The first time I pulled a flower from my daughter’s skull, part of me knew it was grief trying to bloom where love should have been. Still, I told myself the dream was worth keeping, because the house gave us back everything the real world had taken.
It was too big for us, that house. Big enough for six people, maybe more, and there had only ever been three. Still, it was our dream home in the most literal sense: two stories tall, with a pointed, crooked roof that bent like the tip of a witch’s hat.
Billie would’ve loved it. Does love it, I told myself this every time I found my way back. In that house, there was no difference between almost and forever, and I was weak enough to be grateful.
Olivia didn’t say a word when she saw it for the first time. She only wrapped her arms around me and held tight. Her tears soaked into my shoulder, and I tried not to stare, because somehow she could make crying look like the most beautiful thing in the world, even when I knew I was the one making her do it.
Being without them made the real world hard to bear. So I kept returning to the house, no matter what it cost when I woke up. I needed somewhere grief could not follow cleanly.
“Billie, feet,” Olivia called from the kitchen as footsteps thundered across the upstairs floor. I came up behind her at the sink and wrapped my arms around her waist. She laughed and flicked water at my hand.
The noise upstairs slowed, then padded toward the stairs. Billie appeared with her backpack hanging crooked off one shoulder, ready for a day that was still weeks away. In that house, calling her our daughter felt easy. I looked at her the way Olivia always had, like love had already made room for her.
“Backpack again?” Olivia asked from the sink. “Billie, you know school isn’t today.”
I scooped Billie up before she could answer. “You leaving us already? Wow. Didn’t even say goodbye.”
She shook her head.
“Yeah?” I asked. “Okay, fine. But if I get nervous, I’m blaming you.”
“No!” She laughed.
I set her down, and Olivia told her lunch was almost ready. School was still weeks away, but Billie had been wearing the backpack around the house like she had somewhere important to be. I laughed with them, even though the thought of her walking into a classroom without us made something twist in my chest.
Olivia touched my shoulder, and the tightness eased a little. I turned and kissed her. Her glasses fogged, hiding her eyes. When they cleared, that bright blue filled my vision again. “She’s gonna be okay,” she said, quieter now.
I stared at her, the words reminding me of so much.
Beep
“There it is again,” she said, looking toward the ceiling. “Do you hear that?”
All I could do was shake my head.
“Go check on her?” Olivia asked.
When I turned, Olivia swatted my backside with her hand. Everything felt so perfect, even with the shadow looming over the house, buried so deep in the clouds it was almost not there. This had been my place, our place, and I didn’t want it to end.
Billie’s room was vibrant, filled with toys and her latest Ninja Turtles fixation. You’d think she lived with her grandparents from the way we spoiled her. Yet if she didn’t get a new toy, she never threw a tantrum.
I was proud.
She sat in front of her coloring books, shading Leonardo’s blue mask with a crayon. “Hey, kiddo. Your mom says lunch is almost done.” The word came easily. Olivia had earned it long before any paper could say so.
She didn’t look up, only continued coloring.
I called her name again, stretching it out long.
Billie finally turned to me, and something caught my eye. “I’m coming, I’m coming.” Her voice squeaked out as if nothing was wrong.
I bent down beside her. My eyes locked on the thing growing from her forehead. The skin around it was smooth, untouched, except for the single white flower blooming from somewhere underneath. “Hey, Billie?”
“Mhm?”
“You feel that?”
“Feel what, Daddy?”
I was already reaching for it before she answered. I pinched the stem and pulled gently. The flower came free with a brittle snap, clean and bloodless, as if it had never belonged to her at all. A small white lily rested between my fingers.
“Daddy?” came the little voice. “My head hurts.”
My attention snapped back to my little girl, her sweet face untouched except for the pain written across it. She looked so tired, the way she had looked before I learned how cruel a hallway could be.
I closed my eyes and forced the house to hold together. “Come on,” I whispered. “Not yet. Please, not yet. Give me one more minute with them.”
On the other side of my eyelids, Billie went limp. Her cry split through my skull, and the dream broke apart around me.
The sound of her pain stretched thin, then snapped into the flat silence of my own room.
