Dear Daughter,
By Leanna Riley
Dear Daughter,
I know letters are archaic. You probably think I’m archaic too. You so seldom pick up your phone or reply to a text in your busy youth-hood, I thought maybe you would read this for the novelty. Please read this, my love. At least the physical form of paper will be something to hold onto when I’m gone. As you are already aware, I believe you made a post about it after I called to tell you, the cancer has taken a turn for the worst. Well, I think we’re reaching the end of it: stage four, inoperable, chemo showing no improvement. I’m going to die bald as a baby. I’m sure you’ll be getting on a plane far before this letter reaches your dorm’s P.O. Box. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you how bad it was when you skipped last Christmas’ visit.
I wanted you to enjoy your Girls-mas, as you called it, hiking through the red woods. I still scroll through the pictures. It looked like you had so much fun.
I want you to know about the dream I had when you were still bald as a baby. I mean to say you were a baby, so that was to be expected. In my dream I drifted out on an old shrimp boat somewhere in a bayou. As dreams go, my mind didn’t seem to care that a shrimp boat has no place or space to fit in narrow swamp water alleys. You were there with me, resting on my much younger hip with my less wrinkled arm cradling your back. My other hand was on the ship’s wheel, guiding it directionless. The engine wasn’t even running, another thing only registered after consciousness and contemplation.
We ran ashore on the swamp bank. I remember the slender trees made old by beards of Spanish moss. They were vivid, detailed as a fly wing under a microscope. Their bark jackets were black and brittle and lifeless as standing corpses. You know that sensation in dreams where sometimes knowledge is just revealed to you? You’re fed the meaning of the plot and take it for gospel without a word being spoken or a logical path followed. I felt the disease choking out the heart of this land where we landed. There was not a living breath, not a leaf turned upward to the sun, or a croak from a bullfrog. Everything was dead. Understand that first.
A man with skin the color of grey soot, embers of fire scattered across him in waves and pulses, was standing on that shore. His back was turned from me. His shoulders were wide and hunched over a low half barrel shaped grill. He was cooking a barbecue. As soon as I saw his wafts of smoke pilling up in the air my mind conjured its smell: ribs smothered in sweet tangy sauce, sausage links stuffed with jalapeño, corn on the cob dashed with Old Bay, and any other scent my memory could associate with anticipatory salivation. I never saw the actual food he was preparing, if any at all. A small crowd lingered around him. Your Aunt Beth, your Great Grandfather, and a co-worker of mine from back in my teaching days. Well, I guess when I had this dream it was back in my teaching days. There was also a little bald girl I only later remembered from when I was still in pigtails, toting a backpack full of Nancy Drews and Box Car Children. You wouldn’t remember any of them, they were all dead by the time I had this dream, this nightmare if I’m honest.
They all died of cancer. For the girl it was leukemia. There had been a fundraiser at my school, little buttons sold for a dollar each with her picture on them. The fellow teacher had been cervical, she passed from it not a year before. There was a memorial for her in the school gymnasium, everyone holding up candles poked through Styrofoam cups we had pulled out of the cafeteria. Your Aunt Beth actually had a brain tumor. She lost her sight before they even diagnosed her. In my dream she had the glassy sheen of cataracts. When your Great Grandfather went I was too young to know the reason, just the dreadful word: cancer. It spread around the house in whispers, vapors in the air of which I could only catch the scent. It was not casual dinner talk in my mother’s household.
They all stared out towards me, through me. Their gaze saw nothing. Their mouths rested open and slack, silent screams in their throat. They all hunched, held up by the framework of their rotted shell-like bones.
“Now, y’all best turn around and get outtah here,” the broad grey man said. I could still only see his back at that point; the cream-colored ties of his apron, sweat staining yellow blotches on his shirt, and… that’s it. To this day, I can’t picture any further down his waist. I couldn’t tell you what his accent was either, something vaguely Cajun, somewhat country. It was a strange amalgamation of snippets and phrases I must have heard in my life. The mind steals before it creates.
“I said get, go on now, this place ain’t ready for you,” he said. He turned from his grill. I’d never pick his features in a line up, but I knew him to be the face of death. I could taste what cooked in his barbecue then, a taste like dry ash and a texture like soft rubber. An unfamiliar palate then, one I’ve known since the chemo to be my own dead tongue and not the food itself. It’s a taste I’ve come to loathe. The last flavor my mouth will savor when I die. Terror swept through me. I held you tight to my chest, protective of your fragile little body. You were warm with life, my only comfort in this nightmare. I held onto it as much as you.
“It gone spread through everything it touches,” he said. I tried to turn the key on our shrimping boat, tried and tried to start its engine. Emitting soundless, rumble-less revs, it would not start for me. It was then that a blackness took over the bow of our vessel, spreading from the underside where it first touched land and devouring its stained white nose. Even as I stared, it would change forms. At once a kind of branching parasitic mold and a bubbling black tar. It scorched the boat like striking lighting. Then at next glance it seemed like flowing lava, its blackened crust drying on the surface of liquid fire. Like the man’s accent and grill’s fragrancy, its visions were an amalgamation. It brought together every foul horror my memory could construct: a morphic blob, a skittering colony of a thousand spiders, a clawed hand made from shadows. But, in my mind, I knew it was cancer.
