Something in the Walls

by Daisy Pearce

grief. Sometimes small and quiet and shallow, sometimes a tsunami, cold and frightening. But inevitable, just like the tide.

grief gets heavier the longer you carry it alone

Sometimes I wonder how our many-chambered hearts can stand the loss all these years, why it doesn’t simply stop beating. I wonder how the grief can still twist inside you like a stitch in your side when you least expect it.

I feel a spark of something, some understanding, shared. The dead like golden threads, pulling us together.

it’s not the dead we ought to be afraid of, it’s the living.”

“Because you can’t predict what fear will do to people. You don’t know which way it will send ’em. Some people don’t have the stomach for it and it drives them mad.”

“It’s tradition, Mina. You can’t outlast it. Best you can do is outrun it.”

Something aches inside me, deep in the hollows. Bones and rubble.

We smile at each other and just in that moment it’s as if all the horror is bleached and faded away. We are just two women in a messy room full of rugs and plants on a bright sunny morning, talking the way I’ve seen friends do. It’s nice. I wish it could be like this always. But it’s a bubble, and like all bubbles, it has to burst.

I stare after her, feeling a slow horror forming in the pit of my stomach, something which burns dull and painful and as blunt as superstition.