by Vered Ehsani
“Hello, Ashish,” Mom called out from where she was peeling potatoes. “How’s my little angel?”
I was oh so happy that none of my friends were with me. I would not want to be called that nickname in front of them or at school, or anywhere for that matter.
“Oh, Mom!” I complained automatically as my sisters began to giggle. Add “annoying” on top of “talkative.”
“Hush, please,” Mom ordered. “Bibi’s trying to rest in the study.”
My mom was a no-nonsense kind of person, and no one argued with her, not even my dad. When she was serious and expected instant obedience (which was pretty much most of the time), her dark eyes narrowed in warning, and she always flicked her long, black braid off her broad shoulders for emphasis. Just like she was doing right at that moment. She gripped another potato with a sturdy hand, her knife raised. I pitied the potato.
“Yeah, we know,” Shanti said with a grin that dimpled her slightly plump cheeks. Shanti’s a thirteen-year-old duplicate of Mom, a really irritating duplicate. “The crazy aunt’s back!”
“She’s not crazy!” I said heatedly. I don’t know why I felt I had to defend her, because truthfully, she was a little nuts. Actually, a lot nuts.
“Yeah, she is,” Anjali interrupted. She’s the eleven-year-old duplicate.
“Yeah,” Gita added (nine years old, not a duplicate, just really annoying). “She makes even you seem normal, Ash.”
Great. I was so lucky to have not one, but three sisters.
“Poor Dad. He’s going to go nuts when he finds out,” Anjali twittered to Gita, and they began to giggle. And that was when it happened. It was as if a cloud passed over the sun. All the colors in the kitchen faded, and all sound was muffled. The shadows in the room darkened and grew. Some of them seemed to pull away from the walls and float toward my oblivious sisters. It happened so fast that I didn’t have time to react. And when I finally unfroze my mouth and was about to scream a warning or something else equally crazy, I blinked, and color and sound rushed back in.
“That’s enough, girls. Have you started that history essay yet, Shanti?” Mom demanded as she began to chop up the defenseless potato.
Not waiting for the response, I left. I couldn’t stop myself from fearfully glancing back several times. The kitchen remained full of light and life, just as normal. What a day. I paused briefly outside the study, wondering if I should knock.
“Who’s there?” Bibi called out.
“Uh,” I stumbled on a shoe that had been discarded in the hallway. Smooth. “Just me.”
“Well then,” Bibi responded in a jovial tone, “come in, ‘just me.’”
Eagerly, I slipped inside the study. I had a brain full of questions bursting to get out. (Not a nice feeling, mind you.) Bibi sat in a heavy leather armchair near the door, intently listening to the news. Setting down her tea cup and adjusting her glasses on her nose, she gazed up at me through smudges on the lens as she gestured for me to enter.
“So much darkness,” she commented, nodding to the radio, and then grimaced in pain.
“What’s wrong?” I demanded as I sat down.
Bibi glanced at the door and then turned to face me. I automatically bent forward, as if we were about to share a secret. In a conspiratorial whisper, she answered, “I’ve been shot.”
I sat very still, waiting for the punch line—it was a joke, after all—but it never came. When I realized that she was actually serious, I tried to keep my face and voice neutral. “Oh,” I said. Not very profound, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Really? Well, shouldn’t we take you to the hospital then?”
“Oh no!” she responded. “We don’t want anyone to know.”
“We don’t?” I said it more as a statement than a question. At this point, I had to admit something to myself: maybe my father was right. He thought Bibi was crazy. I mean, seriously crazy. As in clinically insane and should be hospitalized in an institution for the mentally deranged. Maybe Bibi should be in a loony bin.
“Don’t worry, dear,” Bibi spoke in a reassuring voice, patting my arm, having completely misread my silence and my expression.
Not convinced, I opened my mouth and then stopped. For some reason, I remembered the dream voice; I mean I could almost hear it again, and I shuddered. Imagine a really deadly venom that can be injected into a voice. That was what it sounded like. Oh, yeah, this day was just getting better and better. I glanced around instinctively.
