Image Credit: Rachel Laverdiere
No matter how many times I blinked, the bark kept creeping up the trunk. Moments earlier, my baby sister had pointed at the tree, saying, “L’arbre bouge!” but I hadn’t believed her. Then, feet and eyes appeared. It was a big, ugly, brown moth! My stomach curled into a fist. I squeezed my eyes shut and shrieked even louder than the noisy magpies squawking in the trees.
My big brother came running. Thunk! “Il est mort!” he said triumphantly. It was hard to believe the moth was dead, so I squinted at the tree. My brother had used the big rock to smash the moth to smithereens, but it hadn’t made a sound. Why hadn’t it screamed? A disgusting smear of moth guts and blood was all that was left of that moth.
We didn’t tell Maman because she would have been disappointed. She would have told us that hurting God’s harmless creatures was a sin.
Image Credit: Leanne Bernal
The neighbour boy came to babysit. I was in my room, changing into my favourite pajamas—they were yellow with tiny brown windmills. My top was on, and I was about to pull up the bottoms when I heard a voice. The babysitter had snuck into my bedroom! My heart whirred when a cackling sound gargled up from the black hole at the back of his throat. The door was closed, so I scooted across the shaggy blue bedspread. I didn’t make it to the other side because he caught my foot and yanked down my pants. When his fingers pushed into the space between my legs, the fear gripping at my throat swallowed my scream. I could no longer breathe, so darkness came, and I disappeared.
Later, Maman was crouching by my bed. Her dark hair and the shadows distorted her face. “Je t’aime, Rachel ma belle,” she said, brushing my dark hair from my cheeks.
I rubbed what felt like sand from my puffy eyes. Why was Maman in her pretty dress? Her lips pressed against my cheek. Beyond the window, I saw the moon framed in black.
Then, the thing that had happened with the babysitter jumped into my mind and I clutched Maman’s arm. “Maman?” I gasped. My heart thumped up into my throat and choked my voice. I could not find words to explain the grown-up things I did not understand.
Papa spanked me for lying even though Maman tried to tell him it was impossible to make up this kind of story. Maman at me with her sad blue eyes, then we all went to bed.
While I slept, the cache of shame the neighbour boy had tucked deep inside of me took hold.
Image Credit: Leanne Bernal
One night, I woke with the urgent need to pee pounding between my legs, so I tiptoed past the parchment paper gunfights breaking out on my brother’s wallpaper. After safely crossing his room, I spied a big scary moth above the bathroom door. My kept my eyes on the creature while I held my breath and backed away. I receded past the guns reaching out for me, down two steps and hid beneath the furry blue bedspread.
Image Credit: Leanne Bernal
I discovered a trap door in my brain—sort of like the one beneath the bed in the room I once shared with my big brother. Narrow stairs crept down, down, down, to a musty crawl space filled with critters and jars of stewed tomatoes and chokecherry syrup. Everything was draped in cobwebs. I tossed the most shameful secrets and most horrible memories down into the darkness: the splotched-up moth, the babysitter, my scary “Uncle” George and his grabby hands, my father’s iron fists, my brother’s face after he skidded across the gravel and into the barbed wire fence. The terrible truths piled up in the dark and spun themselves into silky cocoons before they went to sleep.
Image Credit: Rachel Laverdiere
For decades, I woke choking—my throat blocked up as though a multitude of moths was trying to clamber up. The fuzz on their legs stuck like Velcro to my vocal chords. Dust from their wings made it impossible to swallow. I quivered beneath the blankets and clenched my teeth. I was sure that if I opened my mouth, a rabble of moths would take flight, and I was afraid that if the moths kept creeping up and out, they would fill the room and smother me. It felt safer to clamp my teeth and go back to sleep.
Memories and secrets accumulated beneath the trap door. They laid eggs that hatched and morphed and copulated in the dark.
Image Credit: Heidi Kerr
The trap door in my mind is permanently propped open. With each exposed secret my world expands, and I rise from the dark ever-mightier.
Flashbacks still surface in my sleep. Memories, like the moths I feared for almost forty years, are creatures of darkness. When I feel a presence in the night, I no longer quiver beneath the covers. Like moths, memories live in concealment yet are driven toward the light. These days, I brace myself and take a deep breath before flicking on the bedside lamp. I lock eyes with the tormentors of my past, I recall the horrid details that have caused me shame and those that have led me to believe I am difficult to love. I address each trauma by name. Once I’ve grieved enough to heal, I open the window and set us both free.
