Skeletons in the Cupboard

Mother's Daemon

March 2019

I first met the daemon when I was five years old. My parents thought it was important that I meet it once as a child, before I become too old for fairy tales.

There was wisdom in that, I suppose. When I was five years old, the world around me was always new and always interesting, and the daemon was just another addition. She lived in a ceramic jar with a round top lid, its sides carved with abstract symbolism. I remembered knocking the jar down half a dozen times as a kid. Each time it would plummet from its place of honor at the corner of the house, and each time I could almost hear the ringing as it broke into pieces. But it never broke. It just rolled across the floor. And then my mother would find me and scold me and put the jar back, always in one piece.

That day, instead of scolding me, my mother had me sit down on the living room couch. Then, slowly, she opened the lid. The first thing I remember from that memory was laughter, the sort of laughter that was a child’s first when they let go a balloon and watch it float into the sky. And then there was a swirl of bubbling gas, flowing out of the gap in the lid. And then I saw her, a shape, a face in the mist. My mother whispered to it and then it, all the dazzles, the mist, the laughter, flowed back into the jar.

I was entranced, and I asked her what it was. My mother told me it, she, was a friend, someone to call in a time of need.

The next time I saw the daemon, I was fourteen years old. I came home with my mother and we found my father sprawled on the floor. A stroke, something he had warned us was a thing that run in his family. My mother did not panic. She sensed for his pulse and, after finding it, she went straight to the jar and opened the lid. I was a teenager, and I no longer remember everything from my childhood. I’ve long forgotten the first time I met the daemon; at best I had dismissed it as a dream. But when the laughter came, it was familiar. And as the swirl of mist flowed out, it was like seeing a new old friend. My mother whispered, and then the mist came down upon my father. He convulsed once, and then he woke up.

They never mentioned the incident again, but I understood what happened.

When I was nineteen and failing my classes, laughed at by my friend, and abandoned by a boy I thought I had fallen in love with, I begged my mother to talk to the daemon. She looked at me strangely, as if she didn’t recognize me, and then told me that the daemon is not to be drained like water from the pipes, to be wasted on nothing. I yelled at her, saying how she didn’t care about me, how she never really knew me. My life was not nothing, I screamed, but she never relented.

At night when I thought everyone was asleep, I opened the jar. The familiar laughter, the familiar mist like nebula of dying stars. This time the daemon spoke to me.

“You are the daughter of the master,” were her first words. “You will be my master in twenty years. And then you will bore me a daughter who will be my new master after you.”

I asked her what she was, and she answered, “A spirit in debt. I grant my master any wish she can imagine.”

I begged her for help, but she shook her head, the stars fell in her clouds. “I serve the master and no one else. You are not yet the master.”

I cried. I told her I don’t know what else to do, who else to turn to, where else I can take this. Against my expectations, she replied softly, “I cannot grant your wish, but you can talk to me, and I will answer.”

Every night since then, I sneaked out and opened the lid of the jar. And then I would spend hours talking to the spirit. I will tell her everything I had gone through, every feelings that were flowing inside of me. She listened, she was the best listener one could hope for. And then she answered. She told me what I should do, how I should process my feelings. Her thinking was strange and alien, but everything she said, it all made sense.

One night, I asked her where she came from. “From the remains of a dying star,” she answered. “I fell into this planet.”

I never really understood, I just know she was a blessing for my family.

Ever since the incident with my father, and the things that the daemon had told me, I had assumed that my mother would live forever under her protection. But no. When I was thirty-nine, twenty years after I first talked to the daemon, my mother died rescuing a child from a fire. It was heroic, an act of her own volition, but still I had lose a mother in the incident. The night afterwards, I opened the jar and poured all my grieving with the daemon.

Her replies were short and curt, which surprised me. She had always been so comforting, so talkative before, for years and years. Now she was just an automaton.

I asked her why she was so different now, what she was becoming.

Her answer: “My old master is dead. You are my new master. My protocols are reset. Old wishes are discarded. Only new wishes will be granted.”

I understood what it means but I refuse that she would say it so plainly.

And then I asked her about my mother, and she told me the last wish she’d made, twenty years ago,

“She asked me that I be a friend to her daughter.”