“Is anything wrong, dear?” she asked.
I could think of so many ways that question could be answered. Instead I mumbled, “No, it’s nothing. So why is it time?” I asked, remembering the enigmatic comment Bibi had made upon her dramatic arrival early that morning.
Bibi’s expression grew somber. “Fifteen is a special age, Ash.”
For some reason, I was still glancing around, as if looking for something. I felt the same way I had felt in the dream, when I had seen the shadowy hunter coming nearer. “Yeah, sure is. Maybe it means I can drive a tractor in the countryside.” The comment came out more sarcastically than I intended. I was a little distracted.
“That too. More important, it means it’s time for a new role. That’s why I came.”
Hey, I’m just writing what she said. It made no sense to me either. She shook her head slowly; her eyes squeezed shut for a moment. Then she glanced up and continued, “But I’m jumping ahead of myself. How’s your eyesight?”
Like I just wrote, it made no sense. I frowned in confusion. “It’s fine. I have 20/20 vision.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she replied and looked at me so intently that I was tempted to tell her about the dreams and the shadows. Oh, and the voices that only I heard. Hmm, on second thought, maybe not.
“I see,” she murmured, watching me squirm under her piercing gaze. “Well then, we will talk later.”
“But you said it was time!” I protested.
“Yes, it is.”
“But time for what?”
“Time for me to rest.”
I slumped back into the chair, disappointed. “You made it sound so urgent.”
“It is,” Bibi replied calmly. “When you’re ready. You seem to be tired as well. You should get some rest too.”
“Okay,” I said, but I didn’t really think it was okay at all. My head was buzzing with questions, but if you knew my great-aunt Bibi as well as I did, you knew you couldn’t insist. I had to wait. I left the study and climbed the stairs. As I reached the landing, I told myself that she hadn’t been shot at all. Maybe it was something as uninteresting as a muscle spasm or a bruise from bumping against a cupboard. Being Bibi, she was making it into something a little less mundane, a little more intriguing. Surely, if she had really been shot, she wouldn’t be casually sitting in Dad’s study, sipping a cup of tea and talking about my eyesight. I mean, seriously.
By the time I was getting ready for bed, I had actually convinced myself that everything really was okay, as in everything was normal, including my eyesight, and there was nothing to worry about.
Ha ha.
So after my successful efforts at convincing myself that everything was fine and normal, I went to bed, where I tossed and turned for a long time, and then gave up. I wasn’t going to fall asleep easily. Two nights in a row. Hopefully this wasn’t a sign of things to come. Restless and nervous (no idea why), I went downstairs, padding through the darkened, quiet house to the kitchen. The parents and the three sisters were in deep sleep, but as I passed the study, I could hear the distinct clicking of Bibi’s knitting needles. You’d think she would need to sleep, especially if she’d just been shot. But oh no… I decided not to disturb her. I wasn’t being thoughtful and kind. I just wasn’t sure if I could handle more weirdness from her right then.
So I headed for the kitchen. I didn’t bother to turn the light on but strolled to the fridge and opened the door. I stooped into the pool of cool air and subdued smells of leftovers. Yum. In that quiet pause
, I heard it. It was a soft whisper of words in an unknown language. It came from the opposite side of the kitchen, in the dark place where the light from the fridge didn’t reach. Of course.
“Hello?” I called out, but quietly. Seriously, I should have paid more attention to the lessons learned from horror movies. I could almost hear the audience screaming, “Get out, you fool!”
Instead, I rolled my eyes, letting myself be irritated, which was so much better than being afraid. “Anjali, it’s not a funny joke. In fact, it’s silly. That’s not even a real language.”
The voice faded, but my sense of unease didn’t. I mean, I didn’t hear any sisterly giggles or pitter patter of feet. I licked my lips and tried to breathe normally, which in the circumstance was not that easy to do. Leaving the fridge door open, I forced myself to dash back to the doorway, where the light switch was. White, bright light filled up the kitchen, obliterating all shadows.
There was no one there.
