Abstract

My short story A Mother's Milk uses the folkloric supernatural figure of the changeling – a common trope of folk horror – to explore the dark psychological territory of maternal trauma. My protagonist, Pauline, suffered abuse as a child at the hands of her mentally ill mother, Leah, whose illness made her paranoid that her daughter was a changeling. Pauline was permanently removed from Leah's care by social workers. After Leah's passing, Pauline returns to the house she grew up in, an isolated cottage on the west coast of Ireland. Pauline brings her own young daughter, Shelley, with her, who is befriended by a malignant creature. In the accompanying exegetical essay, I explain how the figure of the changeling can illuminate complex relationships between motherhood, selfhood, abuse, and trauma.

Keywords: folk horror, changeling, maternal trauma, neopagan

A Mother's Milk

I am alone in the house with my daughter and we are a long way from the nearest neighbours. Outside, through the window I see the last of the dusk glowing in the sky as shadows seep into the trees and the rocks and the hilly, folded fields, submerging the landscape like a slow, black sea.

The cottage sits halfway up a hill, set a long way back from the road. Gorse bushes flush with small yellow flowers gather along the roadside. The ice wind rakes across the cragged and mottled hills, relentless. It howls through the branches of the stooping trees and down towards the stunted willows by the creek. Rocky earth out here, it is, hard and cold.

How she spent so many nights on her own out here, and at her age, I’ll never know. I pull the curtain loose from its sash and the heavy fabric falls across the pane.

I turn the huge key in the iron lock and it sends a jolt through my bones as the bolt sinks home with a clang. Shutting the spirits out, that was one of Mam's sayings. She was always muttering about the spirits, the faeries, her skirts swirling around her, hair black and curling, come loose from her braid, around her face.

Memories of her keep bobbing to the surface, like bubbles, at the moment. Things I thought I’d forgotten, snatches of her voice, stories she’d tell.