Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Forty Five
The trunk lid was heavy and Felecia didn’t have the strength to shut it. She didn’t have the strength to stand up either. She stooped there over the ruined letters and stained clothes, breathing in the moldy memories, staring without seeing and crying without tears. She stooped until her knees gave out and found cold comfort in the clumps of grass and mud that awaited her. Felecia slumped and fell, curled in a ball and feeling her still healing injuries complaining about the rough treatment. The little hitches and dry sobs turned into genuine moans, but they weren’t outcries of sadness or despair.
The letters, all of them, laid out and exposed on top of the heap. There must have been nearly two hundred carefully cursive misfires, as close to a girl’s diary as Felecia ever dared to keep. Josephine had seen them, but hopefully never skimmed much. Mother knew about them only as a penmanship practice, an endeavor to give Bartholomew dated letters to read from his kid sister when the times at sea got lonely. Felecia didn’t keep up with those dated letters for long. Hardly much to be written down in the life and times of a bored, kept little rich girl from Long Island. Fantasy however, dreams, longings, the chance to dance with sweet escape. Felecia would sit and stew with her feelings and what she really wanted out of life and what she imagined it could be; as much as a well-read preteen girl ever could that is. She would hold it all in until she couldn’t bear it anymore and only then would she sit down to write one of her letters to no one in particular.
Rachel was a frequent and not particularly eloquently stated recipient of many of Felecia’s hoped for lives and impermissible longings. The exercise of writing those letters allowed Felecia to realize herself, she began to give a very permanent form to what she had assumed were only vague fantasies of the moment and she did so in those slow excruciatingly practiced cursive letters.
Lesbian.
The word had only ever been read in a handful of books in father’s study. Felecia didn’t even understand it for what it was in context, not until she found a particularly lewd collection of short poems and limericks buried in the upper shelves.
The Conway’s held no particular faith that Felecia was ever able to discern. Literature was filled with references to the Holy Bible and the good book, yet she never found one of those in her father’s massive study. Later she learned of family bibles, tomes that held pages of entire family histories, sometimes even littered with the family’s most important documents and legal papers. She asked Nana about the whereabouts of their family bible and was told, once again, to stay clear of father’s study, “Casual reading is for men, Felecia, you have more important issues to consider, your atrocious embroidery to start with, not that your sewing is much better.” Later she asked father about the family faith and was equally dismissed out of hand. “The only higher power we talk about in this house is the sea, young lady, she’s more powerful than any myth man has managed to create so far.”
Even after she assumed that her family didn’t have or practice a particular faith, literature taught her and informed her of the wages of sin, the original one chief among them. Men laid with women and that was that. The stories and poems, and even crude limerick books that Felecia found all seemed to conclude with that absolute. Therefore, even without someone in the family to directly inform her of her malady, her sickness, the sin that obviously infected her, Felecia understood that how she felt must be some how wrong.
The understanding that there was something clearly wrong with who she was and how she perceived the forbidden concept of sex was further instilled by her father’s insistence that she was helpless and mostly worthless due to her gender and of course the absence of her mother and the abuses her grandmother poured upon her.
Felecia was three years and counting into that awful realization of herself, always slightly afraid that her letters would be found out. Always somewhat terrified of everyone in Rotary House learning of her ugly little secret.