Jaa

Jaa liked the idea that someone might come upstairs, glimpse a figure drifting between the shelves of books, and come to the conclusion there that there was a haunting. She liked the idea that she might become a story among all these other stories, intricately bound to the place just as all these volumes bound the characters who inhabited them. She feels a kinship with these books which had been pulled from active circulation and stored on the third floor. Within the pages, there were a host of stories, information and ideas, all viewed as no longer true, no longer accurate or relevant. She, too, is transitory and unreferred to.
         
She herself is a forgotten etymology. Names once known, and forgotten, like elflock and apricity, sweeting and picaroon. She has gone by many names - the ancients called her ignis fatuus, ahuras, Jenny-Burnt-Tale - but in this age, she is little noticed, out-shone by flickering screens, information dumps, and the ferocious din of voices struggling to be heard. When she is noticed, she is more likely to be the impetus for a ghost-hunter’s YouTube video than recognized for what she is.

The hinges of the door below squeak. The girl is on her way up and Jaa tucks herself between the covers of a book, turning herself into a question mark on a well-thumbed page. So far, the girl has not seen her. The girl believes she is having visions, though Jaa is not one of them. The girl has told no one that she is sick with fear that her brain is not working right. When this fear becomes too much, she sneaks away to some private place with her make-up bag, takes the razor blade from it, pushes the waist of her skirt down and cuts herself. The pain, which is out of sync with the drawing of the blade because the metal is so sharp and the skin so scarred, draws her back to the present and away from the landscape of worry that she normally inhabits. The pain of the cut does not allow for anything outside of itself and the present moment. Her bifurcated brain cannot occupy two places at once after blood is drawn; she must attend to the injury and this requires all her attention. Once she has drawn the razor across her skin, she becomes just a girl with a cut. She leans heavily against a bookshelf, pressing a tissue to the cut, waiting for it to stop bleeding so she can go back to work.

Jaa has watched this blood-letting many times. When the girl cuts herself and the skin separates, Jaa sees the brilliant light shining from inside these cuts. The girl misunderstands what the blade and the cut and the pain and the relief mean. What the girl feels is the glow of the secret she carries escaping, and nothing else.

Jaa knows what this secret is because she is the one who placed it. She remembers the sleeping baby girl, her cheek pressed against the cot bottom and knees tucked up under her body. The nursery swirled with the shadows from the mobile hanging above the crib and Jaa stood listening to the baby suck her thumb for a moment before taking a secret from her bag and placing it in a crease on her pinkie toe. The baby frowned unhappily and her thumb popped free as if she was considering crying, then her brow smoothed and the wrinkled thumb found its way back between the little lips shiny with spit, and all seemed right again, and the baby who would become this girl would never know why she was gripped forever after with an inexplicable sense of unease whenever she heard “Hush, Little Baby,” the lullaby the mobile had been playing when she was made guardian of the secret Jaa gave her.

            Had Jaa been able to, she might have felt guilty about the burden she had gifted this girl, but she was older than human time and without conscience because of it. She had passed through many ages with her bag of secrets, had countless hiding places in the universe for them. She was keeper of these places and placer of these secrets, and consequence was a thing that did not concern her. Her sentience was borne of a millennium of bearing witness, and her interest was pure: she planted secrets in different soils and watched to see what they grew into. That they might corrupt the ground they were placed in, or cause pain to a human who bore one, was incidental. And so Jaa’s pleasure – for she did know the passing breeze of pleasure and displeasure – at seeing the girl again was a farmer’s as he inspected the overturned ground for signs of his crop maturing.

            The girl looked at the tissue to see if she had stopped bleeding, crumpled it in her fist when she saw she had, and lowered the waist of the skirt back into place with a slight grimace. She set about the task which had brought her upstairs, to get her patron’s book. She walked until she came to the shelf she needed, searched the volumes there until she found the retired title. She pulled it out and flipped it over to read the back cover.

Jaa took a moment away from the placing of a secret in the split leather of a book to watch how the girl was absorbed by what she read. If she did not identify the expression that was blooming across the girl’s face as recognition, she did at least understand the flash of powerful light that shot through the girl’s waistband where the most recent cut had been made. But like any farmer whose focus must be on what is yet to be done rather than what was done in a past season, Jaa turned from this observation and returned her attention to the placing of her secret.

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Liz Rosen is a short story writer and former children's television writer. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, Sequestrum, Litro Online, Ascent, Revolver, Sanitarium, Ink Stains, Writer's Digest, and others. "Jaa" is a piece of a larger work she is currently at work on.