Present Day
I shut Krimson’s bedroom door quietly.
He has been trying all night, making himself sick to reach his sister. After hours of migraines, crying, panicking…we rested our eyes in his room.
But the nightmares were a tornado terrorizing my brain. Images of my daughter locked away in the harshest events of our past.
The hardwood is cold and slightly tacky beneath my bare feet. I move carefully, avoiding the loose board near the hallway that always groans if I step too hard. The counter smells faintly of yesterday’s grounds—bitter and burnt. I reach for my favorite chipped mug, running my thumb over the cracked rim out of habit.
While the kettle warms, I drift to the wooden table and stare at the grooves carved into its surface, following the scratches and dents with my eyes like they might lead somewhere else. I don’t sit. I don’t move. I just stand there, hollow, watching dust float through the thin morning light.
At some point, I begin pacing. Three steps to the sink. Turn. Four back toward the fridge. Again. Again. The room blurs at the edges, the hum of the pipes ticking, the wind pouring across the windows into a dull static as I sink into the quiet void. The search has been endless. It’s rubbing my mind raw, causing small fissures of open flesh.
The clock above the stove clicks, jumping ahead more than it should.
I tiptoe to the kitchen to make coffee. The golden sun beams through the split curtains, trickling across the dusty shelf over the fireplace. I walk over to it. My daughter’s stunning eyes in that middle family photograph hit me like a train.
I am a failure, and Dessin would be ashamed of me.
He would have figured this all out. They don’t need me. They need him.
“Fuck!” I hiss, slamming my hand against it.
The frame flips off the shelf, clattering to the wooden floor. As I reach down to grab it, hoping the noise doesn’t wake Krimson, I realize I don’t even remember this picture…
The kids are seven or eight years old. I’m kissing Krimson on the head. And Sapphire is in the arms of…
The frame slips from my hands.
Glass shatters with broken shards sprinkling like tiny blades over my bare feet.
The sound of time ceasing to exist.
Of bones breaking.
My pulse is calcified in my throat.
He… No… He wasn’t there…
This has to be a part of so many of the dreams I have about him. I am still sleeping in my son’s room.
His face looks back at me in that photograph, littered with broken glass.
And I feel it everywhere.
My ribs, my teeth, the hollow place below my sternum where grief and hopelessness have been quietly rotting for decades.
“Dessin…”
Christ, it hurts to say his name. Not just hearing it sift through my ears, but to call out to him as though he may just answer.
To feel that gnawing pit of hope again.
My eyes lift to the shelf slowly, stinging from not blinking.
And my body goes numb before igniting on fire.
He. Is. In.Every. Photo.