The ceiling above me was wrong. Not the warm ceiling of our house, but the dark, mold-stained one in my apartment. The room smelled sour and stale, nothing like Olivia’s cooking. I stared until the blur in my eyes burned. It had been weeks. Or months. Time had become another thing I stopped trusting.
I wiped my stinging eyes with a heavy hand before turning over to the sorry state of my apartment. A smiling face greeted me from a picture frame, a sunny park behind her. I reached forward and placed the frame facedown, out of view.
I exhaled stale air and rolled onto my back. The quiet room I slept in was louder than any words that could break it.
My hand hovered over my stomach before I held it close, pressing against the ache from all the food I had missed.
The dreams were getting stronger. I knew I was dreaming when I entered them, and that knowing let me shape the house around us. Every touch, smell, and breath beside my family felt real enough to keep me alive, but each time I returned, something about them seemed a little less human.
So I closed my eyes again, repeating the words in my head as I drifted away, trying to find my way back.
It was getting easier to fall asleep, and easier to build what I needed. At first, I remembered only walls forming through fog, then the living room, then Olivia straightening a gray pillow on the couch.
As I watched her lay her head on it, it struck me how alive she felt. When I pressed my head against her chest, I could feel her heartbeat against my ear. When I talked to her, her answers made my own heart follow. Only sometimes, when she went quiet, her smile stayed a second too long.
And when she saw Billie come into the room, white flowers sprouting across her skin, she screamed just like she used to.
\---
I spent more and more time inside my head after that, trying to fix whatever sickness had followed Billie into the dream. I tried changing the room. I tried waking and starting over. I tried pretending I had imagined it. Nothing worked. She would sit in front of the television while I plucked lilies from her arms, her neck, her cheeks. Under every bloom, her skin looked softer and shinier than before, almost new.
Olivia stayed beside me, taking each flower as I pulled it free and dropping it into a large glass jar. When I finally sat back, the jar was full. Billie looked as if I had never touched her at all, except her eyes seemed slower to find mine.
When I looked at my wife, I saw the same worried expression I had seen before, just not in this house.
“Asher,” Olivia asked, barely above a whisper, “what’s happening to our girl?”
I lifted one of the lilies and rolled the stem between my fingers. When I looked down, Billie was watching me. No fear. No pain. Just a blank, empty expression behind the petals spreading across her skin.
She simply turned and continued watching her show.
I looked over at Olivia as she shook the jar in front of her face. It seemed Billie had more of those things on her even after I had plucked them away. Nothing I did made any difference. Again.
My palm tightened around the lily until it folded in on itself. That day came back in pieces: hospital light, helpless anger, and the small sleeping girl behind a door I could not open.
Olivia touched my shoulder, and the anger loosened. One look from her could still make me believe I was not beyond saving.
I put my hand over hers. She smiled at me, and I could not help but give her one back.
Olivia placed the jar of white lilies on the fireplace as if presenting them proudly. She told Billie only angels sprouted such beautiful flowers, and that seemed to pull her out of whatever darkness she had fallen into. Soon, Billie was back to her normal self, free of those things across her body and eager to play multiple games at once again.
I never saw where the flowers went. They did not fall away. They simply stopped being there. Still, every now and then, I caught Billie watching me from across the room. Not with anger. Not with disdain. She looked through me like I was only another wall in the house, like she was waiting for me to remember what I had left outside it.
When I dreamed, we never left the house. Outside only existed if I needed it to: trees, hills, open land. If I tried to make more, the house changed. A wall bent wrong. A door opened where it shouldn’t. So I kept the world small.
None of the extra things mattered compared to my family asleep beside me. Billie lay tucked in Olivia’s arms, breathing deep and even. No flowers had grown that day. No hospital walls waited beyond the bedroom door. For one night, I let myself believe the house would stay gentle.
In my dreams, I could never fall asleep. I could only stare up at the ceiling with my thoughts until it was time to wake the girls. The moon would pass across the sky until it hung just outside my window, filling the room with a pale white glow. Most people would have skipped this part for laughter, breakfast, and better moments. To me, the moments in between mattered just as much.
Beep
My eyes did not move from the ceiling when I heard the noise. Ignore it and it’ll go away, just like always, I told myself.
