Most of all, her death felt like a landslide had come through and pulled my skin off. Except the skin grew back so I looked normal on the outside, completely untouched, but on the inside it had scrambled and roughed up all my organs, left rocks and sand and debris inside me. It hurt to move. It hurt to stay still. The weirdest thing was that after a while, I couldn’t cry. It was like the tears had gotten trapped inside the mud and debris, stuck there, and that’s what felt so heavy inside me all the time, the weight of all that water. Then we found Gertrude, and for a while, everything began to
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