Since that First Night of Lit Halls
As you read this short story by magical realism enthusiast Tamara Sellman, pay attention to the ways in which the omniscient third person narrator reports the main character’s thoughts and ideas. Techniques of magical realism allow readers to understand and accept the mother’s way of understanding what is happening. With this acceptance comes an ability to read the story as one that evokes the difference between male and female energies and the difference between the rational and irrational that sustain us.
Since That First Night of Lit Halls
by Tamara Sellman
The mother dreams she is the commander of a fierce medieval battle just as she hears them–soft, short scuffs across the shag. The sounds tear through the spectacle of her dream. Images of gallant horses, a stone parapet and a battering ram explode like fireworks into unnatural colors. Fragments of armor, shreds of war flags and clods of earth shoot to the recesses and are lost. The new sounds, now closer, remain constant. Joining them are the choked whimpers of softly controlled crying.
She rolls in the direction of the sounds and recognizes her four-year-old daughter in the silver light from the window, where the moon glistens through the leftover tracks of an evening shower. A nightlight plugged in underneath the windowsill illuminates the girl’s slippered feet. She walks past the foot of the bed and approaches the side where her father sleeps.
“What is it?” the mother asks quietly, hoping the girl will cling to her voice instead and come to her side.
Her daughter, brave enough not to burst into tears, remains at her father’s side. “I had a bad dream.”
The father rouses suddenly. “What?” he exclaims, still in the mitten of sleep.
The mother is annoyed. How can he not sense his own daughter walking into the room?
“Just a bad dream,” she chimes. “Wanna climb in, sweetie?”
The girl scales the side of the bed to snuggle against her sleeping father. The mother sighs and turns over, all too aware he is too asleep to participate in cuddling.
She spends every day of her life with her children now that her career life has receded four years into personal history. She knows that her girls have plenty of quality time with her and that they love her. She also knows there are times when they need their father. But she wishes, all the same, that her daughter would have chosen her just now. Nightmares are a category she knows well, having become something of a specialist ever since the beginning of her first pregnancy.
Sleep returns to the family for a moment. The father snores readily, while the mother’s mind grabs at puzzle pieces to recreate the splendor of her epic dream: a brandished coronet here, a silver mesh gauntlet there. Shards of memory reveal she is in charge of an army of admiring men, swarthy with red beards and spiked helmets. Under her command, they are about to seize a Gothic, smoke-robed keep.
Just as the mother mounts her steed and raises her arm to launch another attack, a voice announces:
“I have to go potty.”
Her daughter rises out of bed and dashes off to the toilet in the master bath. The mother and the father resume their normal sleeping positions. The thick breathing of the father indicates to the mother that he is still the only one asleep. Her fantasies lost to the interruption, she lies awake, ears tuned to the sound of tinkling, the soft flush behind the closed bathroom door, the metallic jiggle of the knob. She takes a deep breath, hoping for a cuddle or two in the second round. “Choose me,” she prays, “choose me.”
When the girl returns, her father, at first, does not move.
“Daddy–”
The father, after pulling the covers closer to himself: “You can’t sleep here all night.”
“But–”
“It was just a bad dream, that’s all. You should go back to bed.”
“But–”
There is no offered hug, no words to hang on, no working it out. The mother stews. This is her territory! Why won’t her little girl come to her side of the bed?
The father rolls onto his back and sighs before starting to snore again, leaving no invitational space. The daughter stands wordlessly at the bed’s side.
She’s only four years old, the mother thinks. “Fine, I’ll get out of bed and see her to her room,” she growls, not meaning to sound resentful of her daughter. She isn’t. She understands her little girl well enough to know that a simple command like “go to bed” is of no use.
The mother rises and meets her daughter at the foot of the bed. “Come here, honey. Tell me what your dream was about.” She wraps her arms around the girl’s slight body.
Her daughter is shaking. “It was a bad witch,” she finally manages before surrendering to the relief of quiet tears.
The mother nods her head and gives the girl a long, rocking embrace. “Look outside, sweetie. It’s been raining. You probably heard the sound of the rain, saw the shadows from the trees. See? It’s right outside my window, too.” The girl looks and nods her head. The mother wipes away warm tears from her daughter’s delicate cheeks. “And anyway, you know it was a dream, right? So you know it isn’t real. Just a dream. Why, I have them, too.”
The girl takes a deep, shaky breath and smiles slightly. “Can you just make her go away?”
“How about I walk you back to your room?”
Her daughter’s smile is as warm as the nightlight on the wall behind her.
****
At her husband’s insistence–for his wife was notorious for sleepwalking–the house had been strewn with nightlights the evening after she had lost her job. She had discovered that same morning that she was pregnant, and it had been a surprise. After all, she and her husband hadn’t been trying.
