Kylie Silvia

Ann wasn't expecting anything when she walked into the layers of dust. The attic was always a place her mother said she shouldn't go. She was never sure how Christmas decorations or winter sweaters and coats appeared. Her mother had never gone up there, of that she was certain. There was always something akin to fear in her in her mother's eyes whenever Ann mentioned the attic.

Other people she went to school with played in their attics or they had been turned into bedroom or playrooms. At play dates, friends found it strange when Ann led them past the lines in the ceiling making the entrance and never said anything about it.

Her friends on the other hand was always trying to convince her mother that the space could be used for more storage, that there was more stuff downstairs than needed to be. They had an attic, what was the problem with using it? But her mother would always come close to screaming bloody murder and Ann would escape to her room.

That day, her parents had left Ann in the house alone. She was looking forward to it. She was going to get all her schoolwork done before hand and then curl up with a mug of tea and a book. She was looking forward to reading something that wasn't about World War II. It was a time period that fascinated Ann, but she was also desperate for a break.

As soon as her parents walked out the door and she heard the car start and move out of the driveway and down the road, Ann started brewing the water for tea. She added a teabag of her favorite ginger tea to a mug and leaned against the counter with a book while she waited for the water to boil. When it was ready, poured the water and moved into the living room. She curled up in a chair and waited for the tea to steep.

It was when she was removing the teabag a few minutes later that she had the idea. She could use the time to explore the attic. Leaving her steaming mug of tea behind, she walked to the entrance and tugged on the rope. It took a couple tags. No one had been up here in nearly a year. Returning the boxes Christmas decorations after the New Year had been the last time.

The door opened and the stairs unfurled. Ann climbed them and it didn't take long for her to start sneezing. Everything except the boxes of Christmas decorations closest to the entrance were covered in a thick layer of dust that crept through the entire space. Ann sneezed again.

She didn't see anything here that was any different that the attics of her friends. Why was Mom so insistent on her staying away for here. Ann scraped her hair back into a messy bun. She didn't want a cobweb tracing a curl to give her away when her parents came home. She walked to the back of her attic. If there was anything in her mother's past it would be in the back.

Ann walked across the wood floor. It creaked slightly under her weight and it made Ann pick her way a little more carefully over the boards. She past the mountains of boxes of clothes and books no one wanted anymore, but her mother could bear to throw away. To Ann it seemed that her mother had kept every sweater and church dress she had given Ann over the years. If Ann had had younger sisters maybe it would make more sense, but Ann was an only one and they had always been sporadic churchgoers - holidays and when her mother remembered to set the alarm was much the policy,

Ann walked past the boxes of stuff that marked her childhood. Even if someone didn't know her they would know moments from these boxes.

She had embarrassed herself as a tree in the first grade play by fighting with the branches off stage and being an awkward limbless tree in the final scene. They would know she had graduated from middle school in a fluffy pink monstrosity that her mother thought looked adorable. Ann had been fourteen. To her mind, that was well past the 'adorable' stage. They would know she had gone to prom as a sophomore and had hated every minute - her scowl clear in the photos. They would know she had been in the school plays and laughed with her friends. They would know she had played basketball - badly, but she had.

Then there were the boxes that were covered in an even thicker layer of dust. She walked amongst her childhood to them. These had to be the ones her mother had always hid from her. She knew they must hold a secret to her mother's past. Something her mother had never spoken of, something she wasn't sure she needed to know or wanted to. She wanted to keep herself strong and focused and see what was inside. She knew she was going to disturb the dust, that at some point it was going to be discovered that she had explored here, but in the moment, that on her mind.

"I'm tired of my mother's secrets," she told herself as she knelt beside one.

She put her hands on the flaps and wrenched them out of position. She had picked this one because it didn't have any tape. The only marks she would leave were her fingerprints through the dust.

The top layers were tax records, old checks and receipts. Ann was pretty sure you could shred your tax records from the '70s, but no one had gone through these boxes in years. The next few layers were her middle school and freshman year papers. She dug deeper. She had no wish to waste time reading her old papers.

At the bottom of the box,, as forgotten as it could be, was a stack of paper. Ann took them out of the box, scanned them, and gasped. They were adopted records and across the top was the name her birth mother had wanted for her.

Kylie Silvia.

Ann dropped the pages. Everything her parents had told her had been a lie.