The tumor is inoperable.
At the window, Grace watches her grandfather’s progress in the garden as he makes his way toward the house, stopping to pull up stray weeds or nudge a brick back into place. Dense clouds push in from the west, and the plum trees lining the long driveway rustle. The wind combs through the screen, pulls, releases.
Her mother, Enid, has just arrived from her shift at the nursing home. She’s peeling one of the oranges from the fruit bowl with a kind of pointed nonchalance. The tension in her shoulders and the stiffness in her neck give the game away. Grace knows that when the orange is peeled and set in segments upon the little plate, Enid will offer them to her as though it were nothing, a trick she learned from the other nurses. Take some for yourself and destigmatize the process. It’s all so transparent. Now that Grace lives with Enid again, plates of food materialize on almost every surface. Crackers, fruit, soup, runny grits, bits of fish, or slices of low-sodium ham. It’s like being haunted by some sort of hospitable ghost. She pretends not to sense Enid’s desperation for her to eat.
“The bottom’s going to drop out,” Grace says.
Enid comes around the kitchen island, carrying the plate with the furry orange slices.
“That so? Here, have some.”
Grace wants to scream, but instead asks, “Heard from Davis?”
“He’s doing well, last I heard. Not that he calls like he should,” she says, plucking pith from the oranges. She’s across from Grace at the table now, still wearing her uniform, the deep purple scrubs under the poly-cotton white coat. Orange stains speck the hem. The plastic ID tag is smeary in the light. “I suppose you hear from him more regularly than I do.”
“He wants me to try with Granddaddy again,” Grace says. The oranges lie there like sad, soft worms. Sour spit fills the back of her throat, but it dries almost instantly, leaving a coppery residue on her tongue.
“He should fight his own battles,” Enid says sharply.
Grace sighs. Her brother, Davis, is a third-year at Hopkins. He wants to be a cardiologist like their grandfather, for whom he is named. Their grandfather no longer speaks to Davis, however, because Davis is gay and they are from Virginia. When Davis came out, it had gone as well as it could go, which was to say that a veil had descended between the two of them, and Davis, like their father, had ceased to exist to their grandfather. There was no argument. No recitation of Scripture. No blowup or passionate speeches. Only instant and deep cold. It’s harder to argue with apathy.
Davis texts Grace throughout the week:
You seen Big Davis?
Tell him he was right about Marshfield being awful
Remind him the pond needs to be restocked
Tell him about this new rabbit trap
Tell him they be shooting out here
Tell him something for me
Sometimes Grace wants to weep at how pitiful it is. The Tell him something for me is the worst of it. She could read the text message in its entirety. It’s not the words. It’s not the what. Enid knows about the text messages. She has made her feelings known. Which is why he does not call her. Not because of the gay thing—Enid is ambivalent on the point of sexuality. What room would she have to judge, her own life having exploded so spectacularly? No. It’s something else. Judgment. Davis feels judged, he says.
Sometimes she act like I’m trying to murder somebody. Just to be asking about Big Davis. She act like she don’t care I don’t exist anymore, is what Davis said the last time they spoke about it.
“She’s projecting,” Grace had said.
Because years ago, when they were small, Enid had shown up at this house with Grace and Davis squeezed tight to her like a shield bearer wading into a sea of pikemen. Grace’s father had gotten himself stabbed outside a bar in Charlottesville—no surprise, considering, was what the church ladies said. It had never been a secret how Big Davis felt about white people, and here Enid was. The church ladies had words for that, too. Begging. Cut off from her own kind, like she hadn’t known what would happen. Grace wonders if Enid sees in this needling some imitation of how it had been years before, when they were younger, and pushed like little pawns across a chessboard. Sees, perhaps, some reflection of the deceased Junior.
“He should be a man,” Enid says.
“He’s a man. Big Davis is a man,” Grace replies. “That’s the problem.”
“Men and trouble, like water and a grease fire.”
“We ain’t,” Big Davis replies as the door bangs shut behind him. Sweat and the scent of earth trail out ahead of him. He bends down and kisses the top of Grace’s forehead. She rubs his back, feels the damp of him through his shirt. His whiskers bristle against her cheek. He’s purple-black with stark white hair, deep blue eyes.
“You are,” Enid says. “Big Davis.”
“Enid,” he says, taking from the plate almost all of the orange segments. She squints at him. Grace feels a flutter of relief. Leans back in her chair and lets it hold her up. The strain of maintaining her posture has left her feeling a little winded.