I think I screamed. I couldn’t hear it in my ears, only felt it ripping through my chest and throat. “It won’t start,” I yelled to the grey man.
He dropped a metal spatula, I didn’t recall him holding one before that moment, and spoke again, “Go on I said, get outtah here.”
“It won’t start, the engine won’t start,” I yelled back, watching the blackness slither, consume, and crawl its way closer. The man departed his deadly shore and leaped onto our boat. He did it in a single heavy booted stride, an astronaut bounding the surface of the moon. His body landed with the force of Earth’s gravity. Wielding an axe of unknown origin, but who cares where objects come from in a dream, he hacked at the front of the ship. Violent blows burst explosions of splinters, amputating the desecrated bow from its body.
The man shoved us off, standing on the carcass of our shrimp boat’s blackened limb. Its skin was as lifeless and dark as the swaying trees then. “You gottah cut it off before it spreads,” he said. “Can’t let it fester. Yeh hear me, now I don’t wannah see ya’ll back round here.”
I felt your body loosen its tension as we drifted away, sinking into the comfort of my chest. My arms were still stiff as bent nails around you. My heart still fluttered fast palpitations while you were quiet, given into sleep. I imagined you dreaming within my nightmare. I imagined you safe from death’s vision. We drifted, once again directionless, with my hand on the wheel. Never mind our half-hacked ship should have been sinking into the depths of the swamp. It was only a dream.
The grey man spoke again. Despite the distance grown between us, he rang loud as ever in my ear. “It spreads through everything it touches,” he said. “Gotta cut it off of yah or I’ll be seeing you here again.” Just as I knew that nothing was alive on that bayou bank, I knew he wasn’t talking about the kaleidoscopic blackness in tendrils our severed ship’s head. He was talking about my body and the disease we only talk of in a whisper growing inside.
Then I woke. I was safe in my bed, your father sleeping by my side. Turning over to my nightstand, I pulled the drawer and jotted down a reminder to call the doctor when the sun rose. Thank you for showing me the modern conveniences of the iPhone, by the way. If not for you, I would probably still lug out a stack of business cards to riffle through like we did in the stone ages. Then I went into your nursery and watched you sleep peaceful, warm, and safe. Slowly, the nightmare faded from my fears, my heart relaxed its beat, and I settled.
Why am I telling you all this now? Maybe the dream was coincidence. Maybe dying and my silly knack for symbolism, giving causation where there’s none and romanticizing mundane moments, have led me to hang onto this sleeping warning. After all, I still have a rock sitting in my jewelry box that your father handed me on a camping trip some twenty years ago. He can’t recall the trip, much less the rock. Speaking of, that jewelry box and everything in it is yours, my dear. Don’t let your brother try to strong-arm you for my engagement ring. One day you’ll meet someone who wants to get down on one knee and open a box and tell you they love you. I’ve set aside that ring for when the day comes. Then at least, you’ll have a piece of me with you as you walk down the aisle. See, symbolism and sentiment. I’m a fool for them.
My first visit to the doctor was within a week of that damn nightmare. I was dismissed. “You’re too young for routine cancer screenings and you display no symptoms for concern,” I believe they said. A more dominating woman may have insisted and gotten their way. I took their expertise for law and forgot about the cancer mess all together. Five years later I felt the hard tumorous lump in my breast. By then I was scared. You were in your golden years of childhood, and I didn’t want to miss a moment. I was busy. I ignored it. I let it spread.
When I did finally return to my doctor, the lump had grown painful. My breast was tender up through my armpit and there was blood lactating from my nipple. I had no doubt what they would say. No one can say I wasn’t a fighter. I had them cut it off. Years of chemo, years of surgery, years of doctors poking me with sharp objects. Every time they cut out one part of me, those diseased cells would crop up in a new organ. My doctors were like storm-chasers trying to get ahead of the next deadly tornado in my body. I’m exhausted now.
I’ll be seeing that rotted swamp land soon. You probably think I’m writing all this as some kind of perverse punishment or that I want to fill you up with guilt from my grave. Much the opposite, I don’t want to make you sad. This isn’t for sympathy’s sake. I know you love me, and I love you. I’m telling you all this because you were on that boat too. It spreads through everything it touches, so I need you to promise me: If you ever feel that touch of death, don’t wait. Don’t ignore it for fear or embarrassment. I don’t ever want to see you come around that shore again.
I love you more than words can say.
With my whole heart,
Your dear departing mother
Leanna Riley is an emerging author with a background in broadcast journalism. Having spent half a decade writing the coverage for some of the most prolific events in recent history, Leanna left to pursue her deeper passions of fiction storytelling. She was homegrown in one of the most haunted cities in the United States. Her upbringing in Savannah, Georgia thrust her into a fascination with dark embellished lore, an interest that has bled into her writing of both fabricated and real-world stories.