“Must’ve been a neighbor’s TV,” I whispered to the room, trying desperately to believe it. Somehow, I wasn’t convinced. So at that point, I pretty much forgot why I had bothered to go to the kitchen in the first place. I just wanted to get out. I beat a fast retreat to my bedroom, turned on all the lights, and opened up my history textbook, preparing to finish my homework. If anything can put me to sleep, it’s a history textbook. Licking my lips nervously, I tried to hum aloud to ease the horribly deep silence. I was so out of tune. For a moment, I actually wished my sisters were awake, making their usual annoying noise. I know: unbelievable. But anything would be preferable to this unreal quiet.
As I mechanically reread a paragraph for the third time, I heard words softly spoken in a strange, yet somehow familiar, language. Stranger still, the speaker was definitely in my room. So much for boring history books. I was wide awake now.
My eyes remained fixed on the textbook, but I could no longer see the words on the page. I stopped humming and held my breath, waiting for the sound to just vanish so I could pretend that it was something explainable.
The voice continued.
My shoulders tightened up into a painful hunch. Holding my breath (not sure why that should help), I slowly swiveled around in my chair, careful not to make any noise. I was so certain that the voice would fade away and there would be nothing but my comfortingly familiar room.
And that was what I saw, apart from the ghost.
Rigid with fear—I mean, I really could not move—I did nothing but stare at the specter. It was a girl about my age with dark brown skin and waist-length black hair. She was surrounded by a mist, which made her a bit blurry. Her dark eyes stared out into the room as she spoke, but she was not looking at me. Thank heavens for small mercies.
“Go away,” I whispered desperately, still unable to move. Even my mouth seemed frozen.
The girl didn’t seem to hear me, but her image shivered at that moment and then faded into a misty swirl, her voice calling out one last time as if from a great distance.
I woke up with a start, my cheek pressed against the textbook. Pushing myself upright, I stared around my room. It appeared normal.
“It was just another dream,” I mumbled in relief. I couldn’t remember actually falling asleep. I had to wonder why this sudden plethora of dreams. For the last several years, I’d had dreamless sleeps, and now in the space of two nights, I’d had three dreams that I could remember.
I stared at the corner where the dream ghost had been and tried to think rationally, which was not easy to do. Strange dreams, bodiless voices, moving shadows … I stood up, pondering what to do and feeling terrified.
How’s your eyesight?
Bibi hadn’t been asking about my normal vision, I finally admitted. She would understand.
“That’s because she’s crazier than you,” I reminded myself. I sighed deeply, realizing I was talking to myself, again. “Bibi it is,” I muttered, and with that, I finally broke the frozen spell the fear had placed me under. I dashed down the stairs to the study.
“Why, hello, Ash!” she exclaimed as I opened the door, not at all surprised by my late-night visit. That should have clued me in right away.
“My eyesight’s crazy. I’m hearing voices. A dream I used to have as a kid has come back. And I think I’m being haunted,” I announced in a strained voice as I stood in the entrance.
She gestured with a knitting needle for me to come in, almost poking out one of my eyes in the process. I tiptoed in, feeling a bit nervous, closed the door firmly behind me, and sat on the edge of the other arm chair. She put down the wool and peered at me through her smeared up glasses.
Now, I was really nervous.
Not daring to make eye contact (she was still staring at me—I could feel it), I watched the carpet and blurted out what had happened. All of it. Except the part about the shadows—I was pretty convinced that had been a trick of the light. She listened quietly, without interrupting. Even after I finally finished, she did not speak. So intently and carefully did she study me that I wanted to jump up and leave.
“I know, it’s crazy,” I muttered to break the silence, really glad I hadn’t told my parents. If this was the reaction from my great aunt, well-known for her eccentricities, Dad might’ve had a heart attack on the spot and Mom would have grounded me for a month.
“Oh no,” Bibi responded softly, her eyes glittering with barely suppressed enthusiasm. “On the contrary, it’s most intriguing.”
“You don’t think I need to go to … I mean, am I crazy?” I whispered.
