Dark Across the Bay

by Ania Ahlborn

Who can get any sleep with the noise familial history makes?

Someone to share the horrors with.

If the house had finally been ransacked, then the damage was hers to discover.

Poppy had been smitten by the online listing that had popped up on her Facebook feed. Whether it was an ad or a link someone had posted, she couldn’t recall, but it made no difference.

It’s going to be a disaster or a revelation. There will be no in-between.

Why not both

there was no talking reason to someone who was sitting on the knife’s edge of a meltdown,

And while she wanted to feel nothing but sympathy for him, his melancholia was starting to aggravate her…which was saying a lot, since Melancholia was Lark’s middle name.

Her irritability was what had gotten her into trouble before, was what had destroyed the relationship she’d been so sure of.

But that was Lark’s Achilles heel. She told people too much. Trusted too quickly. Loved too hard.

It was only when she stumbled upon what looked to be a makeshift campsite that she furrowed her eyebrows in genuine curiosity.

At the start of their marriage, he’d always been considerate, loading dishes into the washer after dinner, making coffee in the morning. But as time went on, those sweet little gestures had faded. Dishes were left in the sink. The timer on the coffee pot was never set the night before.

Their mom always complained that she could feel oncoming rain in her bones. Well, maybe that sort of premonition was an inherited trait, because Lark could sense the storm of Leo’s departure rolling in like a hurricane.

with his sweet smile, with the way he’d curl up in her lap and have her read him the same book over and over, his little face lighting up every time they came to his favorite part. Leo, her first born. Her revelation. The answer to the question so many asked but never got the answer to. What’s the point of living? Why are we here? Poppy had discovered the answer while sitting in a dark nursery, rocking her son to sleep. She’d come to understand the meaning of life in his laughter, in his tears.

Their kids went to school together, after all, and he was certain Poppy had Gemma’s phone number programmed into her cell. That meant Gemma more than likely had Poppy’s digits, too.

She was back in her pajamas, stripping him of the privilege of seeing her unclothed.

She breathed in steam and watched her likeness slowly reveal itself, a ghost surfacing from a thick and swirling fog.

Deep in her core, Poppy knew that in time of disaster, Lark would be the first to go.

👀

The storm was upon them. And while Ezra wished he could say he hadn’t seen it coming, those dark and distant clouds had been looming upon his own horizon for months. And now they were here.

Leo could nearly smell the heartache brought on by things Julien had never spoken of, because boys aren’t supposed to talk about stuff that hurts. That was “sissy stuff.”

Mother Nature growled beneath Her breath, a rumble so low Poppy felt the air go electric with Her rage.

The oncoming darkness felt like an omen, a thing that could only bring catastrophe, but she convinced herself it was only her agitation talking.

weak-willed and easy to lie to. Even easier to control.

Pulled over along the side of a dark road, pacing back and forth through the twin beams of his headlights.

if there was an Almighty, why was there suffering, starvation, blight? Why were there people wanting to harm her children? Was it because she’d rejected the church as a girl, dyed her hair pink as a teen, slept with whomever she felt like in college, or refused to drag her own kids out of bed every Sunday morning to sit in a pew?

Hell, if that’s all it took to get on His shit list, the Great and Heavenly Father could kiss her heavenly ass.

while the two halves of her heart wandered into the darkness with a single flashlight between them.

Her anxiety had become comfortably familiar over the years. Sometimes it seemed to her that she only felt normal when she was on edge.

And finally, she saw herself climbing the rickety ladder into the attic, recalled the space that had looked like a makeshift camp. The Coleman lantern. The sleeping bags. We’re supposed to be here.

Surely, he was having his own reaction to the circumstances, right? But you resent him for it, she thought, because he isn’t responding the way you want him to.

In that moment, Poppy had been blissfully happy, just her and the two halves that made up her full heart. The same heart that was now pounding against the curve of her ribs.

when it came to horror, it was the fear-stricken girl that split up from the group that always got murdered first.

“Find them,” she said,

“Find them,” he whispered,

just a pair of siblings flirting with pneumonia during a cold autumn night.

Because what if, during that meeting, Felix realized what Lark had known all this time—that they had something special, that they had made a connection, that they were meant to be? What if, faced with the task of looking into her eyes, Felix came to understand that this whole Raven’s Head thing was nothing short of a fiasco; that despite the lies he had told her, he did in fact love her? What if he could see that she still loved him?

Literally shut the FUCK up Lark

Maybe he’d take one look at her and fall in love all over again.

Oh my god

crack open his own chest, where a swirling mass of blackbirds would spiral away from where his heart should have been.

Another rolled and shattered, transforming the sound of her broken heart into a cacophony of choking gasps and breaking glass.

as if searching for a doctor who could mend a mother’s devastation; looking for a first responder who knew how to soothe the hysteria that accompanied bottomless despair.

But revenge was a sort of caring, too, wasn’t it?

Because when grief putrefied, all that was left was the black sludge of vengeance.

The blade had teeth like a ghoul.

Last Poppy had seen her, Gemma’s hair had been a red lick of fire atop her head. Now, it was dyed black and looked as though it had been chopped short by a pair of dull kitchen shears.

“The truth always comes to the surface,”

Lark was taking part in the same fight, but for her, it was an altogether different kind of battle.

Jesus himself was saying, you all clearly need some goddamn help.

She drew in breath, ready to scream, sure that when she finally did it would be loud enough to tear her in two. She was a dying star. A supernova. It was the end of everything. Her heart, a black hole.

She looked positively menacing, fueled by vengeance strong enough to raise the dead from their graves. The knife she held no longer struck him as the last option of an empty butcher block. That knife, glinting in her hand, was now nothing short of a saw.

Rather than a clean cut, the serrated blade tore at his flesh with as much grace as a dog shaking its prey. But the scene was a car crash, and Leo couldn’t keep his eyes averted for long.

She was supposed to know how to decipher a single look, and for years, she had felt that her inability to master such a parlor trick was a domestic shortcoming.