confess

“When the reaper comes for you, don’t be afraid.”

The words of my mother echoed through my head, my heart, my confusion.

They were the last words she said to me before she died.

My mother, my favorite person in the world, my last living family member. Gone.

I had tucked her into sleep that night, she had been getting older and less sure of herself. But she was still there, she just had her bad moments.

I had left her with a glass of water and crackers on her nightstand, held her hand and smiled as I told her to sleep well.

That’s when her grip tightened, just slightly, as her eyes looked at me with love and devotion. That’s when she uttered the words.

“When the reaper comes for you, don’t be afraid.”, She calmly told me.

I nodded at her, feeling the familiar helpless feeling that always peered at me when she spoke like this.

“Okay Mom, I won’t.”, I said quietly.

I kissed her hand, and left her bedside, she was asleep before I even shut the lights off.

The next morning, she was found on the rocks below the cliffside about a mile from our home.

She didn’t leave a note, nothing to explain her rash decision. She was just.. gone.

When I cleaned her room that evening, I looked for clues. Something, anything, to get a look into her state of mind. The only thing I found was her journal, and I would never invade her privacy.

I ate dinner alone.

I washed the dishes alone.

I sat on the couch, ready to turn on our favorite show, when I paused.

I can never watch that show again.

Since the moment the officers knocked on my door this morning with the news, I haven’t cried once.

I’ve wanted to. I’ve wanted to scream, cry, throw things against the wall.

But I can’t.

It’s like I’ve shut down.

I picture my phone battery slowly lowering and lowering, and then when it gets to 1% it flashes a few times before dying.

“Accurate”, I said out loud, and then I laughed bitterly.

Just then, a box that I was using to organize with, fell from the chair I probably shouldn’t have placed it on to begin with. Spilling all of its contents on the hardwood.

I sighed, and picked up everything I could, until the last thing caught my eye.

Mom’s journal.

“Found you.. Sorry friend, your keeper is gone now..”, I said, tossing the book onto the coffee table.

I flopped back down on the couch, and sighed.

What am I going to do?

My eyes wandered around the room with my thoughts until they landed on the journal.

I pondered. It felt like an invasion of privacy. She was my mom, and I respected her. I don’t want to go snooping through her things.

But then again, she left me. I have to know why.

“Please forgive me Mom..”, I said out loud, picking the book up before cozying up on the couch.

I flipped open the cover, and her name was written in dark blue ink. I traced the words with my fingers, memorizing the letters, before I turned to the first page.

I was up all night reading, my alarm sounding from my phone brought me out of my trance. I had already called out of work the next day, but I hadn’t turned my alarm off yet. I normally worked the early shift at the hospital so my alarm was set for 2:30. I silenced the chime and turned back to the book.

I was stunned.

I read every word, every story, every line.

But whoever wrote this couldn’t have been my mother.

My kind, sweet, selfless mother. Who would never hurt a fly and would pay for people’s groceries at the store if they looked like they needed a little boost in their day.

The woman in this book is cold, heartless, vindictive, angry, and vicious.

There was a story about how in grade school, another little girl had the same color ribbons in her braids as my mom, so my mom cut them off short enough that the little girl had to have a pixie cut.

Another story, about threatening her high school biology teacher with exposing a nonexistent affair between them if he didn’t pass her in the class.

A story about her best friend teasing her about her frizzy hair at said friend’s bachelorette party, so my mom slept with the friend’s groom the night before the wedding.

She didn’t regret it.

Any of it.

The book was an endless train of her worst moments, inked on paper for all of eternity.

I flipped through the pages, back to the beginning, hoping I missed something that said the book belonged to someone else that just happened to share my mother’s name. I was desperate.

But when I flipped to the front, her name still sat there. In her familiar swooped writing.

It was hers.

My eyes began to well up with tears when I noticed a date inscribed in the bottom corner of the page.

But it didn’t make sense.

It had the date marked as yesterday.

How could that be?

I jumped large sections in the book searching through it, I made a decent dent in it last night but still had a ways to go.

I skimmed through more stories of her cheating on my father, her keying the car of my 2nd grade teacher who gave me a bad performance review, her stalking my ex boyfriend after he broke up with me before Prom.

Years and years of horrible choices.

When I got to the last page, I read the last section very carefully.

“And lastly, my daughter thinks I am losing my wits. I am not. I have lied to her, again. She was pulling away from me. She was going to take that job as a traveling nurse and leave me, I couldn’t have that. So I have been pretending to slowly lose my mind so she stays with me. That’s it, that’s the last of it.”

I dropped the book like it was a hot coal.

No… no. This can’t be true. She’s sick! She.. was sick. She’s…

I looked at the damning book, how I wish I had just burned it when I found it.

In my tears, and rage, I marched it outside. Lighter in hand.

I can pretend, I can pretend I didn’t see it all.

I brought the flame to the cover, waiting for it to catch.

One second passed.

Then two.

The book, still pristine, was untouched. The flame danced around it.

In my frustration, I threw the book at the ground. I screamed, putting my face in my hands.

“The book is now yours.”

I look up quickly, head whipping back and forth as my breath quickens.

I surely imagined it.

“The book is now yours.”, the voice repeats. It is a hollow voice, not sounding completely from our world.

I turn around to where the voice sounded, and all I saw was the darkness of the tree line.

“NOW!”, it bellowed.

Terror ran up my arms as I quickly picked up the book, confused now. I held it shaking.

“The book is now yours. Confess to me.”, the darkness spoke.

Confess?

Is that what my mother was doing?

I opened the book up, and only blank pages greeted me.

