SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

But this time…his eyes told a different story.

Uncle Allen was afraid.

After a late meal and then getting Grandma Naomi settled into her chair to watch The Tonight Show (the “Johnny Carson show,” Naomi insisted), Rachel and Uncle Allen reconnected over a small makeshift brush fire near the driveway. The bright colors of Grandma Naomi’s flowers were subdued and dim under the curtain of darkness, and the night sky was like oil covering the landscape.

A few stories from her uncle brought laughs from Rachel, but eventually the stories wore out and the laughter did as well. Rachel sat in silence for a few moments, gazing up at the stars, light years away.

“I miss her,” she said.

Silence followed from the other side of the fire. Finally, after a few moments, Uncle Allen replied.

“Yeah. I know, kid. I miss her, too. Growing up, it seemed at times like she was the only one who really got me,” he said. “Like Mom and Dad loved me, but kept their distance a little. Your mom was the best sister I could’ve asked for. Your other aunts were just too old by the time I came around.”

Rachel felt a slight chill in the air, but being with Uncle Allen was warming her soul. She nodded toward the starry expanse. “You think she’s looking down on us? That there’s someone out there that cares what happens down here?”

Allen cocked his head and took in the Milky Way and the countless stars that shone down. “Up there? I don’t know. I do know I’ll never forget her. In that way, maybe your mother will keep on living, you know?”

“Yeah. I know.”

With nothing else to be said, Rachel stood, walked around the fire, sat down next to Uncle Allen, and put her head on his shoulder, both of them remembering her mother.

The next morning, Rachel woke to light streaming in the windows of her mother’s childhood room. The house had been built long before mini-blinds had been invented, and the bedrooms had been vacated before window shades would become the norm in homes across the country. The sun illuminated the entire room, chasing away any darkness still lingering.

Unable to sleep any longer, Rachel slid out of bed and dragged herself down the stairs, only to find Grandma Naomi already up and baking. The scent of sugar and cinnamon filled the small kitchen. Rachel pulled a chair out from the table and sat, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

“Good morning, Melissa!” Naomi said, turning around. Her face showed a brief moment of confusion. Rachel waited a moment before responding, to see if Grandma would realize her mistake. She didn’t.

“Good morning, Grandma. I’m Rachel. Melissa is my mom, but she couldn’t be here today,” Rachel said, a small tear beginning a slow slide down her cheek. One of the worst parts in coming to her grandmother’s house was reliving the painful memories of Mom. It’d been three years, but Rachel wondered nearly every day what would have happened if her mom had only gotten that mammogram earlier. What if she had gotten to the doctor even just a few months earlier? Would she still be here?

But her mother was gone, and now Rachel felt compelled to help take care of Grandma Naomi, to take her mom’s spot in the family rotation.

“Of course you are. I said Rachel, didn’t I?” Naomi didn’t wait for an answer, probably because she already knew her mistake. “What do you say we get up in that attic after the rolls come out of the oven? I haven’t been up there in probably ten years.”

Just then the timer went off, and Rachel hopped up, grabbed an oven mitt, and took the steaming sweet rolls from the oven. As she set them on the counter to cool, she glanced out the window above the kitchen sink to see if Uncle Allen’s truck was there. Gone. Rachel was alone with her grandmother. Well, no time like the present to clear out years of dust and memories from a hundred-year-old house.

“Yeah, Grandma. Sounds good. First though, let’s eat.”

The attic was foreboding on many levels, and the neglect was tangible. Spider webs and dust covered everything. Boxes were stacked to the joists along the walls, and dated Christmas decorations were scattered haphazardly around.

As Rachel began to inspect the boxes, she noticed many were damp. The leaky roof had affected Grandma’s attic after all. Books that had been boxed up, perhaps in the hopes of storing them on a bookshelf again at some point, were now ruined, their pages warped and wilted by the constant moisture coming in from above.

“Grandma, these books are no good,” Rachel called out across the large attic space. She’d situated the elderly matriarch in a folding chair as soon as they’d come up to the attic.

“What do you mean, dear? Those books were perfectly fine when I boxed them up last week.”

Not again.

Rachel grabbed a book and made her way back to her grandmother, maneuvering carefully around a stack of cardboard cutouts that appeared to be from Naomi’s days as a Sunday School teacher at the local Methodist Church.

“Grandma, look at this book,” Rachel said, handing her a paperback copy of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds .

“Oh, yes, this was your grandfather’s favorite. All the suspense and the beings from another world. Too much for my taste,” Naomi said. “But it’s all wet. What did you do to it?”

Rachel sighed. Perhaps she would have to take on this task without Grandma’s consent. It wasn’t like she was going to remember what Rachel did or didn’t do anyway. She took the book back.

“The attic is too moist for books,” Rachel said. “They’re all this way, Grandma.”

“Oh. Well, I don’t need to keep damaged books. You just take care of them, Rachel. I’ll stay here and look through these boxes.” In front of Naomi’s folding chair were a couple of small boxes.

“What’s in there?”

“Oh, just a few of the kids’ favorite toys. As they outgrew them, I’d put them away up here. I always meant to give them back to them, but they’ve all gone now. Gone or moved away,” Naomi said.

“Not all of them, Grandma,” Rachel reminded her. “Uncle Allen still lives down the road. Remember? He comes by every day to check up on you.”

Naomi’s eyes clouded for a nanosecond and then cleared. “Oh, yes. You’re right, honey.”

Peering into the box on Naomi’s lap, Rachel saw many familiar shapes: a toy gun, a teddy bear, a baby doll. Each had special meaning for her mother, her uncle, or one of her aunts. She wondered which items belonged to her own mother when she was growing up in this very house—what special toy her mom had loved and cherished until it was a forgotten object, a mere memory of carefree days.

Then something caught her eye. Reaching down, Rachel plucked a key from the box. It didn’t appear old—in fact, it still shined as if it were brand-new. Impossible—Grandma Naomi herself had said she hadn’t been in the attic in years. But Grandma isn’t exactly a reliable witness. Rachel had to admit that although Grandma Naomi believed herself to be truthful, her mind could jump not only between decades but between fact and fiction.

“What’s this?”

“That’s Allen’s toy key. I remember he held on to that key until he turned seven years old. Each and every day, you’d walk into a room and find him holding and playing with that thing. Never really knew where it came from—one day he was just holding it. I suppose today I might’ve gotten turned into the Department of Child and Family Services for letting him play with keys,” Naomi said, with a smirk on her face.

“Maybe,” Rachel said, twirling the key before her eyes. The small key wasn’t aluminum or silver or any metal she recognized; it had an iridescent sheen to it, appearing slightly different from every angle. She’d never seen anything like it.