“does he ever speak of me?”

“Does he ever speak of me?” I asked in a rush.

The woman at the table didn’t breathe a word, just folded her gnarled hands, rings chiming against one another, and sighed. For a moment, I thought she would not say anything, and the air hung stale and heavy between us.

“He does not speak much at all,” she rasped after a moment, pausing with every word, weighing each in the balance before it slipped from her tongue. One skeleton hand reached up to brush a grizzled lock of grey hair back out of her eyes.

This unsettled me, the weight of such news sinking down into my stomach like a rock sinks through water. I swallowed down the ache in the back of my throat, blinking harshly. “Has he said anything? Since, since he um, well?”

Again, silence. After a moment, the woman stood slowly, hands braced on the table, and shuffled across the room. I could practically hear her joints ache and creak, even at this distance. She stopped in front of a bookshelf twice as tall as herself, and lifted one hand to run her bony fingers along the dusty spines. She paused at a gap in the collection, and reached back deep between the tomes, producing a small piece of rolled up parchment, long yellow with age. Slowly, very slowly, she walked back over and sat down, then reached out one hand to pass me the piece of paper.

My heart beat at the base of my throat as I took it, and my fingers brushed hers. A chill rippled down my spine.

When I unfurled the page, smoothing out the curl against the tabletop, my eyebrows drew together, my tongue dry with confusion. “It’s blank.”

The woman said nothing. She gestured to the paper. I looked back down at it.

“It’s still blank. There’s nothing here.”

“Do not look with your eyes.”

I resisted the urge to hurl the paper back in her face, licked my lips, and looked back down at it. One edge was dogeared with age, torn slightly; another was wrinkled and deformed with what I could only assume to be a long dry spot of water. I opened my mouth to tell her, once more, that the page was empty, and then something happened. It started in the center of the parchment, just a slight warping of the page, as if I were looking at it from the surface of a puddle. Gradually, the ripples began to widen, spreading until it really did look like a puddle. I leaned closer, my nose a hairsbreadth away from the paper.

There was a quiet sound, like the creaking of an old book being opened, and the surface of the water rapidly began to clear, the image suddenly taking the shape of an old memory; a cloudless blue sky, an old swing set, a mangy cat. My brother, hanging upside down from the monkey bars, his face split in laughter. I could hear it, his laugh, coming to me from the center of that watery page as if from miles and miles away, only an echo. Tears welled unbidden in my eyes.

“Why are you making me look at this?”

“I can no more control what you see than I can what has happened to you. These are your memories. You must watch.”

“I can’t!”

“You must.”

Vision blurring, I tried to focus back on the looking glass image of my brother, sandy blonde hair bouncing around his face as a stray breeze blew by. His voice came from years away, calling my name, laughing. “Watch me!”

And suddenly that damn stray cat was howling, my brother was losing his grip, startled into shock, and I was watching him fall, falling, falling.

“Stop!” I hurled the page to the ground, throwing my hands to my face, and gave over to sobs, shoulders hunched. “Stop. I don’t want to see any more.”

I heard the scrape of the paper as the witch picked it up from the ground, felt briefly her hand upon my shoulder, and then her footsteps fade as she crossed the room. I lifted my head to see her slide the rolled up sheet back into the crevice it had come from, and draw the shawl back from around her face.

When she turned, she wore my brother’s features, and I could feel the scream bubbling up beneath my sternum. I sobbed once, loudly, violently, and when I blinked there was just the haggard face of the old woman staring back at me.

“None of them speak much after they die.”