Moonlit Promises

Scarlett woke to find the house had grown quiet. The air was growing cooler, the windows creaking softly to the wind and mist tugging at them that streamed through the trees. She lay there, feeling somehow odd, but could not tell why.

She hadn't slept. Her head was swimming. She turned her face aside and caught a glimpse of thin moonlight seeping through the window and listened to the house: some old wood creaking; the distant wind rumbling through the eaves.

Memories were shredded by the footfall.

She closed her eyes. The weariness pulled her under, and she was in her childhood home, not that one. This was a memory, vague and dreamy, as though it were someone else's life, someone else's time.

It was a dismal hall, and all the light came from a single lamp, which cast great shadowy marks upon the papered walls. She was little in this remembrance of hers—a child of four or five, with bare, small feet against the coolness of the wooden floors. The corridor seemed interminable; the rooms of her house lay stretched between.

Scarlett woke up from a restless sleep, jerked awake by dark nightmare images she barely remembered, and got out of bed in search of her father.

He is the man who always makes her better; his voice is full-throated and deep, almost commanding, and has this peculiarly powerful ability to exorcise nightmares.

He found him, stretched out across the fireplace in his favorite leather armchair. His hair was a little mussed, and the sleeves reached up to his elbows clasped around the book. The warmth from the fire ran along his features; otherwise, he was rounded out by warmth and distance.

"Psst, Daddy," she whispers small.

His soft eyes made him smile in this movement as if there was the distance he portrayed somehow. He seemed out of the world, having thoughts in his mind elsewhere. 

"What's the matter, darling?"

He nodded, pushed his book off to one side of the table by his chair, and patted his knee. "Come here, little one," he said, his voice so soothing that it could have been part of a lullaby.

She drew near, but she paused and froze. There was something about the distance between them that felt too great to bridge.

And then the memory shifted.

The flames seemed to go out, and the shadows came in. She was in her bed, and her father was gone. The house felt cold, colder than it should have been, and her heart was tight.

Where had he gone?

She thought about calling out but didn't.

 She woke the next morning in her bed; her father had long since gone to work; the house hummed on, a sort of indifferent busyness that went with its fears. She never spoke of it. She told herself it didn't matter.

But the memory lingered.

Scarlett's eyes opened in the present. The dream faded, but its emotions lingered. The feeling of abandonment, faint but persistent, came back to her.

She could almost feel the chill, that gulf of endless space stretching between her small self and the warm presence of her father, so proximate yet out of sight.

It had been stored in the attic for all those years, kept inside like old boxes, but it came to her sharply now. She wondered whether that was why her father left, why the house always felt colder, and why shadows of absence haunted her.

A half-real memory, half a dream, could not lie.

Would he have wanted to come? Or was it that he had come calling on the part of himself, dug beneath the folds of time and family secrets?

Scarlett laid her palm to her chest, her tears welling there in the corners of her eyes.

It was as if the whole town, shadows, whispers, and silences were buried deep within these memories, fragments of unspoken sentiment and tales left untold.

All connected, did they?

The letter. The warnings. Her return.

The dreams and the memories tried to mean something, but words refused to come.

Hours passed as she tried to shake off the weight of shadows above her head: loss, fear, and abandonment. Even how much pain the sentiments chipped in, though, these somehow felt like missing parts. These were not memories. End.

The types of hints that would direct her towards answers.

Towards understanding.

Toward his silence.

She closed her eyes once again, letting the feelings drown in her. She'd meet them.

The next day she'll face more questions and modes.

But tonight she will feel.

Remember.

She will listen to whispers in her heart.