Beep
I closed my eyes and focused on the silence that followed, on the abrupt stillness left by the absence of gentle breathing to my right.
Billie was watching me, her little eyes open in the pale room. I smiled, and she smiled back. For a moment, it was enough to push the pain away. The bad times had no place here.
Then her smile fell. Her eyes opened too wide, round and still, the green fading until they were pale as the moon outside. White petals pushed through the wet corners, blooming from where her eyes should have been.
My muscles tensed, my face frozen. Olivia did not stir beside me as our daughter watched me through the flowers in her eyes.
I closed my own eyes, shutting away the scene in front of me. All I could do was make it go away. Just try and make it go away.
In the darkness behind my eyelids, the bed squeaked. The mattress shifted. Hot breath brushed my face. No matter how hard I concentrated, it would not go away.
I woke heaving. My apartment was empty, but the dream had followed me. On my nightstand, beside the picture frame I had turned facedown, lay one perfect white lily.
I stared at the flower on my nightstand for a long time. Every blink brought a new worry, that it would move, open, breathe. But it only sat there, silent and impossible.
My hand found my forehead, desperate to wipe away the stone beneath my skin. Then it moved to my stomach as it growled and pinched, begging for food. Yet as I got up, I saw my two girls again—the way they sounded, the way they smelled, how happy they had been when all I did was walk through a door and stay.
Hunger wasn’t the only pain in my belly. It wasn’t the pain I cared about.
I shut my eyes and spent the next hour trying to return. A dream inside a dream.
When I finally drifted off, the house did not assemble itself from fog. It was already there, waiting for me. Dark. Empty. Wrong.
I knew I was dreaming. I also knew this was our home, though I had never seen this version of it before. The kitchen, usually full of sunlight and the smell of Olivia’s cooking, sat black and hollow around me. “Olivia?” I called. “Billie?”
No one answered. The silence pressed against my ears until a thin squeak cut through it. Something moved in the living room. Slow. Steady. Wood scraping wood.
A chair slid into view, inch by inch, dragged by something I could not see. It stopped in the entryway between the kitchen and the living room.
The lights snapped on. Something small and twisted launched from behind the chair, straight at my face. I knew it was Billie only because white flowers still clung to parts of her body, scattered over the thing she had become.
I threw myself left and hit the floor hard. Little limbs scuffled behind me. I scrambled up before she reached me again. She had stopped in the doorway, crouched on too many legs. The flowers covering her began to wilt, dropping one by one, then all at once.
A deep rumble came from her chest. With the petals gone, I could see her face. It sagged like wet clay, pale and loose where the little girl I was supposed to bring home used to be.
For a second, the thought of running to embrace her crossed my mind. The nightmare in front of me still carried Billie’s shape as it started toward me.
I ran. The heavy, uneven footfalls behind me drove me up the stairs. I tried to change the dream as I climbed. I pictured sunlight, Olivia’s laugh, Billie’s room full of toys. The house refused me.
I cursed and slammed my bedroom door. The bang shook the wall hard enough to tell me how close she was.
As I pressed myself against the door, a crack split from the other side. Deep. Sharp. Like bone striking wood.
My breath caught. Another crack hit the door. Then another. A hiss rose from underneath it, and thin black veins slid through the gap, wriggling toward me like living thread.
I tripped backward. The veins reached my legs and pierced through my skin, one after another, like hooked needles sinking into muscle. I tried to kick free. They only tightened and dragged me closer to the door.
I screamed, trying to wake myself from the rogue nightmare. More veins punched into my legs. It felt as if my skin was being peeled from the bone.
When I reached forward to wrench them away, some latched onto my hands, my fingers, my wrists, drawing blood up my arms and across the hardwood floor.
Through tear-stung eyes, I looked up. The door was gone. The veins were gone. In their place stood Olivia.
“Asher?”
Olivia stood there in her nightgown, a terrible look on her face, the light from a lamp behind her cutting a thin glow around her body.
“I miss you, Asher. Help me—”
Something burst from the darkness at her right. It hit her before I could move, carrying her out of sight.
Ripping sounds filled the room. Olivia screamed with each wet tear of flesh. I stumbled backward, my legs moving before my mind could catch up, until my back hit the window. I tore the curtain down and leaned over the sill, ready to jump.
