A collection of Aleathia's work can be visualized at www.myabdication.blogspot.com.

Ghostkeeper

     The incongruency of memory proved to help Amber remain sane all these years

remembering things in a potpourri of half-truths, fact, and fiction.  Her

imagination given free reign to reconstruct the happenings in her life she

deemed unsavory.

     Amber had lived her whole life amidst wilted twilights, seedy trailers and

faces of strangers that changed like dirty socks.  This had not been the life

she would have chosen for herself if given the option, but it had served her

well just the same.  It was the only life she had been provided. The only thing

truly hers in this world was the way her memory folded around the circumstances

of her meager existence.

     She had been wounded by mercurial sounds of her parents’ drunken fights in

the early hours of morning that would startle her from sleep in a room full of

darkness and fear.  She would await the sounds of flesh hitting flesh, her heart

pounding into her ears as she held her breath hoping it would stop time.  Over

time these fights became so monotonous that they no longer perturbed her any

more than the alarm on her clock.  

     When Amber was older, she waited up for them on the couch watching TV or

doing her homework while darkness covered the lawn. They strolled in the door

more than five hours late home from work greeting her with drunken homecomings,

reducing her to groveling for forgiveness after being handed a verdict for

crimes never committed.

    In between these hostilities, Amber spent most of her life traipsing from

town to town, never touching down long enough to imagine growing roots.  This

meant she tumbled around in the perpetual role of new kid in town, always

beginning shyly and awkwardly by listening to the lilting of accented voices so

different from her own, studying their peculiar movements.  

     She languished in the ritual as it was never very fruitful and the courage

it took to interact with them was exhausting.  Beginning emotional connections

repeatedly made Amber feel despondent because she knew what strides she did make

would not last long.  She began to socially diminish into herself with the

unmitigated desire to be bonded to someone.

     Amber hungered for other children to grab her hand and drag her to the side

of the play yard whispering secrets into her ear, to have inside jokes that

caused a tornado of giggles with a knowing glance between the two keepers.  She

wanted to somehow fit into a group tightly, and snug as a puzzle piece, but this

was not her destiny.

     She found herself drifting sideways into loosely assembled miscreants, and

outcaste personalities, whose appearances were slightly off-kilter, an air of

tarnished pride and dignity could be seen on their sleeves and heard in the

lower registers of their voices when they spoke.  They were nice to her, had

depth of character that was not known to those that smiled for a living, had

laughter as their best friend, or knew how to talk about pleasantries.  They had

skeletons whose bones jangled audibly in hollow tones like a warning.

     These children lived confessional, sullen lives whose sordid affairs were

best kept behind the closed doors of their battered homes, but it leaked beneath

the jamb, attached itself to them on their way to school. Their social

invisibility stole the fire from their eyes leaving cold, wet embers.  

     The most unbelievable notions dripped from their lips like slow moving

trains filled with unsuspected horrors. It pained Amber to listen to them

everyday, but they were giving her something rare and special, they were

spilling their insides onto her lap sensing she was tough enough to stand it. 

She attracted these people like moths, all of them circling her like a wagon

train.

     Amber somehow thrived in this garden of weeds, cultivating hardships and

misgivings into neat, symmetrical plots.  She tended to the healing of their

hearts with listening softly and collecting the decaying pieces of them for

planting and rebirth.  Sometimes, she got her hands dirty in the holding of

their demons, her flesh wet with tears of release.  She spoke to them from a

place of tender understanding that felt neither contrived nor condescending. 

Their trust in her nourished what little soul she felt she had, more than the

finest living, more than the hope for stability.

     These moments were raw and human, and the only true connection to mankind

she had lay in these glimpses of supreme vulnerability.  It was here Amber felt

the lucidity of the human spirit, and despite the pain she endured in the

constructing and deconstructing of these pyramids, she felt she could not

function any other way. 

      It was the transient children and their lives that pushed the pen into her

hand, made her a storyteller of sadness and hardship.  She was the keeper of

their ghosts and the memory of them made tangents and bifurcations in the

recesses of her mind. Those unfortunate enough to not be part of her garden

could never rectify in themselves her ideas or actions.  It is perhaps, Amber

thought, why she always felt so alone.

Last update : 17-06-2007 16:53

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