The Violet Slip

When I was eight, we lived in a run-down farmhouse at the edge of a dying town. The house had a peculiar layout: the kitchen opened directly into the dining room, and a single door from the kitchen led to a overgrown garden. That garden was my mother’s pride, a tangle of roses and thorns, but we rarely went there after dusk.

One afternoon, I was sitting in the living room, drawing, when I saw a flicker of violet at the corner of my eye. It moved from the kitchen toward the garden door, quick and silent. I froze, my pencil hovering. I called out to my mother, who was in the dining room reading. ‘Mom, I saw something purple go into the garden.’ She looked up, frowning. ‘Probably Mrs. Harker, our cleaning woman. She wears that violet dress.’ But when my mother asked Mrs. Harker later, the old woman insisted she had not left the kitchen the whole time. I remember the way her eyes darted to the garden door as she said it. I shrugged it off, but something about it lingered.

Years later, after my mother passed, I inherited the house. I found her old journal, tucked behind a loose floorboard in the attic. In it, she described her own experiences: a violet figure that would stand at the foot of her bed, watching her; a whisper that sounded like her own name, but from the garden. She wrote of a fear she could not name, and of a door that she was never to open. The last entry was dated two days before her death: ‘It waits in the garden. I have seen its face. It is the shape of my longing.’ I shuddered, and I feared for my own sanity.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I heard music—a lullaby from my childhood, played on a music box I had not seen in decades. It came from the garden. I rose, compelled, my feet moving as if they belonged to someone else. I crossed the kitchen, my hand trembling on the knob of the garden door. The door was cold, colder than the air around it. I turned it and stepped out.

The garden was black, the roses like thorns in a dream. At the center stood a silhouette, wearing a long violet dress that seemed to absorb light. It turned, and I saw my mother’s face, young and beautiful, but her eyes were hollow. She smiled, and her mouth opened too wide. She spoke in two voices at once—hers and mine. ‘I have waited for you to come back. You left me here.’

I tried to scream, but no sound came. I looked down and saw that I was wearing the same violet dress, and I understood. The figure was me, or what I would become, and the mother I saw was a memory, a trap. The garden began to shrink, the walls closing in, and I realized the door was gone. I was inside the garden, and the garden was inside me. I am still here, writing this, but the paper is made of petals, and the pen is a thorn. If you find this, do not open the garden. Do not wear violet. Do not long for what you have lost, or it will take root in you.