Nana's Chest

NANA’S CHEST



The attic is dusty. Motes dance in the shafts of light that filter through the narrow windows in the roof. All around me discarded or abandoned furniture loom like tombstones. Clearing out Nana’s house is going to be a big job. She’d lived there for over sixty years, and it appears she’d never thrown out a thing. I’m not kidding either - not one thing.



I’m still reeling from the very fact of her death. She’d turned ninety-six on her last birthday, but had still been active and alert. Hell, she still drove her car! She was the designated driver on the weekly run to the bridge club, ferrying biddies twenty years her junior. I mean, this is a woman who gave up downhill skiing when she was eight-four. So her death is a shock.



I haven’t started cleaning out her house yet. So far all I’ve managed to do is wander through the familiar rooms, fingering things. I’ve opened all the drawers and cupboards, searching for what, I don’t know. But I do know it is going to take me a long time to get through it all. Every storage space you can imagine is chock full of things. Receipts, papers, books, clothes, rags, bottles, jars, tins and all sorts of other junk fill every available space. I’ve decided to try being methodical, something very unlike me. So here I am in the attic. I chose to start at the top of the house rather than the bottom; the basement always terrified me as a child, and I still feel uneasy in the cool, dimness.



I take a deep breath. “Okay,” I say aloud. “You can do this!” I head to the far side of the attic, brushing cobwebs from my face as I plunge through them, unable to see them in the shadowy light. I only find the trunk because I stumble over it.

“Owww!” I cry, rubbing my bruised shin, tears springing to my eyes. I wipe them away and bend over to inspect the box. It is made of some heavy wood, dark and coarsely grained, but polished to a high sheen. I try dragging it into one of the shards of light, but it is too heavy to move more than a few inches. A flash of light sears my retinas, leaving black lines floating across my vision. When I can see again, I look down to find a brass key poking from the lock, beckoning me to turn it.



The key turns stiffly and I have to put a lot of my weight behind it to get it to finally turn, a clunking sound announcing success. I lift the lid and am assaulted by a barrage of scents, some pleasant, others less so. The contents of the box are covered by a heavy piece of dark fabric, which starts to crumble when I pull it off. I lay it carefully beside me. Underneath, are a pile of small boxes. I open one and find a dozen or so tiny glass vials in green, brown, blue, amber, and red. The yellowing labels are peeling off, but Nana’s unmistakable handwriting is on each one, a single word on each: love, sorrow, age, joy, memory, lust, pride and more. I pick up the bottle marked “sorrow”, and discover liquid inside. It takes a little effort to pull out the ancient cork, but as soon as I do, the pungent scent seems to fill the room.



It is a familiar scent, one that takes me back to my early childhood. I used to spend the night with Nana often, whenever my parents wanted to go out. I remember waking up late at night, that same scent wafting through the house. Once I went downstairs and found Nana in the kitchen with several other women, stirring something in a big pot on the stove.

“What are you doing?” I asked sleepily from the doorway. Nana whirled around to look at me, a wooden spoon dripping onto the floor. Steam rose from the droplets.

“We’re making stew, darling,” Nana told me. “Now go back to bed.”



I did as she asked, but the memory has remained with me. Something about the look on Nana’s face when she turned has made it memorable.



I re-stopper the bottle and set it back in the box. Other small boxes hold drawstring bags that make a crumpling sound when I touch them. I open one and find it full of dried herbs, so old there is little scent remaining. Another is full of tiny slips of paper, each with a name written on it in Nana’s writing. I sit back on my heels, puzzled by these things.



Underneath the boxes is a pile of books. I pull the books out one by one. All are old with very fragile, thin pages tipped in gold. The covers are all alike: black with gold edging, the titles embossed in the same gold. I finger the titles, wondering what they might mean. I open one carefully, trying to read the strange, looping script. It looks like poetry, or perhaps a recipe. I flick through a few more pages and find more of the same. Setting that book aside, I open another, this one with a word I recognise on the title page: “magick”.



I poke through the boxes once again, looking more closely at each vial and pouch. An idea is slowly dawning on me, the vision of the women in the kitchen reinforcing it. I can’t believe I never figured it out.



My Nana was a witch.



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