The Maid's Diary

by Loreth Anne White

take out. I see these people. I know the occupants of these houses. But they don’t see me. They don’t know me.

What she sees is wrong. All of it. Very, very wrong. Something terrible is happening.

People can seem so ordinary on the surface, but scratch the veneer and there’s always a secret beneath the gloss.

“We need to lay eyes on his wife,” she says. “And we need to find that maid,” Benoit says.

But always, you are running from that faceless Monster. That dark place. And you know what? You can’t run. Because it’s inside of you. The Monster is you.

That carapace the decades have hardened around you—it’s obliterated in an instant, and all the darkness comes rushing in through the cracks and fills you up so hard and fast you think you are going to burst out of the confines of your own delicate human skin.

We’re all tricksters. Each and every one of us. No one is a totally reliable narrator. Life is all Story. Every bit of it. We see things through the filter of our own unique worldviews, through our own longings and fears and loves, through our own traumas. Not one single person on this earth is able to interpret a thing in exactly the same way. The world is dynamic in that respect.

I don’t think anything really heals trauma. You just find some kind of narrative to learn to cohabit with it. I suppose now is the time to