We Ate the Dark

by Mallory Pearson

Show her you’ve discovered all her holy spots and watch her try to find another, deeper forest. Everything she’s kept from you is yours now: these frilly private things, this tiny book of screams. Possession, Martha Rhodes

Between two rolling mountains, split like a lip, a dirt road snakes its way through the trees to a leering house.

Once, someone swept the porch and its threshold, hung wreaths in doorways and star-colored lights from the eaves to banish the dark.

Wasn’t that what summer was for? Rotting away on a couch that molds itself to the shape of your body, watching reruns of reality TV until you can feel bits of your mind melting through your ears? He’d get his life together when the leaves fell again.

Could the shape of a structure remember the hurt administered within it?

But it was the water that mattered most to Frankie. The deep green of the stagnant lake behind Oph’s farmhouse was the color of her heart after dark. The sound of lapping shoreline against loamy clay eased her every anxiety. Some nights when sleep wouldn’t come, Sofia on her mind and her heart hurting like a paper cut, she’d imagine that sound like the coming rush of June bugs, picture the creamy echo of moon slivers against the surface of the water. It was the only type of magic she’d ever been willing to accept.

In Frankie’s traitorous memory, the empty space her sister took up blinked open and caught her watching.

The fact of the matter, the real meat of her hurt, was that she was always leaving something behind, even when she came home.

But wasn’t it nice, to see a physical representation of your hope in front of you?

Why was it that her most vivid recollections were moments of devastating self-doubt?