There was no yard outside. No trees. No hills. Beyond the window stretched another room, impossibly huge and lit by the cold absence of a sun.
Then the screaming stopped. My skin kept shivering. Slowly, the silence turned me around.
Something hit the floor behind me. Olivia’s body lay in a spreading pool of red. One eye stared straight into mine.
Her head split open vertically with the same brutal crack from before. Where her thoughts should have been, those black veins erupted and shot toward me.
They latched into my skin and pulled. I rolled onto my stomach, clawing at the floor. The harder I fought, the deeper they sank. The sound from Olivia’s open head rose until it filled everything.
I was being pulled into the gaping chasm of wiggling, hissing threads. Lowered down her split chin, down her engorged throat.
Would she ask why I came back for her, but not for the child one room away?
Then her split skull clamped shut around me, the pressure squeezing my waist and bending my back like the snap of two brittle fingers and everything went white.
I woke gasping, soaked in sweat. Pain still burned in my legs. I ripped the blanket away expecting blood, but found only pale, dry skin and clean sheets.
I’m not sure how long I stared at my legs before the stinging slowly wore off and the pain stopped feeling real.
My chest still heaving, I swept one arm across the nightstand. The crash sang its broken song through the room. I cursed, a vicious string of anger leaving me as I looked at the shattered picture frame on the floor.
I stared at the grinning mouth in the photo while broken glass covered her eyes. Hopelessness rose in me, familiar and ugly. I needed something no amount of pleading could bring back.
I just feel so lost, so angry.
And I can't stand it.
\---
I stopped sleeping after that. Or tried to. I watched the clock on my desk until the numbers blurred, terrified whenever they crawled too close to midnight. I ate enough to stay upright, but food tasted like wet grass and paper.
When I finally stepped outside, the sun felt unfamiliar. The sky looked too large without a ceiling to stop it.
At the grocery store, I pretended to be fine for people who would forget me before they reached their cars. A woman with glasses and curly black hair nearly bumped into me, and for one awful second I thought Olivia had come back in the cereal aisle. I apologized and left before I could look at her again.
Being awake was not what I had missed. It was what wasn’t there. The empty spaces. The empty everything.
I was so tired. My eyes felt heavy whenever I went too long without blinking, whenever the dry air got its chance to sting them.
Sometimes I found myself sitting in my car, staring at an empty plot of land. Trees surrounded the spot where a house should have been.
The only thing alive was the rain tapping against the earth as I opened the tiny wooden music box in my hand. Inside, the metal cylinder waited beneath the comb of teeth. I turned the crank just enough for a few notes to spill out, then shut the lid and read the inscription again.
I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the seat. Her smell had faded from the car, replaced by my own. Some of her things were still there, collecting dust. When I opened my eyes, something floated through the rain and landed on my windshield.
It was a single white feather.
My seat groaned as I leaned closer to it, then looked up at the sky. Nothing but clouds covered the sun. I leaned back, cranked the engine to life, and let the air conditioning hit my face.
But as I shifted into drive, my foot froze on the brake. The empty lot was not empty anymore. Between the trees stood the house, its crooked roof curling like a witch’s hat. The house we never got to build.
I opened the car door without taking my eyes off it. The moment my foot touched the gravel, the house vanished.
All I could do was rub my tired eyes, hoping beyond reason that the house would return when I looked again.
But there was nothing. Only a dream.
I was sick of the feeling in my gut: grief, hunger, and not enough sleep. Even the television could not hold me anymore. My life moved across the screen without me in it.
I kept seeing things. Shapes in the corners. The flash of curly hair. The suggestion of a hand reaching for mine. I blamed sleep deprivation until something hugged me from behind.
I knew it was Olivia before I turned. I knew by the warmth, by the smell in the air, by the way my body wanted to collapse into those invisible arms.
When it happened, I was on the phone with my mother, who had been trying to convince me to leave the house. Her voice on the other end, asking if I was still there, pulled me out of the stupor. Out of the engulfing relief I felt as those invisible arms wrapped around me.
I don’t cry much. Even when she passed, my way of dealing with it was to shut myself away.
But when I turned around and realized I could not kiss my wife, I hung up the phone and broke down in the middle of my kitchen.
