With Mother's Permission

Charlotte was deep in thought. Her husband had taken the kids out to the neighborhood pool after everything had been cleaned up from dinner. She had been having this dread feeling she absolutely abhorred but couldn’t put her finger on why she had it or what it was about. She had had this several times in her adult life but had never found a formula to quench the feeling. Therapy, medication, traveling, spending more money than she had, cardio exercise. Some things worked for a time, some didn’t work at all, some made it worse.

This time, the dread feeling seemed to pull her attention to her childhood but not toward anything specific. Charlotte had dealt with so many tragedies in adulthood so far and had been thrust fully into single motherhood before her college years had even concluded that addressing anything that had happened in her childhood hadn’t had a chance to be examined by her so far. Now life had slowed for her. Life was like a calm flowing, burbling river now, moving and changing but not turbulent and deadly - she wasn’t always in fight or flight anymore.

She was married to a wonderful man who took her premaritally begotten daughter on with equal enthusiasm as the two younger children he had biologically fathered with Charlotte. He worked hard and nurtured their lifestyle so she could pour into the children through lovingly homeschooling them and filling them with homemade meals and intentional days meant to further their good.

Her thoughts were on her childhood now but she was having a hard time remembering things about it. She had memories of course, good and bad, but it seemed like something was missing. She had heard how abuse survivors brain’s would sometimes block out memories to keep people functional. Did she have a history of abuse? She didn’t remember but something sinister seemed to loom up from her long past years. She had been a terribly rebellious teen and young adult, promiscuous and mostly drunk, that’s what had produced her now beloved college conceived child. She knew these were signs of childhood abuse too but she couldn’t remember. She had heard for forever that journaling was good but she had always struggled to keep up with a regular journal. Maybe a burst of journaling now would ease this dread though, like ibuprofen taking the weight from a bad headache.

She didn’t know what to start with. She looked at her phone. She looked up “journaling prompts to help remember things from childhood”. What appeared in the query results first was “when I think about my father I think…” and she started there. She starting listing all the memories she could think of about her father. It surprised her how opening this was, she was remembering more about her childhood than she thought she could. She remembered watching thunderstorms with him, laying in the grass in the back garden at their home just looking at the shape of the blades of grass and noticing and insects that crawled through the tangle of St. Augustine runners. She remembered the big hands he still of course had being ginormous to her then, her little hand barely wrapping around one of his fingers for many years. She remembered him remodeling their bathroom and letting her brother and herself sit in a bathtub all the way home from the hardware store in the back of their big SUV with back seats laid down flat. All the things she could think of her dad were fond memories, she felt his calm, his care for her. Tears welled in her eyes at the memories and seeing them with the perspective of a parent herself now. She remembered so many things about him that her brain hadn’t let her think about in a long time.

She checked the time to discover it had been nearly an hour she’d sat journaling about her dad. Her husband would be home with the kids any minute and they’d need snacks and bathing and bedtime books and snuggles. She set the journal aside but felt such a release from the gripping dread she had felt that she promised herself she would come back to this suddenly urgent work tomorrow. She felt a hope that sorting out her life could be possible. She couldn’t change anything in her past but she could try to understand and accept it.

Charlotte kept the promise to herself and the next day at the same time and in the same familiar spot in the corner of the deep seated living room sofa she conversed with the journal again, this time answering the second prompt on the list, “when I think of my mother I think…“. She didn’t write for a few minutes but pondered. Her mother was not like her father at all, she remembered thinking when she was younger that they shouldn’t be together. Her father had told her that he had gone on only one date with another girl before he dated her mother, when they started dating her mother was still in high school and as soon as she graduated and was of age, they married. That gave them nearly no experiential knowledge of dating and relationships.

Charlotte starting writing about her mother. She remembered her mom being angry with her for getting homesick at her first sleepover away from home and wanting her to pick her up and comfort her. Her mother had picked her up but said barely a word, putting her straight to bed with a sharp edge of irritation.

She remembered her mom saying she was going to make herself throw up from crying when she had told her to shut up when she was singing the “baby bumblebee” song when she was about four years old. She remembered her mom being mad at her the first time she started her period when they were driving from their hometown to where they lived. She remembered her mom always making contorted faces in the car, talking to herself but not audibly making a sound, Charlotte too bewildered in those moments to do anything but watch.

There was something more insidious than these character quirks that Charlotte was starting to remember too. She remembered waking up with scratches on her back when she was maybe five years old. The scratches were long and from something sharp, not something that Charlotte or a stray toy in her bed could have caused. they were in a splayed shape at the top of her back and came closer together but not crossing near the bottom, almost like a huge, whole paw cat scratch. Charlotte had shown her mother and her mother had dismissed it saying that she must have scratched herself playing. Charlotte remembered something else about this incident too, she remembered telling her mother about a red-eyed, black monkey named Max who crouched in the corner of her room at night. Of course her mother dismissed this too. The thing was, her mother in those times she contorted her face and mouthed things, mouthed the name Max. She wasn’t writing in the journal now but she was remembering things that her subconscious had blocked out.

