The Lady Under The Leaves by Kristopher Monroe

In the cloistered confines of the backyard of the home I grew up in there was an oblong spot on the ground where no grass would grow, and whenever I raked the autumn leaves I was instructed to cover the spot in order to obscure the absence of something that was otherwise supposed to be there. The backyard was always bathed in shadow from the dense canopy of trees that hung overhead and hid our house from the rest of the wide world. It made my own meager existence feel very slight and very small but I couldn’t see outside of myself at the time because you can’t miss something you never had.

“Don’t ruffle the leaves. Leave them in a big pile. Big as you can.”

My mother figure was a simulacrum with a face and features that morphed according to her infinitely mutable mood and temperament.

“Pile them high and let them be. Winter will make them dirt. Spring will make them grass.”

I did as I was told, and each season I would watch as the leaves fled the boundaries of their prescribed impoundment and fluttered off to deteriorate elsewhere and shed their former selves to alter and assimilate into new ways of being. Some would molt into mold and some would transmute into mud and some would renew themselves to become trees again. Those select few would selflessly offer up their elemental constituents in exchange for an existential ascension to discover a new life and a new reality. I only understood this obliquely and didn’t quite consciously grasp it with my limited adolescent mind at the time because I didn’t yet realize that you could dream something you’ve never seen before.

“When you’re finished I need you to go downstairs for a while. I’m having company tonight.”

My mother figure entertained regularly and spent her time in the company of an assortment of different types of men. Some were merry and some were wicked. The merry men never lasted and the wicked men always seemed to linger longer and left their ugly traces in unexpectedly permanent places.

Whenever my mother figure entertained upstairs, I’d occupy my solitary time in the downstairs basement maze of shifting hallways and rotating rooms in the detritus of debris left behind from dead grandfathers and great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers. I’d scour the shelves piled high with various forgotten personal items and discarded collectibles and find memories and fragments of memories and piece together the lost scraps in order to discover something novel. I sensed the influence of the objects I touched in the pit of my belly and felt the distant tingle of past generations in my fingertips. I would excavate various things and pieces of things and take them apart and put them together in unique ways to reveal something that hadn’t existed before.

It could have been lonely alone down there amongst the cast-off chaff of old clocks and antique toys and stray trinkets and mementos but I was uncovering worlds within worlds when I’d pull apart a wind-up music box and bend the teeth of the vibration plate to create a different tune when I reinserted the cylinder drum into a broken jewelry box. I’d find instruments and parts of instruments to create better instruments, and I’d get lost in the sound until my mother figure would beckon me back upstairs for a continuation of the usual. Whenever I’d bring an original creation upstairs, it would be met with indifference or obliviousness as my mother figure stared at me with a painful absence and the whites of her eyes drowned her irises and pupils in a vacuum of emptiness.

One autumn evening I took a rusty tin toy I’d tinkered with into the backyard to the pile of leaves that hadn’t yet blown away and sat next to the mound of fall foliage and imagined what might truly lie underneath it. I placed the tiny toy on the brown grass and watched the tick-tock of the bunny’s tail wagging on the tricycle next to the ballerina that I’d affixed on the side to keep it company. The ballerina spun on her tip-toe as the bunny tipped its tail and I went over and laid myself down in the pile of leaves and looked up through the bare branches of the trees at the snatches of the sky beyond. As I sunk into the leaves, I felt two long arms reach around me from behind and ten skinny fingers clasping over my chest like a latticework of interconnected locks snapping closed above my heart. I immediately jumped up and ran into the house and left the little bunny and ballerina in the grass by themselves.

I never liked that house for as long as we lived there. It’s seclusion. It’s insularness. But I didn’t know you could deserve something you never had. So when my mother figure told me she was selling the house and we were moving away I was both happy and sad.

“We need to get rid of everything downstairs. Everything needs to go.”

“Can’t we take it with us?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it's an anchor.”

My mother figure hid herself in the perpetual present and far away from the inconvenient influence of any unfortunate personal histories. But I wasn’t prepared to part with the only past and present place I’d ever known. My menagerie was the manifestation of my self-constructed self and the attendant army of my imagination waiting and ready to march into battle at my command. So I went downstairs and wept.

When I brought up a dusty folder overflowing with faded old photos and showed my mother figure, she flinched like someone had swung at her with an unexpected punch. I pulled out a picture of a newborn that looked strangely familiar and ran my finger across the image.

“Who is this?”

“It’s… you.”

“It is?”

“When you were born.”

The woman holding the newborn wasn’t the one standing in front of me. The figure in the picture was a much more beatific sort of presence, not unlike an angelic guardian or maternal protector. There was another woman in the dimly lit backdrop of the photograph peering out of the gloom who looked exactly like my mother figure, but she wasn’t the one holding the baby. I could tell that she didn’t know how to hold the baby. I knew that she still didn’t know how to hold the baby.

“Who is this?”

“I just said it’s you.”

“No, I mean this lady holding me.”

The next day I found the folder of photos burning in a pyramid of fire in the spot where the mound of leaves once was. I watched the flames turn the paper to ash and the ash settle into a flimsy pile of fleeting memories within the spot on the ground where no grass would grow. I noticed the protruding ridges in the earth under the ashes that may have been roots or may have been bones. It was the first time I saw bones. They looked like they were laying in a fetal position and stretching out to reach something. A woman and her child. Or maybe it was just roots snaking along the ashy dirt trying to explain something I needed to understand.

I picked up the rusty tin toy tricycle with the bunny and ballerina I’d left there and wound it up and placed it back on the ground and watched it spin and struggle in the brown grass going nowhere. I wanted to lay down in the oblong spot on the ground and pull the ash and dirt over me and go to sleep forever in the arms of my real mother.

But something told me to go. To leave and to not look back. To take all my toys and objects and instruments and create a place for them and make that place the most special place.

“Don’t wait for others to understand. Show them who you are.”

I went and got the rake from the shed and pulled all the leaves from the four corners of the yard on top of the ash in the grassless spot in the yard. I laid myself in the pile and looked up through the branches of the trees at the sky beyond and dreamed something I’d never dreamt before. I felt two long arms fold over me.

“I’ll be here waiting. Come back and show me what you made.”