October 12th – Madeline Wynee – ‘The Little Room’ (1907) – Read it here.
Catch up on the challenge here.
Really digging the East Coast American Gothic, to be honest, with its liminal spaces and things that do and don’t exist at the same time. I really like the way this plays with the vagaries of memory vs. imagination, the way it feels like two different timelines are crossing one another within the house resulting in different sets of experiences blending into one, very confusing timeline, and the ways people try to explain or understand the unreachable, unverifiable bits of their own remembered histories.
I find stories like this personally disorientating because I have no sense of direction or spatial awareness, and I have actually encountered alleyways that genuinely, to my child-mind, didn’t exist the next time I tried to find them. Here’s a childhood memory of my own about a place that, to me, only sometimes existed…
Here’s some lore for you.
I used to live on Paros, a large island in the Cyclades, and grew up in two of the largest towns on the island, moving from Naoussa to Parikia. I had a lot of freedom in the off-season, and basically wandered wherever I wanted to go, and would disappear for ages on my little expeditions. I think I was about five or six, so everything was much bigger than me, and had that air of mystery that I think as an adult I wouldn’t see anymore.
One time, I found a very narrow alley that I had never seen before, leading at an odd angle (as these things often do on the islands) and I headed down it and found a totally deserted beach. There was a little park on the sand, with a fence, and swings, and a roundabout, where I played by myself until I got bored, and wandered further away. I found half-finished concrete houses or flats, just the bare shell of them with the frames up and nothing else, and the beach rounded away below a cliff in the middle distance, which seemed to me at the time like it was miles and miles away. (I think it was a short-ish walk, in fact, for a grown up).
I tried to show my mum another time we were in the area and I couldn’t find the alleyway at all. I remember trying to find it on my own another time, and still not being able to, like it never existed and I had dreamed the whole thing. But I do that to this day – I get so turned around and confused by basic directions that I can’t find easy landmarks, or cafés I’ve literally just left, as if parts of the map simply dissolve as soon as I step outside of some forcefield around them.
Then, I found it again.
By now, this beach and its alley had become almost mythical in my mind, so when I actually did stumble upon it while playing in the streets again, I was already half-convinced it wasn’t a real place. I found myself back on the deserted sand, with no tourists, no locals, except maybe one woman walking a dog, who looked oddly at me when she saw me playing in the empty park by myself with no other adults around. At the time, I thought being alone was completely normal, so I always hated it when adults who didn’t belong to me tried to interfere in my autonomy. I ignored her, and she went away.
Again, I got bored, and wandered back to the shell of the unfinished building project, and looked up at the cliff. On the cliff, looking down at the beach, were three figures dressed in black. They were Orthodox priests, of course, with their hats and long black robes, and they stood so still and silently that they also didn’t seem real. I wasn’t scared of priests, because I liked Papa Petros very much, and I would always go into his small, windowless church to see him, and he would lift me up so I could light a candle. I also liked his wife, but their faces are just smudges in my memory, not from the distance of time, but because I think they were always like that.
These three men in black were also faceless, and silent, and I thought they had seen me, and suddenly I was very scared.
I ran back to the desolate skeleton of the unfinished concrete house, and hid there. It felt like hours – but I’m also timeblind, and I have no idea how long I stayed crouched in the building site, listening for their footsteps on the sand.
They did come down the cliff, and they did walk along the beach, and I saw their sandals under their robes, and I didn’t come out until they were gone.
Then I ran all the way back to the alley, and back up through the narrow winding streets, and back to wherever my mother was, and told her my latest adventure. I don’t know if she believed me, and I don’t know how I told the story, or anything that happened after that. I don’t remember ever finding the alleyway again, but perhaps I chose not to see it. Perhaps I did, but I simply don’t remember.
But there’s a true story for Day 12 that I think works with the story for today. A bit of Greek Island Gothic for you.
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