Charlotte was remembering. Piecing things together. Her conscious mind catching up to what her body had carried all these years.

Max had visited Charlotte in the summer.

No—Max had been invited to visit Charlotte in the summer.

And now she remembered.

She was five. The grass was tall that year, and the heat clung to everything like a second skin. Her bedroom had three doors—one led to a small closet where Charlotte played with Barbies, the second opened to the hallway, and the last opened directly to the backyard. Her mother insisted on keeping that door locked, but Charlotte remembered how some nights it would be slightly open, just wide enough for a breeze. And for him.

Max had not knocked. He had never needed to.

He had crouched in the corner the first night, his black skin like the dried lava that first bubbles from a volcano. his red eyes, fiery like he might have actually been made of molten lava. She had known not to scream. She had known his name before he said it.

“I’m Max. I’m here because your mother told me you wanted to go away for a while.”

That’s what he had said. She remembered that now. He had spoken gently, even kindly. Not the voice of a monster, but of someone who understood something secret and sacred.

Charlotte had been a quiet, careful child until that summer. Then everything shifted. She remembered following Max out the back door one night, barefoot in the overgrown grass. Her mother’s shadow had stood at the kitchen window, arms folded, watching. Not stopping her. Not panicking. Just watching.

Beyond the yard, in the far corner where the fence bowed inward, there had been a patch of wild thicket—overgrown vines, moss-covered stones, and something else: a narrow, rotting gate. Charlotte hadn’t remembered it being there before.

But Max knew it well.

He pushed it open and beckoned her through.

The place he took her wasn’t exactly a forest, though it had trees. It wasn’t a dream, though it felt like one. Time was loose there—elastic, tangled. The sky was always the dim color of dusk, and nothing ever quite settled. Trees moved when you weren’t looking. Shadows whispered.

Charlotte remembered being led through twisting paths that smelled like metal and violets. Max would speak softly to her, tell her she was special, that her mother had given her to him because she didn’t deserve a child like Charlotte. That Charlotte was too loved by someone else. Too adored by her father. His words were mixed with an ugly cackle, muted and then unrestrained.

“Your mother says you’re too much,” Max had told her. “Too soft. Too sensitive. Too seen. But here, you’re just right.” Cackling more and leading her always by the hand on these endless nighttime walks.

She didn’t understand what it meant then. But now, as an adult, sitting in the warm quiet of her own home, Charlotte did. Her mother hadn’t wanted her. Her mother had given her away in the only way she knew how—by opening a door and summoning something dark, something evil and obliging.

And Charlotte had gone willingly. Trustingly. Why wouldn’t she?

Night after night that summer, Charlotte had walked with Max through that gate and into the strange place beyond. And then, one night, she didn’t come back right away.

Back then, no one had found her missing. Or maybe no one had looked. Maybe time worked differently in that place.

She remembered the strange, dusky world Max had led her into. There were others there too - not children, but pieces of them. Laughter without bodies. Teeth without faces. She remembered hearing the soft thump of bare feet that never appeared, and the sound of skipping ropes in the dark with no ropes to see. Charlotte had wandered through it all with Max’s long, cold fingers wrapped around her hand.

And then there was the tree.

It stood in a clearing, twisted and massive, its bark as dark as spilled ink, with long openings running up its trunk like wounds. Max led her to it and spoke gently. “You have something inside you that your mother doesn’t like,” he said. “It shines too brightly. You’ll be safer without it. She’ll love you better if you’re more like her.”

She had been five. She had believed him.

“Will it hurt?” she had asked.

But before he answered, Max slashed at her back. It did hurt but also didn’t. Charlotte was unable to move, her hands began to tingle and her chest felt cold. She remembered the feeling exactly—it was like someone pouring freezing water into her ribs while the outside of her body stayed warm.

Something inside her shifted. Was taken. She was empty. Faded.

She remembered waking up in the garden one morning, her nightgown damp with dew, blades of grass pressed into her skin like whispers. Her mother was already in the kitchen making toast, humming off-key. She hadn’t asked where Charlotte had been.

She just looked at her. And smiled.

She had spoken less after that night. Cried less. Laughed less. Her father had noticed, she remembered that. He had asked if anything was wrong. Her mother had said she was just “growing up” or “had a bad attitude.”

And Charlotte, not knowing how to explain any of it, had simply nodded and eventually it faded from memory just like Charlotte had faded.

Back in the present, Charlotte sat frozen on the sofa, the journal now a weight in her lap. Her heart was pounding. Not in fear—exactly—but in recognition.

She had left part of herself behind in that place. Her softness. Her imagination. The shine that made her different, made her alive.

Max hadn’t just visited her.

He had taken part of her.

With her mother’s permission.

And now, she felt something tugging her again.

Not the dread this time.

A calling.

A thread.