I flipped back and forth, nothing remained. No stories of hate, betrayal, viciousness. Just pages ready to be used.

When I got to the first page, my breath caught.

Instead of my mother’s name, my name sat. In blue ink, in my handwriting.

The date at the bottom page marked today.

I still felt the presence of the voice near me, so I cleared my throat.

“What am I to confess?”, I asked the darkness.

“Whatever has burdened you, big or small.”, it responded.

I nodded, turned, and walked inside the house. Something about it’s voice made me afraid not to do just that.

I went to the desk in the front room and picked up a pen. Sitting down in the chair, I opened the book, ignoring the front page.

I began to write.

Mainly little things. Stealing extra candy in the checkout line, lying to stay home from school, not standing up for kids who were being bullied on the playground.

One by one, I wrote down anything I’ve felt guilty about. Granted, nothing seemed so bad after reading my mother’s stories, but I wrote them all.

After what seemed like an hour, I made my last entry.

“I have finally accepted a job offer as a traveling nurse, I start in two weeks, I was going to put my mother in a nursing home that I felt was better suited to care for her ailing health. I hadn’t told her yet.”

I closed the book, picked it up, and walked back outside.

The second I closed the door, the voice spoke to me again.

“You may meet me where your mother had her final breath, when her fate was decided by the rocks and the waves.”, it said.

I gulped.

I didn’t want to go back there, ever. But how did this voice know where she died?

I had to have an answer, and explanation, maybe this thing could give me that.

I tucked the book under my arm and slowly made my walk to the cliffside. Walking through the woods at night should have frightened me, but I couldn’t focus on anything else except my mother right now.

The guilt I felt from signing her up for the nursing home was eating me alive the last week, and having to write it down made it even worse in the feelings of betraying my mom.

Even though she wasn’t actually sick.

I’ll have to process that later.

Once I make it to the cliffside, it appears empty. I see fresh footprints in the dirt from that morning, but the rest of the land is undisturbed.

That’s when I see it.

A cloaked figure is a bit down the path, looking out onto the ocean.

He slowly turns towards me as he hears my approach.

His hood covers most of his head, but I can just barely make out gray skin, pebbled with texture. And a solemn mouth.

His eyes though, are missing from his face.

He extends his hand to me, long slender fingers and black nails.

I shakily hand him the book.

He envelops it in his robes, and is silent.

My hands are shaking so hard that I try to put them in my pockets to stay calm as I ask my question.

“Why didn’t she tell me she wanted to die?”, I asked, quietly.

The figure didn’t move.

It seemed like an eternity passed, before his words came.

“Because it wasn’t what she chose, the fates chose for her.”, he said.

I was stunned, how could something else have chosen that for her?

“I have accepted your confessions,”, the figure said, “And now you must choose.”

“What do I have to choose?”, I asked, eyeing the edge of the cliffside.

“You can either give me a name, any name of someone you want to take your place. They will die for your sins, and you walk away. Or, you can jump off this very cliffside into the dark water, and see if you survive. Your choice.”

“What? There are rocks down there! It’s obvious I would die!”, I shouted.

“Ah, yes. I see. That’s where your confessions come to play. If the fates have decided you are a good person, and deserve to live, they will adjust the water level so you won’t hit the rocks. If they decide you are bad, you will die. So you have to decide, dear, if you believe you are good.. or bad?”, his haunting voice drawled out the last word.

How could I make this choice? I believe I’m good.. but I am far from perfect.. What would the fates make of me?

I looked towards the edge.

But I couldn’t wish pain on someone else, I couldn’t. That would be horrible to try to condemn someone to any suffering. My mother must have felt the same way.

She must have.

“I will jump,” I say calmly, “I will jump and spare anyone more pain, except potentially myself..”

I walk to the edge of the cliffside and look down.

My heart is racing, but I am trying to stay as calm as I can. As calm as I’m sure my mother was.

“Are you sure of your decision?”, the voice asked me.

“Yes. I want to make the same choice as my mom..”, I said, watching the waves crash over the rocks far, far below my feet.

“That is not what your mother chose.”, the voice behind me crooned.

I looked over my shoulder.

“Yes it is, how did she die on these very rocks then?”, I asked.

“She gave a name, then turned to run. She tripped over her slippers, and fell backwards to her death.”, he stated.

“Oh.. Oh my.. Oh..”, I clutched my heart as I looked down at the water.

“Because there was an error that occurred in her ceremony, I had to remake some rules. Her life was still given, so I chose to offer an additional choice to you. I held up my bargain, I always do.”, he said intensely.

My head was still reeling from the new information on her death, I didn’t hear what was so obviously stated.

“No, no she.. wouldn’t. She gave a name? Who would she do that to?”, I asked, facing the figure completely.

“Yours, my dear. She said yours.”, he said.

The horror on my face was painful. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. Why would she… She wouldn’t.

Then a sound escaped me.

And my cheeks felt wet.

I was crying.

After everything today, I finally shed tears over my mother’s final betrayal to me.

Her daughter.

And I knew in that moment, I could never do the same to someone else.

I solemnly turned back towards the cliffside, closed my eyes, and leapt.

The tears continued as I was falling, then I let the sobs take over.

I didn’t care about my fate, I cared that the one person in my life who I loved has betrayed me in the most horrible way.

I cared that my mother, my good and kind mother, wasn’t the angel I thought she was.

And I hated that I still loved her.

As the waves neared my face, I took a final breath in. And squeezed my eyes shut.

The welcoming of the water enveloped me.

The reaper came for me, and I was not afraid.