Let’s play a game.
If she cracked him open, gently, oh so gently, in her hand a silver teaspoon, his skull the fragile shell of an egg, she wonders if she’d find the answer as to why he stopped loving her. Finally understanding him would be a balm she could lay against bruises that never faded and cuts that never healed, and they would be each other’s whole worlds. She and her little boy.
When they play a game, his face lights up at the winning. His dedication to whatever rules she spins is unshakable. In those moments when he flings himself into her arms, shrieking with joy that he won, she gets the affection that she needs to survive. So, who really wins, him or her?
It’s always her.
She just has to make him love her again, need her.
he has always loved you
She can fix everything with him if she only has another chance.
you just can’t see his affection for what it is
The lamp gives one last static flicker, and then the bulb bursts, plummeting the room into a suffocating darkness that tips down her throat with a sulfur stain. Her whimper is small, easily stuffed back down her throat, as she pulls herself into a sitting position while the room pitches sickeningly to the left. Weapon, she needs a weapon. A gossamer web slowly tightens about her brain, and she can’t think. When she puts fingertips to the back of her skull, they come away slick.
“It’s okay, it’s okay.” It comes out barely above a whisper, and she doesn’t know if the unsteady reassurance is for herself or the baby gone quiet inside her belly.
Bren staggers for the bedroom door, slumping against the frame for a minute before propelling himself into the hall. He doesn’t look back. The dark swallows him.
How angry the house must be now to have almost had its fill of one of them, then to go hungry. She will offer it the rest of Bren, if only it lets her go.
Need hits her with clarity so sharp it feels like a knife sliced across her throat. She takes in a single, brittle breath and holds it.
Bren will not win this; he does not gether son.
On hands and knees, she crawls to the door, waiting for thefloorboards to stop swooping beneath her before she uses the wall to claw to her feet.
Hide-and-seek, that’s what this is. Finders keepers, losers weepers.
She feels drunk as she edges down the pitch-black hallway, her breath coming in short, shallow gasps as she keeps a hand on the wallpaper for balance. It feels damp, mildew flourishing between the curves of the olive floral pattern Bren was so fond of—all the better not to see the mold.
There’s a hostile silence to all the empty bedrooms, the unfinished renovations, the holes in the walls and loose boards and gaping chasms where something has been ripped out to show the house’s spine.
No childish whimpers or scuffling feet can be heard. It’s unlike Jude to be silent; he is always unable to control his emotions.
The house has done something to him.
eaten him sucked his bones licked the inside of his perforated lungs
Elodie forces herself to hurry, but when she turns the corner, Bren is a shadow cast tall and twiggy in the dark, and he’s stumbling out of the nursery. No sign of Jude. But did he check under the bed? Behind the dollhouse?
Bren heads for the stairs, thumping down slowly, his voice a wet slur as he says, “Jude? Jude…” Blood siphons through his fingers like dancing ribbons.
He could call 911, though this would spiral into a messy domestic violence case, what with her head wound, her pregnancy, his sawn-open body, the stick-and-bone six-year-old with hollow eyes who might say everything or might say nothing. She could show the cops the stalker shrine; Bren could tell them to look into her dead family. But if it came down to him versus her, and who would keep Jude, she is terrified to know what a court would decide. It has to be her. She cannot cope with a reality where Jude is his.
The end of this game tunnels deep into an endless throat of horrors,and they tilt on the edge of falling, their teeth sewn into each other, both refusing to be the one to let go.
ready or not here I come
She searches the nursery lit only by the mushroom night-light, her heartbeat hammering bruises on the inside of her chest. Her movements are repetitive yet rushed, her search chaotic as she tears the nursery apart. Something tacky runs down the back of her neck and an iced fervor dampens her skin. She is cold, so cold, despite her coat.
Hurry, she needs to go faster. Bren is covering more ground. But her eyes catch on the woodland bed, and her heartbeat crawls up into her throat; she could swear a baby lies in the midst of the mattress, limbs like twisted spider legs and mouth sewn shut. She grabs fistfuls of hair and bends double with a scream. It’s not real. This is not real.
Her baby is fine. He is just asleep.
She wishes he would kick.
