My mother had a saying for everything, and by nine I understood that they were rules for a house I had not yet seen.
Never whistle after the streetlamps come on.
Salt the sill before sleeping in a new bed.
Never answer your name from a room you are not in.
Whenever I asked why, she said a saying was a fence somebody had paid for with a person.
She has been dead eleven years, and I keep her sayings the way other people keep recipes. Last month I moved into an apartment with good light and a sour smell in the hall closet. On the third night, my mother called my name from the bathroom in the voice she used when supper was getting cold. I stood in the kitchen gripping the counter until she tried again, softer this time, and remembered the rule.
After that she came every night. She asked for water. She asked me to turn on the light. She reminded me of the blue dress she wore to my graduation, the song she hated, the money hidden inside the flour tin after my father left. No imitation should have known everything.
Then she began correcting the sayings. Salt did not keep things out, she explained; it told them where the boundary was. Whistling after dark did not summon anything; it let something know you were still on your side. Never answering your own name was the important one, because a voice could cross only after you acknowledged that it belonged to you.
Last night she told me why she died so suddenly.
She had answered.
Something had called from my bedroom in my voice, and she answered because she thought I was frightened. The fence closed behind her, leaving me on this side and putting her where the caller had been. Eleven years later, she has found a way back to the boundary.
She says she can come home if I answer her.
She also says the thing that crossed when she did has been living here as me ever since.
I am beside the front door with my shoes on, trying to decide which of my mother’s sayings applies when the person obeying them may be the reason they were needed.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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