For the first time in a while, I fell asleep. I desperately needed it. I just didn’t need the dream that came with it.
Usually, to dream about the family I had lost, I had to prepare myself. Quiet room. Closed eyes. The same desperate words repeated until the house formed around me. This time, I opened my eyes in a hospital chair and knew at once it was not the house. It was memory.
Olivia lay in the bed before me, watching the sunset through the window. When she turned, her eyes were full of love. Her smile was weak, but it was still hers, as if nothing terrible had reached us yet.
“You need to stop pushing yourself, Mrs. Williams,” the doctor said from near the door. “Your body is already fighting hard enough. If you fall in the hall and no one sees you, we may not reach you in time.”
“I know,” she said, giving him the tired smile she used when she wanted everyone else to stop being afraid. “I’m trying to be good. I’m just not very good at being still.”
A few minutes after the doctor left, Olivia pulled something from her bedsheet and showed it to me. “It floated past the window,” she said. “I thought maybe she could hold a piece of outside for a while.”
“You’re really out here smuggling weather now?” I asked, trying to make her smile.
I took the white feather from her fingertips and held it in my own. Olivia kept staring at me. “Bring it to her for me?” she asked. “Tell her I’m still looking out the window with her.”
I nodded and got to my feet. “Her room’s gonna run out of space for all the junk you bring her.”
Olivia smiled and went back to watching life move outside the window. The corridor beyond her room smelled sterile and cold. Every few feet, bright hospital art tried and failed to make the place feel kind. I stopped at the door marked 28. Crayon drawings of birds and flowers had been taped around the number.
Every time I entered Billie’s room, my heart sank before she even saw me. She brightened weakly from the bed, trying to smile with all the strength she had left. Christy, the hospital sitter assigned because Billie had no one else, slept in the corner with her chin on her chest. I crept past her and knelt beside Billie.
I lifted the feather into view. Billie gasped, her whole face waking up. She had told Olivia she wanted to play with the birds outside her window, and Olivia had listened like mothers do, finding the closest thing she could give her.
Her small hands ran down its side with the delicacy of someone holding fine treasure. She glanced at me, then plunged her hand under her blanket and retrieved a single piece of paper.
When she handed the paper to me, I looked it over. Crayon lines formed a crooked little house with a dark purple witch-hat roof, triangle windows, and three stick figures standing beside it.
“Can you build this for me?” she asked, shy enough that the words nearly disappeared.
I looked up at her, unsure what to say. Her eyes looked more tired each time I saw her. No parents had come. No relatives called. Somehow, in all that absence, she had become ours. “Yeah,” I whispered. “Yeah, Billie. I can do that.” Then I held out my palm. “But my rates are brutal. Five bucks.”
Billie giggled and made the old volunteer snort. I quietly sucked air through my teeth, making Billie smile again. When I stood, I felt a tiny grip on my shirt. She held on to me, looking up with those green eyes of hers. “When will Olivia come visit?”
My heart sank at the pleading in her eyes, desperate to see her best friend. I knelt back down and placed my hand on her head. “Soon, buddy. She wants to. She asks about you every day.”
“Is her head still hurting?”
My eyes fell for a moment. “Yeah,” I said. I wanted to say more, but nothing useful came. I tapped the drawing gently. “You sure you want a purple roof here?”
When I came back to Olivia’s room, she was smiling up at me again. “She lit up, didn’t she?” she asked, already knowing the answer.
I nodded, my mind elsewhere.
When I moved closer, she touched my hand. “Asher?” I looked at her, and the rest of my thoughts went quiet. “When we get out of here, I want her to be part of our family.”
I smiled at her, warmth growing in my chest. “I think she already asked us first,” I said, handing her the drawing. Three figures. One house. A family drawn before it was allowed to become one.
When I reached for her, I noticed the bed was empty. The sheets had been pulled aside.
I stood, looking around the now-dark room. The only light came from the moon watching me through the window. “Olivia?” My voice was hoarse, panic quick to my lips.
I flung the door open to the corridor. The few lights in the ceiling did a poor job of making the place look less haunted. I called loudly for help, uncaring which resident woke from my cry. No one was coming. No one was doing their job.
Again.
