Recall was what happened to Nadia on her initial attempts to settle down for the night in the empty house. As the blood-warm waters of sleep began to close over her head, the wave had a tendency to recede sharply and she was torn away and jerked awake like an unfortunate fish impaled a hook. Sometimes, she brought back things from her failed attempts. One evening, she brought back a boy.

How did it happen? It happened like this: she was going under, and she saw a face looking up at her from the bottom, and an outstretched hand. She grasped the hand. She was snapped back. Twisting and turning in her sweat-damp sheets, she glanced in a corner and saw a small figure illuminated by the night-light. The figure was an impossibility, and yet no less real than her rickety night table, and even more real than the picture of her mother on said rickety night table.

Nadia had never known herself to hallucinate before. She supposed the boy would have presented a problem had she lived with someone else, but the house had emptied out many years before, and she was alone. She was, one could say, glad for the company. A good thing, because the hallucination was not in a hurry to leave.

The boy looked roughly eleven years old. In the daytime, he busied himself with humming softly in a corner, arranging Nadia’s discarded shoes into enemy fleets and waging world wars on the threadbare rug. The wind wrestled with the curtains and, tiring, sighed; her mother smiled from the brass frame. The boy played.

At night, he curled up at the far end of the king-size bed. Before he went to sleep, he made a habit of tracing the headboard inlaid with mother-of-pearl birds and fruits, once Nadia’s mother’s pride and joy. He was in awe of Nadia’s house, of the outmoded furniture, the wear-and-tear, the creaking of a loose shutter at night.

The boy rarely spoke. He did like to hear Nadia speak, all the time. She mostly trash-talked her relatives, lamenting that they had left her “all alone,” when she, in fact, had refused to move in with any of them on account of their loud children.

He was delightfully interested in her endless litany of complaints, so interested that she could never imagine asking a doctor prescribing her anti-psychotics to make him go away.

Who were they hurting, the two of them?Continue reading “Recall”