Ashley Flowers (5:02)
My mother left us when I was seven years old. There was no note, no call, no nothing. She was supposed to pick me up from school, and when nobody came, the front office called my dad and he came to get me. When we got home, the house was empty. Mom's beat up Volkswagen was still sitting in the driveway. Dad called 911 to alert the police. They searched the house, the town. They put out an apb. They did everything they were supposed to. In the end, they never found anything that could tell them what had happened to her. My dad never got over it. He pined away over her and whittled down to a twig of a man by the time he died. After a year of hoping that she would come back or that her body would at least show up, he decided to get rid of her things. He said it was how we would get some semblance of closure so we could move on. I'd spend a lot of time with her stuff. Her shoes, her clothes and makeup. It reminded me of when I'd watch her get ready. She used to let me help her pick out her dress. And I always liked how precise she was in covering up the dark birthmark under her chin. But no matter how much I wanted to hang on to her things, in the end it all went. Or most of it, rather. My mother's office was the last thing to be cleared. It had been a place that neither my dad nor I ever touched in the long year after her vanishing. The initial police search was the last time either of us had gone inside. We'd shut the door and left it as some sad memorial to her. I thought it was sacrilege when he said we were going to clean it out. Next to her desk were several boxes of pictures, papers and notebooks, most of which were filled with her stories. She was an aspiring writer and had carried around notebooks since she was in college. Long before I was born, she'd always told me, you never know when a good idea will strike. You must be ready. As dad cleared out her things, he left the books for last. I watched as he sifted through a litany of journals. Each one was different, either in shape or size or thickness. Just by looking at them. You could see wear on the spines, ruffled pages, or wet marks on the covers. Mom's desk had been infested with tea and coffee cups. While she was still around, I was sitting on the ground mournfully, watching the discard pile grow larger. What happened next I can't really recall for certain, but I remember hearing, just faintly, a heartbeat. I looked at my father, who acted like he hadn't heard a thing. Granted, he was so wrapped up in my mom's old books that he wouldn't have noticed a car plowing through the house. But then I heard the heartbeat again, except this time I felt it stronger on my right side. My breathing shallowed, and I had the sudden sense that I was being watched. I turned around slowly, and I saw nothing but the office door, slightly ajar. Rising cautiously, I inched closer to the doorway. When I felt that heartbeat tug again, I froze in front of the desk and cast my eyes down to see a book splayed open on the chair, almost like it had fallen there. I stared, waiting for the heartbeat to return, and when it didn't, I reached out. The journal was pristine, the COVID and evergreen canvas even though it had been sitting open for nearly a year. The striped gold bindings were hardly creased and the pages unsoiled by the humidity of the office, which was odd because all the other books were beginning to wear. My father noted the book in my hands with a curious look. Perhaps seeing my wide eyes, he asked if I wanted to keep it. Of course I did. It was beautiful and mysterious, and it was my mother's. From then on, I held the journal dear and began to write and draw in it as often as I could. It was around that time, after a long year of loneliness, that I met my imaginary friend, Knowles. It's easy to see now how she came to be. I was a child in a state of grieving, separated from kids at school by emotional trauma, with a father who was barely holding it together. I'll spare you the therapy lesson. I'm sure you get the picture. I don't remember exactly how I met Knowles. Maybe she walked in through the door with us as I got back from school, or maybe I woke up and she was playing in my room. But I was glad she was there. I Loved drawing her in the notebook. And as I did, her features became more and more vivid, clearer to me than an azure sky on a crisp autumn day. We played in my room when I was sad or bored or angry, which was more often than not back then. Knowles always knew how to cheer me up, and I loved her for that. Another year went by, and then another, and I held onto her still, some would say for far too long. I bet you'd say that, too. I bet you're probably thinking, God, what adult needs to have an imaginary friend? But Knowles is far more than that, and I think you've figured that out by now. When I was 11, I was playing with Knowles in the playground after school while I waited for my dad to pick me up. After I got tired, she sat next to me on a bench, and it was then that she told me she was sad about something. Something had been on her mind for a while now. I, of course, could tell she'd been acting odd all day, but I knew she would tell me when she was ready. She told me she was going to leave after tonight, that she had fulfilled her purpose. I'm sure I looked insane when dad pulled up to the parking lot, a tween girl screaming at an empty park bench. He had been concerned for a while now. My teachers had told him that Knowles was having a big impact on how I interacted with other children and that I should have grown out of having an imaginary friend by this age. When I got home, I went up to my room and Knowles was there waiting. I asked her, what could I do? What could I possibly do to keep her with me? She paused for a moment before finally saying, I need to write about her. For her to stay with me, I had to make sure I could never forget. Because once I did, she would be gone, flung into the universe like a lost angel. I had to write about her somewhere she would never be forgotten. So I dug around in my closet, and I found my mom's old journal. I skipped past the old melancholy poems and cartoons of Knowles right into the heart of the book. I grabbed a pen and began to write. I remember a feeling like an electric current was running up my arm. My breathing became rapid and my body trembled uncontrollably, like I couldn't break a fever. I had never written so quickly and cleanly, but by the end, I could feel beads of sweat just staining my eyes. I described everything I knew Knowles to be and how I saw her. The sound of her voice, the color of her hair, the softness of her Skin, the way we made each other laugh. And I wrote about how she would never