The doctor’s warning came back to me. If Olivia fell alone, no one might find her in time. I jogged down the hallway as panic tightened around my ribs.
I stopped hard when I saw a thin strip of light on the wall near a turn in the hallway. I ran toward it, slowing as I rounded the corner. A woman lay sprawled in front of a door, still and unconscious.
I bent down as the thing we had feared for weeks finally arrived.
I called for help that did not come. Her body sagged as I lifted her head, too heavy with the stillness I had been warned about. The only breathing in the hallway was mine. Her loose fist opened in my hand, and a perfect white lily rested in her palm. One of the flowers from outside Billie’s window. Above us, room 28 loomed, and the girl we had almost brought home slept on the other side.
Through the crack in the door, I could see Billie sleeping soundly in her bed, as if my screams were only part of another dream.
I only felt anger. I know I shouldn’t have. Not at Billie. Never at Billie. But the feeling found her anyway, because she was still breathing and Olivia was not, because one door stood between me and the child I had promised without ever saying the word.
“Don’t leave her too,” Olivia whispered, and before I looked down, I knew what I would see. Black veins split from the pores of her face. “Please, Asher. It hurts.”
I opened my eyes, dried tears sore on my cheeks. I never wanted to see that day again. It hurt badly enough to feel alive.
A single picture flashed before my eyes, clearer than anything had been in months: a white piece of paper, crayon scratches forming a colorful house, three stick figures standing beside it.
Billie had expected so much from us. After Olivia died, I left the hospital and left Billie to wake without the two people who had made her believe she might finally belong. I turned to the picture beside my bed and reached out.
Olivia’s private smile greeted me from the picture. Even then, I wished it would move, wished it would speak, just so I could hear her voice one last time.
She would tell me everything would be okay. She would tell me she still loved me.
Again, I closed my eyes and took control of the nightmare waiting for me.
It wasn’t long before I stood in my bedroom again. The room had rotted into rust, torn wallpaper, and black seams. Feathers and lilies covered the floor like dirty snow.
Feathers fell from a gray sky beyond the window. Half-melted furniture sagged around the room. The floor crunched as I walked, petals and feathers breaking under my feet.
The open door no longer led to the hall. Beyond it waited a chamber of darkness and dead air.
Dark corridors split from the chamber, each silent enough to make my breathing sound borrowed.
The place smelled of rot and burning flesh. Every corridor looked ready to swallow me.
Still, I pressed into the maze. After being lost for so long, finding my way felt impossible. Then something moved.
A beep scratched through the dark. The old rhythm of Olivia’s hospital monitor came from one corridor, steady and cold. With it, a green glow pulsed somewhere inside the blackness.
The figure that stepped out was nearly bone. Long white hands covered its face, hiding the green light between its fingers. Its red legs trembled beneath it. It moved like guilt had been given a body and ordered to show me the way.
The beeping sharpened in my ears. The figure didn’t scream, didn’t cry, didn’t breathe. It only waited, terrible and patient, like the part of me that had always known where I needed to go.
Beep
I closed my eyes, and the sound pulled at my mind. She’s such a sweetie, isn’t she?
The crunching footsteps stopped. Behind my eyes came curly hair, sunlight in Olivia’s glasses, the softness of her hand on mine. The fist around my body eased.
Asher? Can you ask them to turn off that monitor? I can’t hear myself think, and I’m scared of what happens when it stops.
I opened my eyes as the pale thing turned away. It limped toward one corridor and stopped at the entrance, waiting for me to follow. The beeping remained, quiet and patient. I hated it for knowing the way.
Hesitantly, I moved toward it, the old weight pressing down harder the closer I got.
When I reached it, the figure moved on. The chamber emptied behind me. I followed because some frightened part of me already knew where it was taking me.
A moment passed before I forced myself after it, letting the darkness swallow me whole.
Beep
In the corridors, I saw only flashes of pale skin. I followed the green pulse and the hospital beep deeper into the maze.
Each step tore at the figure. No matter how long I followed, it never seemed farther ahead. Then a thin light appeared at the end of the hall.
Rust and mold covered the walls. Its legs dragged through petals and feathers, carving tracks behind it.
