The Moth by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781401305963
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2013-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

Erin Barker is a writer, a Moth GrandSLAM champion, and the senior producer of science storytelling project the Story Collider (storycollider.org). She would like to thank Justin D’Ambrosio, Ben Lillie, and Jenifer Hixson for their support and advice with this story and others, and her family for being awesome.

EDGAR OLIVER

The Apron Strings of Savannah

Mother used to always say to us, “Savannah is a trap. It’ll try to imprison you. Even if you manage to find a way to get away, it’ll drag you back.”

Mother also used to say, “Beware of other people. They won’t understand you. We’re different. We’re artists.” So all throughout my childhood it was just the three of us—Mother, Helen, and me. And then there was the world as though we were lost in it. Never were three more lost children than Mother, Helen, and me.

No one ever made it into our house, especially relatives. Mother was deeply suspicious of relatives. And if some old friend from Mother’s past did dare to pay a visit, they wouldn’t have been there very long when Mother would begin sobbing and screaming, “You’ve been listening to the vicious gossip about me! I can tell! You’ve been listening to the vicious gossip about me!” And she would advance on them, and they would back out the front door and flee, never to return. At which point we would all three jump in the car and zoom off with Mother driving like a maniac.

All throughout my childhood we drove obsessively, at least two hundred miles a day, sometimes three hundred. They were aimless drives. It didn’t matter where we went just so long as we were on the go. Helen and I did our homework in the car, which to this day I believe deeply affected both Helen’s and my handwriting, which no one can decipher.

At night we would return to the house on 36th Street and lock ourselves in. Then we would plunge the downstairs into darkness and all three make the terrifying journey upstairs together, where we would lock ourselves in for the night. We were all three so terrified of the dark that it never would have occurred to any of us to have a room of our own. So we all three slept together in the upstairs front bedroom. The rest of the rooms upstairs were stacked to the rafters with chests of drawers and trunks and armoires and boxes that were all locked and filled with Mother’s secrets.

We’d all three lie on our narrow beds in the front bedroom beneath dim-shaded lamps, and Mother would shuffle her gypsy-witch cards, and Helen and I would read, which we did madly. And Mother would ask the gypsy-witch cards things like what she should have to eat the next day. Eventually the gypsy-witch cards convinced Mother to go on a banana-split diet.

Invariably at some point Mother would beg Helen and me to rub her feet, so Helen and I would take turns sitting at the foot of Mother’s bed for hours kneading and twisting and tickling and pulling at her feet.

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