A Dream of My Mother

I awoke in the middle of the night with a start. Wrapped in a fit of depressed sadness. I turned on my lamp, grabbed my notepad and scratched this out:

It had been four days without eating, without bathing, without sleeping, and I had found nothing… I was restless. The feelings in me were growing again, same ones that had caused my mother to disappear one day. Except she stayed in her room, where I found her that morning. I wasn’t there when she decided to leave, without a word without anything, no “I love you” not a thing, but a warning to the people who lived around me… “She must never know.” Which meant, that if I was to never know something, she knew the one thing I needed to. And if she knew the key was with her, not in these books I’ve been wasting my time on.

“Her room." I said to myself.

I grabbed my car keys, and walked those spiral stair cases to the infinite left end of the house that my mother and father had made years before I had been born. I opened that far end and entered into the darkness.

Cough.

Fuck. All the dust, and dampness. I grabbed one of the old candles from the marble stand near the entrance and lit it. I maneuvered through all the cobwebs until I had gotten through to her bed. I remembered her secret book case underneath the frame. I knocked a few times. Every corner. Until. I hit. The loose. Wood. Bang.

Opening the loose drawer, I pulled out old pictures and books. There were pictures of my mother and father. I never knew him. Dark brown hair and eyes, pale features, a lot like the devil. I shared his pale face and dark hair. He disappeared, after my adulthood in a blaze of searing hate, my mother told me. She told me something happened to him. There was another girl in a few of these pictures. Blonde, blue eyed. She is with my mother and father when they were much younger. Then, gone. Last name is the different. Her face is exactly the same as mine when I was a child. It suddenly hits me.

My older sister. She was the Chosen before the boy. She was the one who died. It was my turn to choose, because she had been taken already. My father disappeared because he couldn’t bear the thought of possibly losing another child. My eyes began to well up in tears. Parents are left without children, children are left as orphans, and The Chosen, is left to become a hideous…

“The Ones Who Walk Away From Columbus" by Elgin. The book that every family in Columbus is given. Here it was, all the history of Columbus, and the truth that has been hidden from me all these years.