Shadow Memories

Excerpt

I was born with a song in my back. You said it’s because my father played the guitar and sang to your belly all the time when I was on the other side of it. Sometimes when I lie cradled in bed, somewhere between sleep and eyes wide open, I hear the timbre of my father’s voice. It’s funny I remember his hum as a silver thread weaving its way along your lips, but his face is long gone from memory. His absence was the most bitter song, one you didn’t know how to stop playing.

You slept in bed next to me for months, feet dangling off my mattress. I pretended to be asleep, but I always felt how your tears made my neck warm then cold. When my father’s guitar still hung by the front door, you’d get on me for eating mandarins in bed. But after he left, you burrowed your head in places it didn’t belong—in my hair, between the couch cushions, under the kitchen sink, even in the oven one time. But your head sank deepest into my pillows, where shuddering breaths shifted to soft snores. I hated the age seven and the odor of citrus because they both reeked of grief.

Jeneé Skinner

Jeneé Skinner has a degree in Creative Writing and went abroad to the University of Oxford to study Renaissance Literature and the Italian Renaissance. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Additionally, she won Michigan Quarterly Review’s Jesmyn Ward Prize and was a finalist for the Black Warrior Review’s Fiction Contest. She has received fellowships from the Tin House Summer Workshop and Hedgebrook. Previously, she was the Writing in Color Book Project Fellow for the Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Her work has been nominated for Best Microfiction, Best of the Net, and a Pushcart. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is an assistant memoir editor at Split Lip Magazine, and is at work on a novel and short story collection. You can find her on Twitter @SkinnerJenee and Instagram @jskin94.

Patrick Ryan on “Shadow Memories”

A confession: Our new issue is anything but a holiday story. Or I should say, it’s many things but a holiday story. It’s about motherhood, addiction, regret, resentment, religion, and depression. It’s about demons in every sense of the word. It’s also about a shadow that’s as scary as the rabbit in Donnie Darko.

“Shadow Memories” begins with a declaration: I was born with a song in my back. This sentence grabbed me the first time I read it because of its mystery. Is it meant to be taken literally? Is it a metaphor? Who’s speaking? And to whom? To give away as little as possible, the narrator is a daughter, speaking to her mother. The story, in effect, is a recounting of the daughter’s life, delivered to the mother at some point in the future. There is a novel’s worth of material here, squeezed with precision into an unconventional narrative that might, at times, make you shudder.

Perhaps you need a break from traditional holiday stories. Perhaps you’re one of those people who likes to watch scary movies rather than roast chestnuts. Fittingly, it’s the author, Jeneé Skinner, who indicates in our Q&A why “Shadow Memories” might be a fitting story to come out in December: When I asked her to tell me more about the shadow, she said she thinks of it as the Ghost of Christmas Future.

So “Boo!” and “Happy Holidays” all in one issue. We hope you enjoy this highly original and haunting story—though you might not want to read it close to bedtime.