October 2023 Fiction Project: The Witch House – Oct 13

Note: Email sent from her own email address to her own email address, still saved in the “Drafts” folder on her phone.

I don’t know how I let it go this far.

How did I end up here?

How did I end up married to a man I barely know, and have him in control of not just my health and sanity, but my daughter’s?

How did it all happen so fast?

One moment, I was living a happy life with Steven. He was a good husband and a good father, a good partner.

The next moment, I was shivering in the basement of Dave’s house with his wedding band on my finger.

In between there was mostly fog.

I don’t know how I ended up here. I feel like I haven’t felt like myself for a long time.

Is

…

I was looking at photographs of Stephen today, from a photo album that I’d been keeping snapshots in since I was old enough to get my first camera, when I was four or five or so. Nana always liked to buy me the little black and yellow disposable cameras and tell me to “go take pictures.” Easier said than done, when I was little! Pushing the button on a disposable camera wasn’t always the easiest. The buttons were all of a piece with the outer case of the camera. At first I had to have Nana or Uncle Frank push the button for me. Or a stranger—this was all the way back in ancient times, when you figured it was fine if your kids talked to just about anyone, as long as they “belonged” to the neighborhood. That was something. Every adult over thirty or so was your auntie or your uncle.

So I was flipping through pictures, going from out-of-focus pictures of rocks and flowers and shoes, to photographs of me and my girls when we were Jayla’s age, to my first “real” camera at sixteen, a terrible digital camera where we printed out pictures on bad old printers and put them in the album laughing, because who’d want to look at printed out pictures anyway, when they were so much better on the computer?

The printouts got better and better, though, until you can’t tell them apart from a real photograph.

I still have a fondness for those old disposable film cameras.

They felt real in a way a digital photograph does not.

I don’t have any “real” photographs of Steven, or of Jayla, for that matter. I’ll have to try to rectify that with Jayla, at least. It’s too late for Steven.

What happened to him? I can’t even remember it clearly.

I look at the folks in the albums, and I go: I can’t even tell who’s who anymore.

I look at my own face in photographs and it doesn’t even seem like my own. Who was that woman, with the wide smile and the laugh lines that turned upward at the corners of her eyes? Even after she became a mother her face was all over babyfat. Renee, I think, like it was someone else’s name.

Who was that man, often standing or sitting beside her, a smile on his face, always pretending to be serious but cracking a smile as soon as he thought the camera was turned away? I remember that he had a cleft in his chin, but in the photographs in my album (taken via a digital camera), he doesn’t have one.

I can remember the feel of it under my fingers. He’d roll up his chin to be scratched, like a big cat.

There’s one picture of me in that album as a grown woman that feels real. Steven drew a picture of me from my high school prom photo, from before he ever met me. He was a real artist despite everything, and drew me more beautiful than I ever was, surrounded by flowers and leaves and butterflies.

Isn’t it funny how something that never was real can feel more real than the real thing ever could?

…

pitch black

he said renee wake up

what is it?

i hear something

i listened, but i said, i don’t hear it

he got up, pantherlike

check jayla

i got up too

he was halfway downstairs, i opened the door of jayla’s room

in her room

i screamed steven!

i grabbed it and tore it off her, threw it in the corner

she gasped for air mommy mommy

i went to pick her up, i turned my back on it for half a second—

fight baby, fight it

he was standing over me, hands on my shoulders

fight it baby

i felt hot acid in my stomach

i shook my head and swallowed and swallowed

you have to fight it

then

i was underneath a blanket and it was scratchy on my skin and i couldn’t remember how i got there, to dave’s house

and now i am waking up