Dark and Shallow Lies

by Ginny Myers Sain

I shiver when I see the bold pencil lines. Like someone walking over my grave, Elora would have said.

“Étranger,” Sera tells me. “A stranger. Someone we don’t know.”

“There’s bound to be some magic in you, Grey. You need to know that.”

Chere. Pronounced like sha. It’s a Cajun word. A term of endearment. Like darlin’. Sweetie. Sugar pie. Nobody ever calls me “chere” in Arkansas. Only in La Cachette, and usually it makes me smile. But not tonight.

Everybody down here knows the story. If you’re unlucky enough to see the rougarou, you have to keep that secret for one hundred and one days. If you don’t, you’ll become the monster yourself.

Because if she were really dead, surely I would be, too. How do you go on living with only half a heart?

“Knowing is hard,” he says, “but it’s a thing you can survive. The not knowing will kill you in the end. It’s the secrets that fester.”

I feel my secrets, huge and heavy. If I fell into the river, the weight of them would pull me straight to the bottom.

“You don’t go on living just the same,” he tells me. “You have to go on living in a completely different way.” And that’s the first thing that’s made sense to me in a really long time.

It hits me hard how every single one of us—everyone in the whole wide world—is walking around with missing pieces.

Need isn’t love. Loneliness isn’t love. And pain isn’t love. Even if it’s shared.