A.R. Henderson
My mother was a wanderer, always chasing something the way the night chased the day across the sky.
A glimpse of white sails out the window told me when she was on her way home. The briny wind whispered joy and promise as it stirred the pages of her books. I took one last look at the orderly, tidy cottage I had maintained for the past two months, then shoved my feet into boots and threw myself into the wind.
We crashed into each other on the docks, and I noticed that her hair had gotten long and unruly again, haphazardly tied back in a braid. “You got taller!” she yelled. “Again!” And I was good and did not point out that this is what happens to children when time passes. I didn’t want to spoil things.
She always brought back gifts, filling the cottage with the bric-a-brac of a hundred faraway places. Here, a pressed flower from an oasis kingdom in the middle of a days-long desert. Here, a cat carved out of quartz from a city of canals and water spirits. Here, a knot of rope from a pirate ship she had bartered passage on.
I would say, “Mama, why travel with pirates?” and she would respond with something like, “They know all the shortcuts through the archipelago, and how to avoid sirens and lawmen alike. Besides, isn’t it more fun?”
*
When she was home, my mother kept what she called odd hours. At night I would find her surrounded by books and maps, lit by stubby candles and witch-lights she had brought home. “A spell in a bauble,” she eagerly explained. “See, they float! Ah, you just need to make sure it doesn’t fly out the window…”
I had many memories of being small and being tucked up in her lap, entranced by the sprawling text in languages I could not read and the monster-edged charts of places I had never been. “Will you take me one day?” I asked, again and again, and she ruffled my hair and said, “It’s a frightening world out there, my little seagull. I feel much better if I know that you’re here, safe. It gives me something to come home to.” I would fall asleep pillowed on an encyclopedia or a bestiary.
Nocturnal creature that she was, during the day I would often find her in bed—if she didn’t pass out with the witch-lights orbiting her. I would march in with the sun and tug the blankets off her, making her shriek. “Laundry!” I declared.
“No!” she yelped.
“And then we need to go into town, and you need to talk to Mr Wise about getting the roof tiles fixed!”
“Noooooo.”
Some days it was impossible to get her out of bed—she remained a sunken shipwreck in the sheets, eyes dull and looking at something faraway and unseen to me. “Sometimes a little monster named Melancholy starts to chew on me,” she had explained once, voice nearly swallowed by the thick hush of the bedclothes. “It lives in the base of my neck, and sometimes it crawls up and starts biting my brain and I need to be sad for a while.”
I was alarmed by this, and presumed it was a parasite from some far-flung forest, or a curse inflicted by a witch she had beaten at cards. “Can we get it out?”
“Unfortunately not, my little seagull. I can keep it at bay most of the time, but not always.” She had smiled then, even while withstanding the gnawing teeth of Melancholy. “And on those days I’ll need you to take care of me. I’ll make it up to you later.”
I nodded, for I understood this. She was a storm: sometimes crackling with lightning, brighter than anything you’d ever seen, sometimes a fathomless cloudy dim. I had long since learned to weather her. I wondered, sometimes, if Melancholy bit her while she was away, or if chasing falling stars and cataloguing foreign spells drowned the creature out.
*
It had always been just the two of us, in that house by the sea. I had given up asking about my past. Sometimes, in her telling, my father was a travelling merchant who traded in hand-woven dreams. Sometimes, instead, he was a scoundrel outlaw fleeing the noose. Once she just told me, “You fell from the sky.”
I stared at her. She elaborated. “My party and I were hunting falling stars, seeking out the treasures they might drop to earth. But in one of the craters was you, curled up asleep and seeming unbothered, glowing and hot to the touch.” She held a finger to her lips. “I said to myself, poor thing, they’ve got nowhere else to go—stars can only fall, after all, and have a much harder time getting back up in the sky. So I thought the kind thing to do was to make you a safe home here on the ground.”
And that was our story: whether it was strictly true or not did not matter. It sounded good around a tavern table, and it was one of the few things that truly belonged to me.
*
Eventually, inevitable as the changing of the winds, she would sling her travelling coat back on and pack her bags. I never asked where she was going or what quest had called to her. She hugged me farewell and said that she’d be back, and I always believed her, and I always swallowed down the cruel whisper at the back of my mind: whatever’s out there, she wants it more than you.
She talked as she threw clothes and mysterious tools into her bag, excitedly, dazedly listing off her plans to hitch a ride on a trading ship and arrive in a dragon-infested archipelago smelling of the imported spices in the hold and the heady incense used to ward off unruly merfolk. The sea serpents she spoke of usually would have snaked in front of my eyes, but my vision was clouded that day. I could not say what it was. Was she talking to me, I suddenly wondered, or did I just happen to be there to listen?
Do not spoil it, I schooled myself, as always. I clenched my fists by my sides as always, but that day, somehow, I could not keep myself together, could not keep myself still. I was always the one who was still, and she was always the one in motion.
She stood in the doorway. Always framed by a doorway, always coming or going—my mother, gathering no moss; my mother, surprised every time I got taller. Some underfoot force tipped me forward, as if this time it was me on the deck of a lilting ship. I lurched across the cottage and grabbed the lapels of her big old coat.
“Won’t you stay?” My voice cracked like an ancient mosaic, like the ice of an enchanted frozen lake. I hated how young I sounded, pleading and babyish. “If I do all the cleaning and all the repairs, will you stay? If I promise to let you read into the night and sleep all day… if I make only your favourite foods…”
I pulled back to look up at her and was shocked into silence. My mother, for a moment, was gone. So was the intrepid explorer, the chaser of myths, she who hunted the monsters at the edge of the maps. She was not a grand adventurer but a mortal woman. Her dark eyes shone, and I realised then that I had never seen my mother cry before, not even in her deepest and most unfathomable dark moods.
“I know that I’m not enough,” I choked out, but I did not get to finish. She swept in like a storm and bundled me into her arms, pressing her salty-wet face into my neck, an embrace where it was uncertain, for a moment, who was comforting whom.
“Oh, my little seagull, I’m sorry.” Her coat smelled like the outside world, all leather and sea-spray and starlight. “You’re the greatest treasure I ever brought home.”
Years later, recalling this moment, I would wonder: does that mean she was telling the truth about me falling from the sky? But then, it did not matter to me. She was always chasing something, my mother; and she would not give up the chase. But we had that moment of stillness: temporarily moored, safe in the harbour, rocked in her arms like a sailing ship on a gentle tide.
A.R. Henderson (they/them or she/her) is a writer, editor, and researcher working on Ngunnawal country. They completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Canberra, where they studied LGBTQIA+ representation in young adult literature. Their short stories have appeared in literary magazines such as SWAMP and #EnbyLife and anthologies including An Unexpected Party (Fremantle Press, 2023). You can find all their work in a nice, neat pile at arhendersonwrites.com
Long Trek Press 
Leave a comment