“I sure thank you for taking Grace in for the appointment today.”
“Well, I took her fishing. I took her to school. I took her for ice cream. To the movies. I reckon it makes sense I’ll take her to get well.”
“All that in one day?” Enid says. Big Davis grunts.
“Don’t get smart with me,” he says, and though there is some playfulness to it, there is also danger. It’s the edge of a temper that in Grace’s father turned violent and evil. All those nights, Grace and her brother squeezed together into the kitchen cupboard while their parents screamed and broke things upstairs. All those nights of noise and tumult, banging doors and raised voices. The room vibrates with the quiet that comes after Big Davis’s voice, so much like her father’s that she sees her mother flinch a little. She goes whiter. But then thunder cracks over their heads, releasing them.
“Gracie bug, we better go,” she says.
“Don’t call me that,” Grace says with more resolve than she feels. Her arms betray her, shake when she goes to push up from the chair. They both reach for her, and it is worse than the stupid name, that they expect so little from her, that she can expect so little from herself. She pulls away, feels the obscure tubing of her port shift inside her.
“Baby, rest a minute,” Enid says.
“Y’all don’t have to rush off,” Big Davis says. “You can stay. Eat at least. I know you hate driving in the rain anyway.”
Enid frowns at this. Grace folds her arms across her stomach and watches the calculation behind her eyes. It is true that Enid is wary of water on the roads. She has a pathological fear of being swept away in unseen floodwater, drowning in her car. Years ago, at the height of her terror, she had refused to drive across any bridge, fearing that it would give way and plunge them to their deaths. Junior used to make fun of her for it. One Christmas, Enid had been driving them home from dinner at Big Davis and Mama Lil’s house. Junior, drunk, high, reached over and snatched the wheel just as they crossed the bridge, and the car, with Davis and Grace drowsy in the back, swerved. For a terrifying few seconds, they were free of gravity. The whole of the car seemed to lift and turn easily, swiftly, with more speed and force than seemed possible, and they all held their breath, waiting. Then the wheels found the road again with a solid jerk and squeal. Junior’s laughter broke out in the car, loud, calamitous. Enid wept the rest of the way home. He kept asking, “What you so sad for, baby? It’s Christmas.”
“We don’t want to put you out,” Enid says.
“You ain’t, I got plenty. I planned for Grace anyway. We didn’t know when you’d be coming by.”
“I said after my shift.”
“Well, but who knows—”
“I’ve never been late to get her.”
They go back and forth this way, Big Davis bored, pragmatic, cruel. Enid grows redder the more they haggle over her soul. Grace reaches for an orange slice, pulls the white pith from it, and makes a small pile on the table. She sometimes is struck by the irony of this new arrangement, staying with Big Davis after treatments, waiting for her mother. Somehow, at the age of twenty-five, she’s reverted to her childhood self, the one who waited after school at her grandparents’ house until her parents came for her. Often they were so late that the sun was going down by the time they arrived, their eyes red, faces tight and hot. She had been relieved to get away from all that once she and her brother got old enough to look after themselves, but neither ever forgot those long, hot hours in their grandmother’s kitchen, the endless days of waiting to be retrieved, wondering if they’d get to go home or if they’d have to stay.
But Enid has been better these last ten years. She is not who she once was, though that version of herself remains in this kitchen, as if conjured up out of their collective memory, as if in this family one is powerless to resist its curious gravity. Grace feels a small flicker of pleasure at watching Enid shift uncomfortably.
“Let’s just stay,” Grace says to her mother, “it’s easier.”
Enid’s expression is one of betrayal, but it passes. Grace puts the orange in her mouth and sucks the juice from it, as if in penance. It stings and slides down the back of her throat, alleviates some of the dryness but leaves only a sense of unslaked thirst.
“We’ll stay, then, if it’s no trouble.”
“Good,” he says.
“I’ll help,” Enid says. “What do you need?”
He hands her a bouquet of turnip greens, bits of dirt dropping to the floor. They are still warm from the garden. “You handle that,” he says. “I got this going.” The rain grows heavy, dropping into the windowsill behind her back, splattering her in fragments of cool.
“What’s for dinner?” Grace asks, and they are elated. A sign of appetite, of hunger.
