Branches
a short story about memories that haunt
This was written for the 30 Days of Fright Writing Challenge, prompt 13: personification (of something in the natural environment, or an inanimate object)
This one’s a tiny big longer than some of the others I wrote for this challenge.
Branches
Cassie didn’t relish the thought of going home.
Her childhood home, in a too-small town, where everyone thought they knew everything about her. Poor Cassie.
She slung her backback over one shoulder and got off the bus in front of the old drugstore. It was still a drugstore, but now it was one of those chains.
Cassie had been out of the hospital three weeks, scars on her wrists still pink and unsettled, when she got the call that her mother had died. Heart attack. She hadn’t seen her mom in three years. Hadn’t been back to the house in ten. “It’ll be good for you,” her therapist said. “Get some closure. Face the past.”
Whatever.
Her uncle was waiting for her at the house. She set out down Main Street, hoping no one would recognize her. She’d have to face people, at the funeral at least, but not today, after riding on a hot bus for nine hours. Please, just not today.
===
“Um… are you… can you have that?” her Uncle Jim asked awkwardly as she sat at the little kitchen table and popped open a beer. He lived down the road, had been helping Mom out around the house. He was the one who’d found her.
“Yeah. It’s fine.” She put her foot up on the chair across from her. Same damn red and white checkered tablecloth, she thought. Like some Italian restaurant.
“Is… uh… is that all you brought? All your baggage, I mean?” He was looking at her backpack leaning up against the table leg.
She laughed a hollow laugh. She could really use a cigarette. Didn’t have any. Trying to quit that, too. “Yeah, I just brought the one backpack,” she said.
But all my baggage? Hell no, I got a ton of that.
===
She’d begged off chatting, saying she was tired from her trip. Needed a shower. He led her up to her old room, as if he needed to, as if she’d have forgotten where it was.
So much the same. Her old bed. The window on the wall opposite that overlooked the back of the property. Pop band posters still on the wall. Her old desk, but now her mother’s sewing machine sat on top with a bin of fabrics on the floor next to it. “She tried to take up quilting,” her uncle said. “Didn’t really have the patience for it.”
She dropped her backpack by the bed.
“I put on fresh bedding,” her uncle said weakly. “Listen, I—”
She turned to face him. He pulled the chair out from the desk and sat down heavily. She felt compelled to sit, too, on the edge of the bed. He was thinner than she remembered and so much more serious. He had always been her favorite relative, joking and laughing with her. Now he seemed strained. Like Mom. Like her.
“I know you don’t want to hear it, but I need to tell you a couple things about your mom.”
Cassie suppressed a cringe. She and her mom had a… fraught… relationship and she didn’t want to hear sorrys and should-have-beens right now. God, at least let me take a shower first.
Her uncle leaned forward in the chair and looked down at the floor. “She wasn’t well near the end. She said a lot of things I wish I hadn’t heard. She blamed herself for a lot, too. I think… I think she was having some mental health… issues.”
Cassie sat stiff on the edge of the bed.
Her uncle tilted his head to look up at her. Awkward. “If there’s a possible family history,” he said too quickly, “of that sort of thing, I just feel like, in your circumstances, you ought… you ought to know.”
Cassie was never good at knowing what to say, so she said, “I’m sorry she died.” And she found she meant it.
Her uncle sighed as he stood up. “Me too, kiddo.” He made to leave. “Go ahead and take that shower. Get settled. I’ll rustle up some grub—by which I mean I’ll order a pizza.” It seemed like he tried to laugh his old laugh.
“K.”
He turned back at the doorway, as she was unzipping her backpack. “Oh and Cass? Just so you know, she blamed herself for Lizzie. She never blamed you.”
===
Lizzie. The shower sputtered in starts and stops at first but now ran smoothly and hot. Too hot, the way she liked it. Lizzie. She wanted it to almost burn her skin. Lizzie. Her sister.
She never spoke her name.
“You never call her by her name,” the therapist noted. “You always say ‘my sister.’ Does that mean anything to you?”
She slid the shampoo through her hair, closing her eyes.
“You tell me,” she’d said. “Isn’t that your job?” Surly. Guarded.
“I just wonder,” the woman said in that measured way of all therapists, “if you aren’t being avoidant. Names are very meaningful, personal, very powerful things.”
She turned the knob. Just a little hotter. Hardly bearable.
Lizzie. The truth was that so many people could be named Lizzie. It wasn’t personal. But she’d only had one sister. My sister. My little sister.
When her uncle had spoken Lizzie’s name, it was like he summoned her up. Cassie could see her blondish braids and that silly patchwork dress their mom had made, drenched and wet, her pallid skin. On that terrible day.
She let her tears mix with the water running down her face. Even alone, she didn’t want to show she was crying. Her uncle had said that her mom blamed herself for Lizzie. “She never blamed you.”
The question was: who would Lizzie blame?
===
That night, Cassie lay in her childhood bed, covered in a mismatched quilt her mother had apparently made. The faint moonlight cast everything in shades of deep blue.
Over pizza, her uncle had tried to make small talk. “You gonna see anyone special while you’re in town?”
She shook her head, mouth full.
“You ever in touch with that old boyfriend of yours? What’s his name? Jimmy Harper?” He smiled. “I remember that kid was around here all the time.”
Cassie didn’t smile. Her uncle was just trying to make conversation. She swallowed. “Jim died. A couple years ago, I heard. He lived out in California. Motorcycle accident.”
