet.

I breathe out a few times, each breath unsteady. One. I close my eyes. All I can hear is my heartbeat in my ears. I breathe in. Two, three, four. I open my eyes slowly, looking slightly downward, and clench and unclench my hands at my side. Six, seven. Once more. I close my eyes again. Eight, nine. Pause. And out: one, two. I keep going, waiting for my legs to stop shaking. Four, five. I lift myself up onto the balls of my feet. Seven, eight. Hold. Pause, and out. And heels back on the floor. Two, three, four. My heart slows its pounding. Seven, eight. My eyes open, blurriness clearing. I can do this.

“They…didn’t really understand what I meant.”

“Yeah, it all sounds really confusing.” Sadie nods sagely, starting to focus on cleaning the inside of a mug.

A small smile disrupts my frown. “That it is.” I let my attention linger for a moment on my tattoo and can’t help but feel proud of my journey.

And we go back to the dishes. She grabs a plate from the rack, wets it in the sink, and rubs the sponge in tight little circles. She dips it again in the sudsy water and hands it to me. My skin blushes red under the steaming water running over my hands. I rinse the plate then feel my hands cool as I give it a cursory wipe with my cloth and place it in the drying rack. And a second time. And a third. And then a saucepan that I had to help Sadie wash, and then some utensils. Neither of us speak and the air hangs still and warm around us.

“Promise me something,” I venture hesitantly, my words barely audible above the running faucet.

“Yeah?” she replies almost before I’ve finished.

“Promise me that you’ll tell someone if you ever see goblins.”

“Why would I see them?”

“Well, a lot of people in our family have seen them. They just don’t usually talk about it, though. And no one should call you crazy for saying that you saw them, remember that, too.” I hear myself getting louder, and I take half a second to recompose myself. “Just promise that if you see a goblin, you’ll tell me?”

“Sure, Auntie Jo. I’ll tell you if I see a goblin.” She takes a second to scrub off a stubborn piece of food from a plate before adding, “Auntie Jo?”

“Yeah, sweetheart?”

“Can I tell Mommy and Daddy too, about the goblins?”

“Absolutely you can,” I answer emphatically.

“Okay.”

And back to the dishes we went.