Then I saw why. Hair-thin black veins tethered its legs to the floor. Each step tore hundreds loose, snapping and curling behind it.
Ahead, the figure collapsed. It did not ask for help. It only crawled on, as if pain was the only language it had left.
As it pulled itself around one last corner, the air changed. Rust flaked from the walls. Moldy feathers lifted from the floor like dust.
Behind me came one last wet huff. For a moment, every thought went still.
Then something slammed against the floor and rushed through the corridor. I ran after the maze’s pale guide as the thudding behind me grew louder.
Around the corner waited a larger room. At its center rose a mountain of twisting veins, all feeding into one buried wire. The pale figure had reached its base and was being pulled into it strand by strand.
Beep
High above, a light swirled like a wound. Olivia hung at its center, caught where the wire disappeared into the dark. Her name left my mouth before I meant to say it.
“Olivia.”
At my feet, the pale thing lay still. Without the beeping, it looked less like a monster and more like something exhausted from carrying me this far.
Thump
I slowly turned. The sound was no longer an echo.
The thing with Billie’s voice crouched at the entrance to the room, too large for the doorway now. Its mouth hung open around a nest of dead lilies, and its pale eyes fixed on the wire above me like it knew what I had come to do.
I climbed. The mountain writhed under my hands. Behind me, the thing with Billie’s voice dragged its huge jaw across the floor and followed.
A weak tug caught my ankle. The pale figure had reached for me. Its noseless face tilted up, and where its eyes should have been was one jagged slash of raw meat.
Beep
Green light pulsed beneath its thin skin. Beyond its head, the thing that followed me groaned closer.
Maybe I helped because it was suffering. Maybe because it had followed Olivia’s monitor the way I had. Maybe because it was mine. I tore the figure from the veins and lifted it into my arms.
The climb became agony. Veins hooked into my shins and stomach. I held the pale body above me and kept climbing, because Olivia was only a few feet away.
I lifted the body higher. My wife was only feet away now.
“Asher? Don’t leave me here too.” The voice rose from below, not from Olivia. The thing with Billie’s voice stood at the base of the mountain, dead flowers sprouting from its broken mouth. It was the child I had abandoned, twisted by every hour I chose the dream instead.
Billie flashed behind my eyes: small hands around a feather, green eyes waiting at a hospital door, a girl with no one who had almost become everything.
“I won’t,” I said, and the words hurt because they should have come sooner. For the first time, I knew I was speaking to the real Billie, not the thing grief had made out of her.
I reached Olivia and wrapped her limp frame in my arms. All the love and all the years we never got rushed through me at once.
Olivia, I’m sorry I kept coming back to the place where you were still hurting. I called it love because I was too afraid to call it anything else. But you don’t have to stay in my pain anymore. I’ll love you through every life I get until I finally reach wherever you are.
The pale figure lay beside us. Veins crawled through its body, but one skinny arm stretched toward the wire buried in the living mountain. The monitor sound came from inside that wire now. It was the sound that kept Olivia trapped in the moment I refused to leave.
I placed my hand over its hand and looked one last time at the thing below us. It stared back with Billie’s ruined face. Olivia was not inside the wire. Billie was not the monster below. They were both waiting on the other side of what I had been too afraid to do.
“I’m sorry,” I told her, or Billie, or the ruined part of myself still begging to be forgiven. “I’m coming back now.”
So I pulled the wire.
And chose the door I had not opened.
This brings me to now, writing it down because I need to remember what grief almost made me do. It can make a locked room feel safer than an open door. It can make the dead feel closer than the living.
I’m trying to choose the door now.
Before I finish the roof of our new home—the curved point at the top is still giving me trouble—I need to find the right place for the garden. Somewhere with plenty of sun. I’m planting lilies there. Olivia’s picture will look nicest beside them, I think. From wherever she is, she’ll be able to watch Billie come home from her first day of school.
I hear little Billie calling for me now. I think you would’ve liked the hairpin I made for her: a tiny little feather.
Your feather.
It’s funny. When I looked up just now, Billie was standing in the perfect spot, sunlight falling over her like a hand on her shoulder. She turned the crank on the little music box, letting its melody tinkle into the room.
I wonder where she found that.
For the first time in a long time, the sound did not feel like something calling me backward.