“Now, what makes you ask that?” she exclaimed in sincere amazement, as if it was completely normal to be seeing and hearing things that no one else could see or hear. Then, with a tsk and a shake of her head, she resumed her knitting, needles clicking soothingly against each other, while she muttered, “There’s nothing wrong with you at all, my dear. Nothing at all. It’s the rest of the world that’s confused.”
Not entirely convinced, I nodded glumly. Bibi saw my expression, which was probably pretty miserable, and smiled warmly. “It’s quite normal to feel you are abnormal,” she responded, trying to console me. It didn’t work. “Why, when I was young, I was convinced I was an orphan from a freak show.”
I decided not to say anything about that idea. Instead, I mumbled, “Well, I feel like a freak. My dream … it’s like I’m really somewhere else, and not in a good way. And the dream with the ghost. They’re both so strong. And the voices. It’s not normal. I’m not normal.”
“That’s probably true,” Bibi said jovially.
“That’s not making me feel better.”
“I wasn’t trying to,” she stated, still knitting away. “If normal means being like everyone else, then no, you’re not normal. You’re interesting though.”
“Yeah, lucky me,” I muttered. In my experience, interesting was a word you used when you didn’t want to be rude, when you knew you really shouldn’t say what you really thought, or when you didn’t know what else to say. Like, someone asks what you think of his horrible hair cut and you respond, “Um, ah, well, it’s interesting!” In my case, interesting meant weird, crazy, different. Not things that I wanted to be. I just would’ve liked to survive the experience of being me without attracting too much attention in the process. You know, just blend in with the crowd. Because attention meant trouble. I didn’t want trouble. And I didn’t want interesting either.
“I think you’re very lucky!”
“I don’t,” I grumbled. “I don’t really fit in. I’m a … a cultural misfit! Especially the misfit part. I mean, when my friends ask what I did last night, I can’t exactly say, ‘Oh, not much. Just saw a couple ghosts, heard a few voices, had a prophetic dream in which I get killed. So what did you do?’”
Bibi smiled. “Maybe that’s because you don’t really understand who you are.”
I was so not in the mood to hear anything. I shook my head, already mentally defeating the idea. “I don’t think that’s really going to help
me fit in at school.”
“No, it won’t,” Bibi admitted and then leaned forward, her gaze suddenly sharp as she stared into me. Being stared into was really uncomfortable. “But it will help you realize that you don’t have to.”
Just as she said that, I thought back to the venomous voice that reminded me of nails on a chalkboard. “And the shadows,” I whispered without realizing I had spoken out loud.
“Shadows?” Bibi asked sharply. “Where did you see them?”
“In the kitchen. I think it may be haunted,” I admitted, startled by her tone.
“You have no idea,” she murmured enigmatically. “Your eyesight isn’t crazy at all, and neither is your hearing. Pass me my purse, dear,” and she waved a needle at a very big and heavy purse (I had to dodge to the side to avoid being impaled). What on earth do women put in their bags? Seriously. She could’ve been carrying the kitchen sink, it was so heavy.
Discarding the knitting needles and wool into a tangled heap on the floor, Bibi placed the large purse on her lap. With exaggerated care, she reached into its voluminous depths and pulled out a parcel wrapped in brown paper. “I believe I missed your birthday, Ash,” she explained and handed me the parcel.
“For me?” I exclaimed, although with certain trepidation. Let’s just say that Bibi’s gifts were rather infamous. I could still remember what she had brought me a couple years ago. It was supposed to help me conquer fear. It had been a tarantula. A very big, mutant tarantula.
Curiosity, however, compelled me to rip off the paper, to reveal a sachet made of soft leather with a string tying the opening closed. Definitely not another bizarre insect. Eagerly I opened up the string.
Imagine you are opening a gift, thinking it is something earth-shatteringly cool like the latest and greatest computer game, or better yet, the gadget you play the game on, and instead you open it up and find a dead bird. So you have some idea what I experienced.
“What is it?” I asked, trying hard to disguise my disappointment.