leave me. I pressed the pen deep into the pages, almost carving through them. Then I drew her as best I could, far better than I ever have before. As I shut the journal, the madness broke. I shuffled to my bed and collapsed. The next morning I woke up holding my breath and searching. Knowles wasn't there. My eyes began welling. She was always right next to me. When I woke up, I sobbed, thinking that I didn't write enough down, that I didn't describe her in every detail. That I had failed. I could hear dad walking around downstairs getting breakfast ready. He would want me to come down soon. I opened the journal to read everything I had written last night. Maybe I missed something. Anything. Maybe I could still get my friend back. The pages were blank. Not just the pages I wrote yesterday, but the years old entries too. My eyes went wide with terror. My pulse pounded in my veins. My skin grew cold. Starting at the back cover, I flipped through the pages, looking for even a pen mark, but saw nothing. Nothing until I hit the front cover. That was when I saw it. In the top left corner was the exact same drawing I had made of Knowles last night. Except now she was winking. I slammed the book shut, dropped it on the ground and kicked it under the bed. I stood there in a daze, unsure of what to do. When dad called my name, I backed away slowly and then bolted from the room, shutting the door behind me. The day passed in a blur. I couldn't stop thinking about the empty pages of the journal and the drawing that I didn't draw. I started to question if sleep scribbling was a thing, but that didn't explain how everything else had disappeared. Thoughts were somersaulting through my mind, but it all came back to the fact that I felt so alone. I'd lost the best friend I'd ever had. My only true friend. When I got home, I snuck upstairs to my room, worried the book would hear me. But it was there, half open, spread across old toys and still underneath my bed. Blood rushed through my ears and the world zoomed in. Dust tickled my nose, spiked with the stale stench of dirty, forgotten socks. I reached under the bed, fingers trembling, shut my eyes and felt the canvas cover. I expected the journal to explode or start shining or spring from my hands, but nothing happened. I pulled it out and flipped through the pages. The book was completely blank. Even the drawing I had seen this morning was gone. I grabbed a pen from my desk and plopped onto the floor, thinking carefully about what I was going to do next. When my breathing stopped, letters appeared. Written from nothing, appearing from nowhere. It was almost as though there was an invisible pen swiftly jotting along the paper. I stared at the fully formed message for almost a minute before I even had enough sense to read it. It said, why didn't you take me to school? I thought you wanted me to go everywhere with you. It was Knowles. I couldn't believe it. Slowly I began to write back. I told her that I didn't know what happened. I thought it hadn't worked, and I was sorry for leaving her. She and I wrote to each other all night and then again in the morning. It was like nothing had changed other than my wrist getting sore. Each night our conversations spanned the course of pages, and each morning I woke up to everything crisp and inkless. I had my best friend back, and she wasn't imaginary, not anymore. Now she was real, just like before. She came everywhere with me. I told my teachers and dad that I was just writing stories that I wanted to be like moments. I stopped talking about Knowles, which I think made everyone less uneasy. I wasn't lonely, and that was all that mattered. A year later, dad decided that he wanted to move a few towns over. I had begun to move on from my mother's death, not forgetting, but adjusting to life without her. Dad, however, was still having a hard time living in the house they had bought and shared. He ended up with a new and better job. We moved closer to family and we both got a fresh start. At the time, I hated it. I raised hell, but there was nothing to be done. I would tell Knowles my frustrations and she'd always find some way to make me laugh, to make it easier. She often asked if I wanted help to stop us from moving. But her being there, talking to me was enough. And what could she do anyway? I started at my new school on October 2nd. It was almost twice the size as my old one and with no one I recognized. I didn't have many friends per se, but I had people who knew me, what I had been through. At this new school, I stuck out like a missing tooth and a wide smile. I was small, quiet, and always carrying a stack of books. I was an ideal target for teenage tormentors. Kids at my last school didn't want to bully the girl who'd lost a parent. But here I didn't have that luxury. Alastair Timone was the first real bully I had ever encountered. She was tall, slender, with chin length hair cut almost like a boy, and always Wearing loose, unbuttoned flannels over her tank tops. When I introduced myself to the class, she whispered something to the girls next to her and they all started to laugh. Later, when I spoke to Knowles about it, she said she could hear their cruel snickering. She didn't like that I was here all by myself, that there was no one here to help me if I got into trouble. She said she'd protect me if she needed to, but I told her there was nothing that she could do for me. Real or not. Knowles was just a friend in a book. But anyway, there was no reason for her to be concerned. At least not yet. I avoided Alastair and her clique at all costs. I stuck near the teachers and found a quiet group of kids who accepted me at their lunch table. We were defensible in numbers, but no matter how hard I tried, Alastair and her friends always found a way to corner me. They pushed me around through my school books in the trash. There were also times in the middle of class where she would trip me, pinch my sides, or get boys to turn when she saw me looking at them. It was a terrifying time of my life, and the longer it went on, the more Knowles was upset. She kept suggesting ways we could get even, or even threatening to hurt Alastor. I was always against it, but I was starting to take her side. My boiling point was two days before Halloween. We were in between classes and I was swapping out books from my locker when Alister came up behind me and whispered in my ear. Your mom didn't warn you before she died, did she? I looked over my shoulder. She and her friends were pointing at my pants. Suddenly, every health class I ever had came flashing through my mind. My stomach had felt like pin cushions all morning, and it wasn't until now that I knew why. She's bleeding so gross.