“Turnips and some of this roast I made last night and some corn bread,” Big Davis says, and he’s proud of it. Enid is the one cutting up the greens and the turnip roots, which have always been Grace’s favorite. Her brother hates greens of all varieties, and he especially hates turnips. He says they’re too bitter, and Grace always has to remind him that he’s thinking of mustard greens, not turnips. But Davis hates to be corrected more than he hates greens, so he does not hear her, which usually results in a protracted silence over the phone.
The kitchen is muggy with steam. She wishes she could get up and go outside, sit on the porch swing to watch the storm roll in. But she would have to ask someone, and they’d look at her with worry and pity.
In truth, if she could get up, she’d walk out of this house and keep walking. Nothing would stop her. She’d keep going and going until she got to her brother in Maryland. She’d take his hand and walk both of them into the sea, far away from here. The thought feels like a betrayal—leaving home, leaving Enid and Big Davis—but she wants to take her brother away because it seems like the only way to protect him from the inevitable hurt of their grandfather dying without forgiving, kissing and making good.
There is no reason that it should be Grace here and not Davis. When they were young, their grandfather always favored Davis. She wants to call her brother now and tell him to come, urge him to get in the car, to break any speed limit, to come home and have dinner. But she knows she can’t. She’s promised to work on Big Davis, to try, in small, slow ways. She has no skill for this sort of game. When they were little, Davis always beat her at checkers and chess. She was always the one to grow impatient before the game was done, to turn away and pout, sometimes to throw the board over. Davis played the long game, but he played it boldly, directly, in strong, clear moves. She was scatterbrained, collecting in small flurries of movements, tiny advancements, minor miracles of displacement. But in truth she never got far across the board before her willpower gave out. She never completed the game, begun in all the earnestness of childhood and the eagerness of believing that this time she would win.
Davis is a fool for entrusting her with this task.
Big Davis puts the plate in front of her. It’s full of greens with white turnip roots sliced and spread around the plate. The roast portion is tiny, minuscule, and yet it is still more than she can bear. But it smells rich and a little musky from the vinegar.
“So, what’s the plan for tomorrow?” he asks. He neatly slices his roast portion, much larger than either of theirs. Grace feels awkward, coltish, her body starting and jutting into curious directions with even the smallest movement. Enid watches her keenly.
“I’ll do what I do every day—lay around until I have to hobble to the bathroom.”
Big Davis grunts. “Outcomes are better if you stay active. Keep your strength up.”
“I have doctors.”
“Don’t be disrespectful,” he snaps. The fork and knife glint under the kitchen light. His gaze hardens.
“I have doctors, sir,” she sneers. “I know what my protocols are.”
“You have to keep her active,” he says to Enid.
“She is active.”
“I’m right here,” she says.
“You were too easy on them kids. Look at them now.”
Enid’s eyes widen and go buck in exasperation. She lets out a sharp sigh.
“I did all I could. On my own.”
“You weren’t on your own,” he says. “Them kids was here after school every day. And every weekend. And in the summer. If you was on your own, it was in some way I’ve never heard of.”
“I never made you,” she says. “I never forced you or Mama Lil to look after them. You offered.”
“What was we supposed to do? With a dead pappy and a mammy hooked on that stuff?”
Enid sits a little straighter. Surprise and hurt are visible in her eyes, shame. The nape of Grace’s neck crackles with electricity. It’s the sort of remark that would have prompted, in another life now, a shouting match between her parents. But here, in this house, in this kitchen, on this day, Grace sees Enid work it through. Think it over. She has worked her steps. She has taken responsibility. Enid is fond of affirmations. Own Your Shit, Save Your Life and My Shame Is My Badge of Honor and My Feelings Are My Responsibility. All that pretty talk, those encompassing generalities. Toothless to Grace, but powerful to those looking for something to believe in.
“That was a long time ago, Big Davis. And this is hard enough. Now, I’ve tried to make good and make right.”
“You don’t know hard,” he says. “You don’t know the beginning of hard.”
Grace wishes she had kept her mouth shut, that she had resisted the mean, biting part of herself. Enid and Big Davis avert their gazes, look down into their plates. Grace bites into the roast, chews it through, swallows. She’s let something ugly into the room, she knows. All that stuff about her parents, before her mother got clean and before her father died, all of it suddenly back in the room like departed ancestors of a common line. The spectral outlines of who they had once been. Grace has been trying to be better about letting that sort of thing go. Letting people be who they are now. Not holding them to account so hard, so much. Letting them change. Grow. Mutate.