They had crept around the house that afternoon calculating the number of tiny lighted appliances they would need, then made the trek from their tiny coastal town of Salish to Warrenton, where everyone went to do their discount shopping. At the dinner hour they flitted between strip malls and outlets in November rain, searching for the perfect apparatus. A late meal of New York steak and fried onion straws at a chain restaurant restored them briefly that night, but there had been no official celebration of a child-to-be, that night or any night, only the popped cork from a bottle of sparkling cider heralding the completion of their task. She had been too weary then, from the emotional upheaval of her job loss, the physical exhaustion of early pregnancy and their whirlwind shopping task, to protest. They drove home in ruthless darkness, eyes wide only for deer along the highway.
Ultimately, the quiet little beacons did nothing to help the mother navigate brand-new nightmares which suddenly super-imposed themselves upon her usual patterns of sleepwalking. Mostly there was the recurring visitation of a shapeless hag, who liked to crouch upside down in the corner of the ceiling and claw at the mother’s head as she ambled past in deep sleep. Occasionally, the witch would stuff her reeking bulk into the linen closet, and the next day, the mother would have to wash all the towels and sheets to get rid of a strange odor. And there were times when the mother would bump into the witch when their paths crossed in the loft.
After two weeks of visitations, the mother realized that the only thing the nightlights protected was the father’s ability to sleep at night over the course of her pregnancy. They gave him the illusion that she had light–however useless–to protect her pregnant body from falling down the stairs. He never noticed the regular litter of dead ladybugs on the carpet that appeared every morning wherever the witch had been lurking the night before.
She tried to tell him that her sleepwalker’s nightmares were as real as the comforter on their bed–she pointed to askew furniture in the loft or to grimy handprints left high on the bathroom windows–but her stories only left him shaking his head, blinking at her like she was speaking gibberish.
“I think this is just a case of motherhood anxiety,” he deduced. “It’ll be over in a few months.”
****
The mother holds hands with her daughter as they tiptoe down the hall, which glows at either side with strategically arranged pairs of lights.
“Shhh, don’t wake sister,” the daughter half-whispers, half-giggles. The mother breathes through her mouth so she can listen more keenly.
From the children’s nursery, where the baby also sleeps, there is the creaking noise that signals movement in the crib and the soft classical music floating from a radio on the bureau that has been left on perpetually. As mother and daughter turn the corner to enter the room, they stop.
The black aberration peers over the crib. In the soft radiance from a Winnie The Pooh nightlight, the mother can see that the witch has already taken the baby.
Mother and daughter watch as a gnarled hand reaches into the crib and scoops up another clawful of the baby’s flesh. Over the chords of a gentle symphony, there is the sound of chewing, breathing, licking. The mother notices the strange smell again: the scent of new birth, of sweet blood.
“Oh!” the mother starts, realizing this is likely her daughter’s first encounter with the witch. She stands protectively in front of the girl, but hesitates, shattered by a confusion of feelings: of her sudden, innate fearfulness mixed with the odd pride any mother would have in sharing a common bond with her child.
Sounds of snoring wind down the hallway then.
“I want to go back to Daddy,” the girl tugs at the mother’s grip on her hand.
The mother’s heart clouds for a moment. “What you would see if you would only wake up.”
The girl insists. “I’m scared, Mommy. Make her go away.”
Inhaling deeply, she kneels next to her shivering girl. “Let me show you what you need to do.” Their eyes lock for a moment. The energy the mother pulls from their shared gaze quickly arms her with the attitude of a knight inspired to valiance.
“Stay here and watch me.” She rises and, with arms raised, she approaches the witch, planning to push the hag out the window.
“Say boo.” After her second step–it is the same with every encounter–the nightmare folds itself up, a noiseless implosion of black into elusive, treacherous dark. The window rattles.
“Mommy!” The daughter’s voice is a bright exclamation of amazement, pride and horror. “You made her go away!”
“Not really,” the mother rolls her eyes, smiles crookedly, tries to play a funny hero’s role, though what she wants to tell her daughter is that the witch never really goes away, she has been visiting since that first night of lit halls more than four years ago.
They reclaim the crib’s side and peer in. The baby girl rolls over peacefully in her sleep, kicking the wrinkled bunching of blankets from between her plump legs. Her cheeks are rosy in the nightlight’s glow.
“One day,” the mother whispers as she rearranges the swaddling around her baby, “one day I’m going to catch you and eat you myself.”
“Mommy, don’t say that!”
The mother realizes with a chill what she has done. “No-no, sweetie,” she stutters, “I meant that for the witch.”
She pauses to listen for the liquid sound of thumbsucking from the baby, and when it commences, she turns to her sleepy-eyed girl.
“Now it’s time to go back to bed.” She pulls up the satin-edged coverlet as the girl wiggles into a question-mark shape on her bed. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
“Is that witch going to come back?”
“Maybe.”
The girl frowns. “Will you say boo the next time, too?”
The mother shushes her. “I’ll do it every night, if you want me to.”
“Can’t Daddy make her go away?”
The mother sighs and kisses her brow, then leaves the nursery for the well-lit hallway. Wide awake, she ducks the shadow in the ceiling over her bedroom door before passing through to join her dozing husband.
****