Her Own Handwriting
自分の筆跡
The was reached by a ladder that protested every rung, as if it too disliked being climbed.
Beneath the rafters lay the of generations: trunks, broken lamps, a spinning wheel gone to rust.
In a hatbox lined with yellowed newspaper I found a of letters tied with a black ribbon.
There were perhaps thirty of them, unsigned, addressed to no one, written over what must have been years.
I opened the first with the mild curiosity of a stranger reading another stranger's private grief.
Then I saw the handwriting, and the curiosity drained out of me like heat from an open door.
The letters were written in my hand, in my own particular , my own impatient crossing of the letter t.
I do not mean that the script merely resembled mine, as one careful hand resembles another.
I mean that it was mine, down to the small I had believed I alone had ever invented.
For a moment I entertained the comfortable idea that I had written them myself and forgotten.
But the paper was old, the ink long dry, the concerns those of a woman dead before my birth.
She wrote of the house, of a cold that followed her from room to room, of footsteps overhead.
She wrote of a portrait that watched her, and of a nursery she could not bring herself to open.
Everything I had felt within these walls, she had felt first, and set down in my own handwriting.
It was I who now retraced her sentences, though she had died before I could have taught her a single stroke.
Blood, I told myself, carries more than the colour of the eyes and the shape of the hand.
Perhaps a family passes down its as it passes down its nose, or its griefs, or its rooms.
That was the kinder explanation, and I clung to it with the grip of someone above deep water.
The other explanation I could not say aloud, even to the empty , even to myself.
For if the hand was not inherited, then the house was not merely reminding me of her.
It was, in some manner I lacked the to name, beginning to make me into her.
I read every letter that night, and each one told me a little more of what was coming.
She had recognised her own handwriting too, in a older still, left by the woman before her.
The house, it seemed, kept a single grief and lent it, in turn, to whoever came to live alone.
I understood that I had not inherited a building so much as a role, already written, awaiting its player.
At the bottom of the box lay one blank sheet, and a pen, as though someone expected me to continue.