Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Ninety Three
Felecia was fourteen and staring head long into another winter spent in the cave, another time of cold conjoined isolation with Jacqueline’s declining presence. The time spent in Phillip’s house seemed like a fading memory then and all her years spent in Rotary house felt like a distant dream that belonged to some other, younger and more hopeful girl.
There was some strange twelve-year-old girl in a blue and white pinafore dress who owned the foreign concept of happiness or at the very least a sense of being safe while Felecia toiled and read and only occasionally dared to look into a mirror only to be reminded of the horror that stared back at her.
Books had been read and studied, that first giant tome Jacqueline handed her was only one of many by then. Felecia had trudged and tip toed the length and breadth of Aquidneck Island looking for the many herbs, bulbs, mushrooms, and wild weeds listed before she perfected the hundreds of herbal recipes and gathered the requested needs the tome explained. Even more weeks were spent learning and perfecting those simple recipes before Felecia felt herself comfortable to put down the oft-read tome in need of another.
A book written by a great uncle; a man Felecia had never heard mention of during her time in Rotary house was the next offer. A simple manual dedicated to the tides and shoals surrounding the island. As much a private log of canoe travel as it seemed a proper published book on local coastal anomalies and trends the book was puzzling to Felecia at first. She was busy perfecting recipes to cure dozens of minor ailments, not to mention making her own casual concoctions that caused minor but certain changes in small patches of earth and the behavior of the animals and insects there. Felecia couldn’t seemingly stop time, or speed it up, like Jacqueline could, but she was becoming an adept herbalist and here was a book about the coastal ocean.
“I know I was all talk about the ocean and learning my father’s trade when I first got here, but I am fully willing to concede that was an assumption of youth. A childhood wish if you will? My time in the wrecked boat fully cured me of any want to ply the ocean as a trade.”
Jacqueline only barely looked away from the book she was still reading at the time, not one of her burble gurgle tomes but some dry history book none the less, “Did you see a canoe outside by the well this morning?”
The old woman, the witch, Nana’s dirty doppelganger, leaned on sarcasm more and more as their time together stretched on, Jacqueline also became more communicative, if only to chide and be sarcastic and therefore she became better spoken over their time together. Small but significant pieces of the woman she used to be would come spilling out as they talked and that apparition of old began to take a semi-solid form that stood out best when they laid in bed at night.
“No, but you offered me the last book to study with a clear purpose of touring the island in search of ingredients and I did just that, now there’s a book about tides and coastline features that pose a danger to small vessels. I assume there’s a reason for you choosing this one.”
“The first book I offered up. That had very little to do with you learning herbs. This one, it doesn’t have much to do with the tides either.”
Felecia picked up the book and prepared for another lesson in learning to read between the lines when it came to her family, both present and past. She couldn’t help but mutter, mostly to herself as she did so, “Just imagine if this family talked to each other instead of journaling through the press.”
Jacqueline didn’t skip a beat as she returned to her dry history read, “Imagine the family library of Rotary house being your great grandfather’s sea journals and an encyclopedia set missing most of the vowels.”