Nelly's Note

Short Fiction | A tale of two sisters

Iona loved the sound of her mother’s spirit. She could tell that the musical composition of it was right. When she was 11, she tried to explain to her mother exactly what her soul sounded like: river water rushing over mossy rocks. Her mother nodded and smiled the way mothers do when they don’t want to hurt your feelings or tell you something you said was nonsense. But Iona knew she was right because she could also sense when someone’s spirit sounded wrong.

She had often tried to remember when she realized she could hear the sound of someone’s spirit. It was unclear, but she recalled always having a feeling that people were right or wrong.

Her grandfather’s spirit, for example, had a rattling sound as if something metal had lodged itself in his piping and decided it would not shift. The thing had caused him to be spiritually backed up. As he began to lose his memory the spiritual constipation often manifested as fits of “fucking bitch” and “I’d slap the sonofabitch again!” It grew worse right until his heart killed him.

Her father’s spirit had a deep resonance to it. She wanted it to curl around her like a heavy blanket of sound. It vibrated and expanded a delicious “Ommmmm” sound. They were sweet and pleasing octaves.

When her mother’s sound morphed, she could not figure out why. There was a discord to the sound that kept her up at night. Even two doors away, the constant thrum of the discord crawled inside her skull, rattling, gnawing; a horrid, loud, beastly sound.

When she mentioned it, her mother did not do that, “it’s nonsense but I won’t say so,” mother smile. She looked unsettled, caught off guard by something she did not expect to be known. In a few weeks, the bump in front of her would protrude like the round bottom of an eighth note. As the bump expanded, the discordant sound grew louder.

With each passing week, 11-year-old Iona found herself growing more ill. The more time she spent around her mother, the worse the feeling got. Her head pounded, her skin grew feverish, and her eyes felt like tiny needles poked and prodded them. At night, sometimes she woke herself up howling in agony. Eventually, she began to sneak out of her room and sleep as far away from her mother as possible.

She had turned 12 by the time the tiny creature was ready to be born. Before that, the sound had made Iona grind her teeth til two of them had cracked. She prayed a 12-year-old’s prayer that the discord of sound was only due to its being trapped in her mother’s belly. The two nights her mother was gone, pushing out the tiny being, she slept better than she had in months.

Her grandpa (not the spiritually constipated one, the one whose spirit sounded like the rustling of leaves through a great plain) had come around while her mother was away. She made a great effort to spend time listening to the breeze, her head resting on his shoulder. She could feel a calm settling in her soul.

The baby arrived with a low and heavy sound. Iona felt her body relax when she realized it was not the same as the sound that had assaulted her for the past few months. She was glad to be free of the sound, happy to have her mother back to her usual notes, and ecstatic to know she could sleep peacefully at night again. She leaned over the thing and stared. She thought its plump brown cheeks and wrinkly skin looked cute in an alien sort of way. She inhaled deeply and admitted that the scent of the new creature was delightful, but still the low and heavy hum of its spirit unsettled her.

Baby Nelly grew the way babies do, fattening, smartening, learning to shape sounds with tongue and lips moving in ways they’d never moved before. The sound morphed, too. It grew deeper and heavier as the girl stretched out into her body.

Iona tried her best to ignore the sound’s morphing. She ignored it when she heard her mother yelp from bitten nipples on an almost nightly basis. She ignored it when baby Nell managed to avoid the spoon and bite the hands of anyone who attempted to feed her, sometimes drawing blood. They giggled it away, but she heard it; the deepening of the sound. She tried to ignore it when toddler Nell snatched the knife off the kitchen counter and drew blood from her mother's calf. She was briefly scolded, and it became another demented action tucked away into the folds of denial.

The incidents continued as Nell stretched and stretched. Soon she was 13 with eyes a flat, lifeless brown and lips that spread into a smile that never quite reached the dead brown eyes of hers. By then, the sound of Nelly’s spirit had become a clawing, rotten beat. Iona had long stopped trying to convince her loved ones of Nell’s dark wickedness. She was glad when she turned 18 to be free of the devil girl and be off to college. She barely returned home. Iona worked extra shifts, took extra courses over winter and summer break, and signed up for anything that would keep her away from home. Through all of her schooling, she had yet to find a spirit that sounded as wicked as Nell’s.

Now, at 25 in the comfort of her own apartment, the call from her mother caught her off guard. It had been a while since she heard from her parents. They had grown distant over time. They had not understood the root of her need for space–her avoidance.

Her father was dead. Her father was dead, and only now did it strike her that she would never hear the deep resonance of his sound again. She felt a void crack open within herself. She could hear the spiritual shift. The sadness, the grief, a hollowness echoing unto itself.

