Feed Them Silence

by Lee Mandelo

The suburban solitude roused an itchy, marrow-deep loneliness that nothing in her life had been able to fill.

“But seeing how you treat your team, and the wolf pack, and the research itself makes me aware that—maybe, I’m on the same tier. I’m an object; you consume me, use me to build yourself up, put me in your story. Do you even know what course I’m teaching this term, or what I’m revising when I’m at the office? Do you read my work anymore?”

The sciences had drawn her because they encouraged observation from a careful remove, separation from the world as a stance for understanding it—while still allowing her to shape the results that followed after through her own language, her own ideals. Adoring the bigness of life, while dissecting it from a place of quiet solitude.

The drive to prove herself, over and over again, to a system that wasn’t designed with people of her—or, even, Aseem’s—sort in mind, kicked like amphetamines with as bad a hangover. She’d done a five-star job as one of the guys, though; it had catapulted her to the head of this lab.

“When I struggle with whether our relationship is still good for us, my concern isn’t focused on ‘what will the neighbors think.’ Instead I’m worried, am I going to be able to survive losing this, or will sustaining it be the thing that kills me.”

As nested as their bodies were, a hollow distance ached in her bones—like she wasn’t holding her flesh-and-blood wife, but the ghost of a future loss.

“This is fucking nuts, bud,” she muttered, removing meat and medical supplies from their packaging as she loaded up the sled.

The last forty-eight hours weighed her down like a mountain of sand, crumbling in her eyes and mouth, grinding between her bones in their sockets.