These Fleeting Shadows

by Kate Alice Marshall

“Even if someone killed Grandpa, no one would have hurt Jessamine. She was just a little girl,” he said. “People do terrible things to little girls all the time,” I replied, but he was already gone.

After dinner, I was supposed to give a toast. This had been the worst news I’d received in the past several years. I would never have agreed to live in a haunted murder house if I knew it involved public speaking.

I was coming undone, some unnatural force rearranging me. Or maybe it was an entirely natural force. Reality is randomness. To be organized and static is an unnatural state—it’s the change and decay that is natural, entropy the only inevitability. Every pattern is constantly tumbling toward its own undoing and— “Helen.” A name. My name. The name for the set of rules I was, the name for this collection of limbs, digits, organs, features, neurons in this particular order. I was still me.

She held my face in her hands, forcing me to look into her eyes. “Rabbit. You did what you had to so that you could survive. Never, ever feel bad for that.”

“What has been done to you is monstrous. What the dark soul has done, it has done out of blind pain. We did that. We took a beautiful thing, and we cut into it until all it knew was suffering. You have to believe that you deserve to be saved, Helen. Because you are the only one who can do it.”