Just Like Home

by Sarah Gailey

“Don’t get me wrong.” Daphne’s head tilted to one side, her unblinking eyes still on Vera, until her ear nearly touched her shoulder. “I loved you. I’ll always love you. But I hated you too, at least for a time.” There it was, and it struck Vera like a quick, brutal kiss on the mouth. I hated you. “I think I had to,” Daphne continued in that same low, rolling rhythm, her neck still folded at that impossible angle. “Is one possible without the other? I think you have to know someone in order to truly love them, and you have to love someone in order to really hate them. There’s the thin hate we have for strangers.” At this, so fast Vera almost didn’t catch it, Daphne’s eyes flicked for just a moment to James Duvall. “And then there’s the thick, true, smothering hate we have for those we know best. And that, Vera-baby, that’s what I had for you. That’s what bubbled up in me and stuck.”

“You will not drive me away from this house,” she said. “You will not be the last one here. I don’t care what you think you know. I don’t care what you think you’ve seen. I don’t care what you think you have.” She leaned even closer and she spoke directly into the tender hole of his ear so he couldn’t miss a word. “This is my home,” she said. “And you’re just passing through it.”

“They made us.” The thing in the bed spoke with the urgency of immense relief. “Do you understand? They invented us, together, from their sweat and their blood and their flesh they created us. We didn’t ask to be born, did we? We didn’t ask to have to soak up their sins and their expectations. All we ever did was love them, and all they ever did was hurt us.”