She was so distracted by the sound of her sadness that she did not hear anything her mother said after the initial statement. In her mind, she tried to recreate the sound of her father, a final ode to him, but failed. She’d probably always fail because of the time, because of the distance. So, she decided she would make her way home to see her father one more time, and to hear the sound of her mother. Even if it meant dealing with Nell.

The house had grown dull and had shrunk into itself. It had been so long since she had been home…she did not remember it being so small and sad. In the kitchen, her mother sat looking as frail as the house, but it was her sound that grabbed Iona by the throat. The woman, who had sounded like a roaring river, now sounded only like the trickle of a dying stream.

She did not bother to ask where Nell was, she was just glad to have the time alone with her mother. Iona wrapped her hands around her, placed a kiss so gently on top of her head, and let her cry. She cried as if all the water that used to be a part of her spirit sound was trying to escape from her tear ducts. The two stayed wrapped together until the dark, heavy sound of Nell interrupted.

It had been years since she had seen Nell in person. Sure, she had caught glimpses in photos, but she had avoided looking at them, for even the idea of the girl made her bristle. Nell had grown tall at thirteen, taller even than their mother stood now, but not quite as tall as their father. The flatness that had been in her eyes at 6 had now hardened into a cold abyss. She stood there in the doorway, glaring at Iona with a deep distaste. She studied the scene with that coldness now and smirked.

The three women said nothing. Her mother stiffened eyes still leaking. She could feel the fear radiating off her in waves. Why hadn’t she told her about Nell? Why hadn’t she picked up the phone and said, “you were right, Iona, something is wrong with her”? She would’ve come. She would’ve done something. Nell broke eye contact and walked away.

Against her better judgment, Iona had agreed to stay in the house. Now, at 11 pm, as she struggled to sleep, she had regrets about the whole thing. The dark sound of Nell had seemed to grow louder as the hours progressed; it now felt like it was suffocating her, and so she did what she had done so many years ago and got up to head downstairs.

She opened the door, and Nell stood there. She looked broader in the darkness of the hallway, cold eyes sliding over Iona with the critical eye of a predator. Iona stared back, wondering how long the freak had stood there waiting.

“Are you going to move, Nell?”

Nell tilted her head as if to say, “What a stupid question.”

The proximity to her was giving Iona the same skull-splitting migraine from the days she had been a fetus in her mother’s belly. Iona ground her teeth together, trying her best not to scream at the chainsaw in her skull.

“Move Nell,” she said from between gritted teeth.

Nell stared some more and stood still, a slow smile spreading across her face. She took a step into the room as if knowing the effect her sound had on Iona. Iona began to wonder if her parents had mentioned her early warnings about the girl, her claim to be able to hear and feel the twisted heaviness inside her.

Iona began to see spots from the intensity of the headache. Her body thrummed, vibrating from the pain of the wickedness inside her sister. She brought her hand to her head, wanting so desperately to be able to reach inside her mind and pluck the pain out.

It was then that Nell hummed a deep reverberating “Ommmmmmm.” The om of her father.

Iona, who had closed her eyes in pain, snapped them open. Could Nell hear too?! Nell smiled then, lips stretching across her face like fingers were pulling them to her ears. Iona stood in terror, in disbelief that the girl might’ve always been able to hear others too. Could she tell that something was not right with herself?

Nelly opened her mouth, jaw snapping open into the darkness of the bedroom. She groaned. The wicked sound made Iona kneel as her eardrums quaked with a ferocity. She felt the girl burrowing into her mind with a singularity so sharp and greedy it forced her to scream. She screamed for what felt like the expansion of time over millennia as she knelt, pinned down by the darkness of Nelly’s note.

Her eyes were closed in agony, so she did not see her mother approach. She only heard the thud of wood connecting to skull. The absence of Nelly in her mind, the empty silence of the space, made her open her eyes in relief. She took a deep breath, eager to get air into lungs that had all but seized up in terror. Her mother stood above Nell’s body holding a plank.

“I couldn’t let her take you. I couldn’t let her take you too!” The woman muttered in between wretched sobs.

Iona stood aware of the lightness in the room, the absence of the dark, oppressive sound of Nell. She stepped closer and saw the blood pooling around her head, and closed the distance to hold her mother.

“It’s okay, Mom, it’s okay.” She wrapped her hand around the woman pressing the bloody piece of wood between them. They fell to the floor, bodies racked by waves of grief, disbelief, the pleasure of being free from the greedy, violent sound of Nell. Even now, between sobs, she could hear it now the sound of the swelling water inside her mother. The sound of a river swelling full and free again. It sounded like her mother.

“I should’ve listened,” her mother choked out between sobs. “I should’ve listened to you.”

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I went back and forth on the ending. I almost made it so the showdown was between Iona and Nelly. It felt right to make the mom who seemed to have suffered under Nelly for years and lost her husband to her be the one to have the final blow.

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