The door frame shook in response to Jack's furious disappearance into his study. The walls of their tiny apartment reverberated as flimsily as a Punch and Judy set. Wendy should have been used to this by now, but still her shoulders defrosted on cue as the air from the slamming cardboard door brushed her shaggy black bob. Her hands began to shake and her thin arms lost all stiffness. 'Yes, go and hide, Jack', she thought. 'Go write your mommy's story. Keep it behind closed doors where it belongs'.
She began to tidy the chaos Jack had created. The perfume bottles, papers, and underwear he had strewn across the room in his rage had to be replaced in readiness for his next outburst. She picked up a tattered, yellowed envelope and noticed that it was in her grandmother Kimi's hand. It read 'To my aiyana, Wendy Gill. Open with Care.'
Wendy was certain that she had been through all of alisi-Kimi's papers soon after her funeral, but she didn't remember seeing this before. She tore it open eagerly. She needed a sign from Kimi that everything would be better than it was right now. The pit of her stomach sank when she found only an ancient and impossibly fragile piece of airmail paper. It was blank. 'Kimi, you cheeky old woman. Don't you sit up there laughing at me when I need you most!'
She threw the paper, half aiming for the dresser, but it landed precariously on the lamp. She rushed to remove it, fearing the bulb would quickly singe the dessicated paper, and noticed some faint markings illuminated by the hot globe. She held the document at a safe distance from the light and read what she realised was handwriting:
'My darling Wendy,
At some time in every woman's marriage, her uyehi will become interested in another. The Cherokee woman's power over her man comes not from her charm, or from her beauty, but from the Upper World. Take these words to protect your union, and remember never to incant using the white man's language.
I'm watching,
Alisi-Kimi."
Wendy read the old woman's scrawl. Some words - 'water', 'broken', and the number 237 - were in English, others were in Cherokee, and many were completely illegible. Her mother used to tell her about Kimi's womanhood-rites when she was half wasted on red wine and weed. The stories made her cringe, but after hearing them she would sneak into her bedroom with her mother's inherited adornments. Draping them over her shoulders, the beads and feathers skimming the surfaces of her torso that she barely knew, Wendy would lengthen and bend her lean body in the long mirror, feeling the hum of the incantation, and imagining warm brown hands moving over her taut hips.