Where I End

by Sophie White

The gaze of the house is now unnerving. It has been gagged, the eyes and mouth stuffed shut with the stacked splintered rock. The straight-edged lines are steely stitches that have sewn our house closed. Inside is worse.

(Hope, I’ve come to learn, can be a noose. When we hope, we willingly, blithely, put our heads in a sadistic coil and wait to be hanged. I hoped for things when I was younger—pathetic things—and was always left swinging.)

That’s what a baby is, I’ve come to see now. It is the mother’s whole soul extracted,