“It’s good,” she says of the roast. “I like the pepper sauce.”
“It was kind of you to offer us dinner,” Enid says, quick to change the subject, to make good.
“Y’all my kin,” he says.
“Davis, too?” Grace asks, because she cannot let this chance slip by her.
“Nothing stopping your brother from coming here, being here. That’s his choice,” Big Davis says coolly.
Grace feels like a sulky, surly teenager. She wishes that she could simply accept things as they are, not dig around. Meddle. She wishes, too, that Davis had never asked her to. Wishes that she had more time. Then it all wouldn’t seem like such a waste.
“It’s not a choice,” she says. “He was made that way.”
“What made him made you,” he says. “And you ain’t that way. You’re decent. Some folks is still decent in this world.”
Grace laughs. It is of course a ridiculous sentiment. And anyway, if you looked at it hard enough, they were the same in a way. That way being that they wanted men. All the times Grace and Davis used to run to this man after being chased by the dog from down the road. Or the way they’d been chased by goats when they’d visited their cousins farther out in the country. Or the way they’d hidden their faces when they met their great-grandparents, skin like polished wood and ancient-looking, hunched forward under their shawls, smelling like astringent creams.
When she was younger and sleeping upstairs, Grace had sometimes felt a pressure on her chest or on her shoulders, holding her down, doing nothing else but that, pressing her against the bed until she was perfectly flat. She had tried to scream, to holler for someone to come and help her, but the weight on her chest had prevented it. She’d lie there all night, frozen, stuck inside her body, unable to do anything to get free. When she told Big Davis about it, he said, What made them made you, didn’t it? They don’t mean you no harm. As if some common origin could negate terror of the unknown. Because we were all made of the same fearsome stuff, nothing in the world could scare you if you looked it in the eye and saw the part of it that was yourself. It was nonsensical in the way that only wisdom could be, Grace thought. Old men and their little stories.
“What made you made him,” Grace replies.
“You have bigger problems, little lady, than what your brother and me have between us. Mind your business.”
Grace hums. Enid stares at her hard. Now who’s trouble? she can almost hear.
It’s true that, growing up, Grace had been the one they watched like a hawk. Her grandmother used to say that boys made babies and girls brought them home, dropped them like kittens at the doorstep, and then who had to raise them but the parents or the grandparents? Nothing her grandmother hated more than the sight of a loose girl, which was to say every girl. When Grace was little, she was the one whose hair they combed all Sunday morning and the one they dressed in the stiff white polyester dress with a ruffle collar before church. She didn’t get to run through the woods that cut along by the cemetery. She didn’t get to crouch by the pews and play cars before the service started. No. Grace had to behave.
Even on days when it was just her and Davis waiting to be collected by their parents, Grace would look up and see her grandmother and aunts looking out at her through the window. Their hard faces. Their mean, tight expressions. Never Davis, who tore a hole in his uniform shirt and sometimes got his new shoes caked in mud. They never watched him that way. But for Grace, if she sweated through the neck of her shirt or got a smudge, her grandmother would pull it off her rough and say she didn’t appreciate things enough. That she’d be just like her mammy, dropping babies she couldn’t look after.
One time, at a family picnic, a boy cousin, tall and beige like her, had kissed Grace on the mouth. She didn’t ask him to. She didn’t want him to. But he did just the same, and Grace recoiled. Before she knew what was happening, though, before she could get her mind around what had just been done to her, she felt a hard, fierce tug at her arm and turned around just in time to get slapped by her grandmother. She called her whorish and fast. Grace wept and tried to say that she hadn’t wanted it, but her grandmother pulled her into the house and locked her in the room upstairs.
It wasn’t until she was in college that she felt she had some control over her own body. But even then, her grandmother called in the middle of the night. She called the dorm phone, not her cell, to make sure that Grace was in her own bed. Grace had once had to run clear across campus when she realized that it was ten thirty and her grandmother would be calling any minute. Grace sprinted over slick grass and hurdled stone benches, running beneath the high, fragrant trees. She could hear the phone ringing down the hall by the time she got to her floor, sucking in air, her chest burning. And she’d picked up the phone, only to hear her grandmother’s cold voice, the crackle of her disappointment: You been out with them boys.
