The Cherry Robbers

by Sarai Walker

I see in flashes and impressions, color and light, not in words snaking across and down a page, that deep cavern of writing, which I rarely choose to enter.

Women are raised to be accommodating, so I suppose a woman who draws clear lines that others are not allowed to cross becomes remarkable for that fact alone.

Our summer vacation was our annual airing out, when the dome placed over us was lifted and we, choosing from any number of metaphors, scurried away like ants, flitted into the breeze like butterflies, scattered on the wind like petals.

Emily Dickinson wrote that it’s not just houses that are haunted but that the “brain has corridors.” Indeed. And mine are overflowing. The underworld of my mind—all those haunted corridors, however you want to describe it—contains shards of broken glass scattered all over the ground.

Our mother thought our house was haunted. That’s one of the reasons she was a figure of ridicule. She’d told us many times that on the day she first stepped into the wedding cake she felt the chill of a house paid for by death. She heard voices. She saw things. She had always believed in ghosts, from her earliest days, before she ever met my father and became his wife. From the start of her marriage, she knew the wedding cake was full of spirits and that they wanted to talk to her and her alone.

I grew up believing our mother was haunted, and since my sisters and I had each lived inside her for nine months, I wondered if we were haunted too.

But hindsight is twenty-twenty, as the cliché goes, and who could have imagined what was in fact to come. Not even Edgar Allan Poe, I’d say.

A baby haunted by the ghost of her mother.

evenings stuck at home with the darkness of winter wrapped as tightly around us as a scarf around the neck;

We lived in a weird sort of limbo that week, characters at the end of a chapter whose next sentences were being written at a torturously slow pace on an old typewriter that was running out of ribbon.

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.