Rebecca Turkewitz
Biddeford, Maine, 1855
I like the mill girls, but I do not like the mills, whose windows glow all night like rows of yellow cat eyes.
The girls have come to this town of noise and filth from their quiet farms, their quiet lives. I watch them marching towards the mills in the brittle dawn, and I watch them reading in the windows of their boarding houses, and I watch them teasing one another as they walk arm-in-arm down Main Street.
The girls are afraid of me but also drawn to me. In the summer, I sit below their open windows after curfew and listen to them gossip. I imagine them perched on one another’s beds, their features sharpened by the strange cut of candlelight and shadow. They call me “The Medium.”
People once said my clairvoyance was a miracle. Divination shares a root with divine, and people treated me as such. But I grew weary of the table tipping, of the desperate séances and the desperate spirits, of the silly tricks with hidden pockets and gauze that my brother insisted I add for theatrics. I grew weary of the sitters’ tedious requests.
People always asked me to pass on the wrong messages to the spirits. What good is love to the dead? Love is a currency of the living. What the spirits want is a rope they can use to climb back into our world or at least a window they may peer through. Instead of weepy apologies, you should describe the sound of a train roaring over a bridge, the taste of cold cream, the sting of snow on one’s cheeks, the sight of the supple green buds that mark the seasons’ changing. Remind the spirits what it’s like to step into the clammy air of a warm evening or see moonlight turned the texture of water by a passing cloud. They are forgetting, and the forgetting is awful. They seek the end of their fading away. They want a heartbeat. They want their chests to rise and to fall.
When I stopped speaking on command, my brother brought me here, far from Boston’s plush parlors and private carriages. He opened his apothecary shop of foul-tasting elixirs and sleeping draughts that either do not work or work too well. Now, he calls me mad. Now, he decides—or thinks he decides—when I can leave his house.
Last week, I thought the river was speaking to me. That was novel and I welcomed it, but it was just one of the drowned girls, a young thing of seventeen, newly dead. Thin as a reed and saturated with shame. Her anger was turned inward like rot. She did not want to leave the snarled, swirling river bottom. Eventually I coaxed her out with the promise of letting her into me. When I become their vessel—a conduit between realms—the spirits can see through my eyes and feel through my skin. Their voices come crawling out of my throat. All other times, they see everything in our world the way that I see them, like shadows glimpsed through fog. They never want to leave my body, but I am stronger than they are. I am their window, but this is not their world.
The mill girls want to talk to me, but they do not dare. Their curiosity is so strong I can smell its musky, feline scent. What would they ask me, if they grew bold enough? They’d ask about the spirits, I’m sure. Everyone thinks the dead are more interesting than the living. This is folly. Like people, some spirits are interesting and others are not. The long-dead, for example, are too confused to offer any insight. Some have lost even their names. Their only certainty is their desire to be alive again. They are jealous of us, and this covetousness—vicious and sharp—is what people sense when a spirit is near. It is what makes you afraid when the night is black and there is a whisper of wind and you suspect that you are not as alone as it would seem.
My brother is angry with me and his anger has an undercurrent of fear I don’t understand. He found my treasures, which I’d buried in a jewelry box in a shady corner of his wife’s garden. Scraps of the mill girls’ clothing, a few locks of their hair, a fork that had once rested inside their pretty mouths, a page from a diary, a locket, a bloody rag. “Where did you get these?” he demanded. Has he always been this pig-faced and ugly, this trapped by the limits of his ordinary mind? I tried to conjure the tenderness I once held for him when we were young, but came up empty. He disposed of my keepsakes, but no matter. I will find more.
I have never understood the spirits so well as I do now. Watching the mill girls is no longer enough. I want to see through their eyes, run on their sturdy legs, press their calloused fingers against my cheeks and chin. I want their spit in my mouth and their breath in my lungs. I want to feel the thumping of their young, keen hearts in my chest. Yesterday, I watched a girl’s nose begin to bleed as she stepped out of the warm mill and into the winter’s cold dry air. She tipped her head towards the sky as red sluiced across her slightly open mouth. I angled my own head back as I watched and parted my lips. I imagined her blood trickling back onto my tongue. I wanted to taste it so badly I almost could.
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Rebecca Turkewitz is the author of the story collection Here in the Night, which was a finalist for the Maine Literary Award. Her fiction and humor have appeared in Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024, Best Microfiction 2023 and 2024, Colorado Review, Electric Literature, The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, and elsewhere. She is a writer and public high school teacher living in Portland, Maine.