But she hadn’t been out with boys. She had been out with her friends. The girls from her floor. Who taught her to wear skirts and how to flirt. Who showed her how to bum cigarettes and how to burn the ends of her braids to seal them. The girls who taught her how to dance, how to enjoy herself, the swing of her hips and the sun on her stomach and thighs. Those girls had taken her in and showed her real love and kindness. Not watched her. She misses them now, powerfully. Dreka, Tierra, Amina, Asha, Brytt. She misses them and she misses that period in her life when everything seemed to fly open and she could breathe again. When she felt the strength in her arms and legs. She felt powerful. Alive.
She wasn’t trouble to them. She was just Grace.
What she misses most of all is that feeling of autonomy. Being able to go wherever she wanted. Whenever she wanted. The feeling of being able to lift her fork and not have to think about what it will cost her later.
Oh, she misses it.
The carelessness of those four years.
How easy it was.
But now she misses her hair.
She misses the moisture in her skin.
She misses hunger. Not for food, exactly, or even the sensation of appetite, which remains, if much attenuated. She misses sex, the desire for sex, the capacity for sex.
Before her diagnosis, she had been fucking a white boy named Jonas. He had played lacrosse at the University of Virginia. He was tall and firm. He came from money and his family had a second house in the mountains. Her friends had tried warn her about him. Not that he was dangerous or bad, but that white men were a particular kind of hazard. She was light-skinned, they said, susceptible. But it wasn’t like that, Grace didn’t think. She wasn’t thinking about her parents. She wasn’t thinking about how she’d been watched by her grandmother and aunts, or what it meant that her mother didn’t speak to her own family anymore because she’d run off with a black man. Grace was careless and free, and what she thought about was what felt good. Having been deprived of it her whole life, having spent all her time thinking about what other people thought, she’d given herself over to Jonas because he made her laugh and made her feel like she was showing him everything about his body and hers both.
With Jonas it was always so good, so easy. He was so pliant, willing to give in to her, to give way to her desires. When they had sex, she could think only of herself, the friction inside her, the gathering heat between their bodies, the scent of her hair, of her sweat and his, the rhythm of their coming together and falling apart. She didn’t want a oneness with him, as she’d heard some people describe it. What she craved was the white-hot oblivion of an orgasm, riding the rim of it again and again until finally she slipped down into herself and shivered.
All of that feels beyond her now.
It seems a tragedy to say good-bye to that full-body shudder, that brief glimpse over the edge of herself down into eternity. She’d had it for only a few years before they found the tumor, before her slow withdrawal from life began. She doesn’t feel angry about it all the time. Rather, it’s as though she’d booked a cruise that is, at the last possible moment, canceled—or, more precisely, that her ticket alone has been canceled. The particular agony of it all is that she has to stand on the beach and watch as everyone she loves drifts out to sea without her.
They go on eating. The clink of their silverware on the good plates. The rain and wind whipping through the trees outside. Thunder. And the blue glow of lightning rippling overhead. They go on in their strained quiet, and Grace watches the beautiful motion of Big Davis’s hands. The way the knuckles shift and bob like buoys under his skin. And Enid’s sharp, anxious cutting and piercing.
They are the last of their kind, she thinks. Her father is gone. Her grandmother. Davis. All that remain are the three of them, and soon these two will have nothing drawing them together. Grace sees in their stiff awkwardness a premonition of her own demise, and her vision briefly grows dim. She feels as though she’s being drawn too quickly up the length of a well. Vertigo.
“Gracie?” Enid asks.
Grace closes her eyes, waits for the spinning feeling to abate. “I’m all right.”
“You don’t look it.” Big Davis presses his hand to her forehead. He hums. “You’re warm.”
“I’m fine,” she says, pulling away, but the motion makes her stomach burn. She’s going to be sick. She knows it the moment before it happens, that gurgling, burning retch. She presses her fingers to her mouth, bites down to hold it all in, but it is of no use. Hot acid pulses at the back of her throat, and she feels a blinding, white anger at the fact that she cannot even have the privacy of excusing herself. She must be on display even when she’s about to vomit. This moment of horrible weakness belongs not to her but to them.
She hates it.
Big Davis jumps up, reaches for the red bucket on the counter where he keeps the scraps. He shoves it under her face, and the smell of it—the rotting, wet food from breakfast and lunch, the woozy smell of grease and stale bread, the soggy, sad grits—draws the vomit out of her, and she empties herself into the bucket. Her stomach clenches. Her chest clenches. Fire spreads through her veins.
She leans back, her vision all splotches and luminescent squiggles. Enid presses a wet cloth to her forehead. Grace reaches, holds her hand and sighs.
