Rules For Vanishing

by Kate Alice Marshall

In the house in the town in the woods on the road are the halls that breathe. The singing will lure you the smoke will infest you the words will unmake you the woman will hate you.

I’m walking down the median line, and another girl is walking with me. I’ve never seen her before. She’s my age, with long, dark hair and a tattoo of a feather on the inside of her left wrist. Five crows wheel overhead, calling.

I thought that when you lost someone, you lost the details first, but details are what I still have—the crinkle at the corners of her eyes when she made fun of me, the way she’d chew on her thumbnail when she was really focused. It’s the big things that are slipping away. Her face. Her voice. The way it felt to be around her.

I’d never answered Mel because she wanted to be there as my friend, and I’d stopped being able to pretend that was all I wanted, too. And so I’d let both of them—all of them—slip into absence and disconnection.

The crow screams again. We cinch together. There’s a moment—a stutter, like a skipped frame, my stomach suddenly tight and sour, a desperate sensation tilting through me like there’s something I’ve forgotten. “Oh God,” comes the voice from the crow’s beak, distorted, raspy. “Oh God, what is that?”

Dahut opened the gates for her lover, and the tide came and snuck in after. But her lover was no man of blood and bone and breath. It was older, greater, than any man. It sang to her of destruction, and she let it in. To cover every part of her. To devour every part of us. Do you understand?

She reaches out, and before I can pull away, she seizes my hand. Something rushes out of her, cold as the sea, and into me. And I cease.