Her uncle looked shocked, like he’d said the worst possible thing he could’ve said. Which maybe he had. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I hadn’t heard.”
She shrugged, like it didn’t mean anything. But at the time, she had sat in her apartment and stared at the wall, and just… thought. Thought about how her life might have branched out in a different direction if she had stayed with Jim, married him even, moved to California.
“I hope you get some sleep. We can talk more about the funeral arrangements tomorrow.” Her uncle said he’d sleep here, downstairs on the sofa, in case she needed anything.
Or in case the unstable daughter doesn’t want to be alone in her dead mother’s house.
===
Cassie looked at her phone. 1 am. Her uncle had said the wind was picking up. It might rain. She looked at the ceiling. She looked at the posters on the wall. She purposely hadn’t looked out the window, out back, where the lawn sloped down to a pond and beyond that the woods.
The pond.
tap-tap-tap
Cassie propped herself up on an elbow and looked around in the semi-dark.
tap-tap, tap-tap
What was it? Annoying, is what it is. She needed some sleep. She grabbed two sleeping pills from the bottle and chased them with a swig of water from her bottle on the nightstand.
She stared at the ceiling until her eyelids grew heavy and her jaw slackened.
tap. tap-tap.
She opened her eyes. That sound. It reminded her of Jimmy tapping on her window, late at night, to get her to come down. He’d climb the tree, with those slats they’d nailed into the trunk, tap quietly on the window panes so her mom wouldn’t hear.
Summer nights with Jimmy. Something else never to be recovered.
She propped herself up again and ooked around.
tap-tap-tap
It was the tree. The branches tapping against the window in the breeze. She could see their silhouettes against the glass. tap. tap-tap-tap.
The tree that Jimmy used to climb up. That she used to climb down.
The tree into which she and Jimmy had carved their initials inside a lopsided heart.
tap-tap-tap
Cassie screwed her eyes up tightly and clenched the edge of the blankets in her fists. Dwelling on it wouldn’t help. Wouldn’t change anything. Breathe in. Breathe out slowly. Relax your eyes. Your grip. Just like they taught in therapy.
She didn’t want to remember.
tap-tap
But the tree, it wanted her to remember, she thought unreasonably.
She opened her eyes. Branches silhouetted against the window in the moonlight. Long, tapered shadows growing along the floor, like they were reaching for her.
The tree remembered. The tree saw everything.
The tree against which she and Jimmy, at fifteen, were making out when she was supposed to be watching her little sister.
Her mother just had to run down to the 7-11 for milk. Just fifteen minutes. Watch your sister.
But she wasn’t. Watching her.
Not when she wandered off. Not when she made her way down to the pond, to try to see the ducks by herself. Not when she slipped.
Not when she drowned.
It was her fault.
Not Mom’s.
Not Jimmy’s.
Lizzie was her sister. It was her fault.
And the tree knew it.
tap-tap-tap-tap
Cassie downed two more sleeping pills, pulled the blankets over her head and let the drugs drown her in sleep.
===
“Have an okay night?” her uncle asked, not turning from the stove where he was already cooking eggs. She could smell it.
“Coffee?” she muttered as she shuffled into the kitchen and flopped down at the Italian-restaurant table.
“That bad, huh?” he said and placed a steaming mug before her. It was her mom’s old mug with the stupid, ugly, heart-shaped handle.
She took a sip. Too hot. Too black. Good.
“I couldn’t sleep. That damn tree. The branches kept knocking against the window.”
He slid a fried egg onto a plate. “Scrambled or fried?” he asked.
“Scrambled, please.”
Then, “What tree?”
“The one outside my bedroom window. You know, the one we used to climb.” She studied the magnets on the refrigerator, mostly free ones from random companies.
Her uncle turned around, a puzzled look on his face. “You must’ve been dreaming. Or it was something else. Your mom had that tree cut down a few years back. Lightning. Tree guys said it would fall on the house eventually if she didn’t cut it down. Too bad, huh?” He turned back to the stove. “Dammit. Almost burned ‘em.”
Cassie felt flushed. “Excuse me a sec.” She ran upstairs to her room, to the window. No branches. She prised up the sash, the old wood sticking and protesting. She leaned out. The tree, her tree, was gone. Down on the ground, a stump. Her breath caught in her throat.
Breathe in. Breathe out. She thought about the sleeping pills. The stress of her mom’s sudden death and the trip on the bus. The weirdness of being back in her old house. Yeah, her uncle was right. Of course, he was right. She’d been dreaming all along.
She was sad for the old tree. Sad for Jimmy and her mom. Sad for Lizzie. Sad for herself.
===
That night she started out with two sleeping pills right away. Another two an hour later. How many after that? She couldn’t remember…
She lay on her back with her eyes closed—half into sleep.
tap
tap
tap
She let the tapping come. Breathe in. Breathe out.
tap-tap-tap
She didn’t open her eyes. Breathe in. Breathe out.
The silhouettes of branches tapped against the window.
She imagined she could feel the tap-tap inside her scars. She didn’t open her eyes. Breathe in. Breathe out.
The blue-grey shadows of branches snaked across the bedroom floor, growing closer.
She wouldn’t open her eyes. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Shadow branches like tendrils, like arteries, like rivulets of water, snaked over the bed, the blanket, her body. They wrapped her in their embrace. Tighter. Tighter.
She couldn’t open her eyes. Breathe—
If you’re interested in doing this 30-day horror-writing challenge, or reading other stories by other writers in the challenge, it’s hosted by
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This is your best one! Word perfect!