“Just call him,” she says. “Just call him, please.”
“Now isn’t the time, Grace,” Enid says.
“You have to call him. He’s afraid of you. But you have to call him.”
Big Davis drops the bucket on the counter. Braces himself.
“You better worry about yourself.”
“Call him,” she says.
“And say what?”
“Tell him the truth. Tell him you love him,” Grace says.
“If he doesn’t know that after all this time, that I love him, then that boy is worse off than you.”
Grace sinks low in the chair. Enid is blotting her brow.
“Well, that we can agree on,” Grace says.
“You need rest,” Enid says. “You overdid it.”
“She has a room,” Big Davis says.
Enid nods at this, loops Grace’s arm over her shoulder, whispers reassuring things to her about strength and patience and balance. Grace feels embarrassed for her, the way she sometimes feels when she can hear Enid praying in the next room in that tiny apartment of hers. Some things you should get to keep to yourself.
Grace sits by her room’s wide window, from which she can see the deep green pond. The old forest rimming the property line. The sleepy fields. The house is full of sounds, night music.
Enid sleeps in the adjoining room that had belonged to Davis. When they were little, the two of them would spend a portion of each night passing back and forth, leaving small things for each other. Sometimes, Davis pranked her. Or left frogs under her bed. But that night of the picnic all those years ago, when her grandmother had slapped her and locked her in this very room, Davis had come in from his side. Grace was on the ground sobbing, her face hot from her grandmother’s palm. She’d been banging at the door, begging to be let out. It hadn’t even occurred to her that Davis’s side would be open, but when she looked up, there he was. Her brother. He handed her a small kitten. It looked so young that it might not have even been weaned yet. Its fur was soft gray, and it had a pink tint to it. When she asked Davis why he’d brought it to her, he had only shrugged and said he’d grown bored with it, that he’d found it in the woods and played with it until he got tired of it, and he didn’t want a cat, anyway.
All that long summer, she carried the kitten around with her, stroking it and petting it and saying that she loved it. Giving the kitten everything she didn’t have. Until her grandmother got sick of seeing her loving up on the kitten and pulled it from her hands and flung it out the back door. She said that girls had no business holding on to things with all them fleas. And cats would make a girl hot, and Grace was already fast enough. She never saw the kitten again.
It was the last summer they stayed with their grandparents. The last summer that her father was alive.
So much had come to an end that summer.
Grace should move to the bed, but she is so tired. She’s got one of her grandmother’s old blankets tossed over her legs. The window emits a cold chill that turns the room bluish in its light. She will regret falling asleep in this chair. Her body will torment her in the morning. But her legs refuse to cooperate. Her arms too heavy. She sinks low in the old chair and closes her eyes.
She will rest a moment. Just a moment.
She dreams of a boat going farther and farther into the distance. One of those rickety white boats out back, the kind she and Davis had taken across the pond, shouting and squealing so loud, they scared all the fish away. Such a boat had no purpose on the sea or a river, where the water was too wild and would rend it to pieces. She dreams of a boat going farther and farther into the distance, disintegrating all the way, leaving behind a trail like a comet, the shrapnel that a life leaves behind as it burns itself out. And now she feels herself beneath the weight of the invisible world, stuck. After all these years, stuck. She might have known it would happen, might have known to prepare herself for this, but she did not.
Beyond the periphery of the dream, though her eyes are still closed, Grace feels suddenly that she is not alone. There is some sort of presence in the far corner of the room. Some barely there shift in the room’s air pressure, the impression of space being taken up. She cannot make her body move, cannot get her eyes to open. Instead, she turns the whole of her concentration toward the presence in the corner. It reaches back toward her, as if it were using her concentration to pull itself hand over hand in her direction. A sensation, heavy, dragging up the length of her leg, the quilt rumpling under this unseen force.
She forces her eyes open with all her willpower.
What is this, what is this, what is this, she chants to herself. The presence has always been amorphous. Her tongue is stuck to the roof her mouth, her throat full of static fuzz. She floats beneath the surface of her skin, staring at the ceiling, the white globe of the lamp overhead.
The door creaks open. There is a change in the shape of the darkness as it lightens fractionally, insignificantly, but perceptibly, if only just so. There is another presence now, coming on from the distance, coming across the void toward her. She swallows thickly. Something is reaching for her, and there, suddenly, contact.
Warmth like a human hand.