by Cody Mower
She remembered the white sheets, glowing in the afternoon sun as her mother helped her into the bed. A doctor had been called in from town, and she was embarrassed. She’d never had a baby before but was in love from the moment she heard those small raspy cries. They named her Ada. Though she gave birth without issue, she could feel the fever rising in her chest that first night. Over the next few days, the heat of her body began to drain away, like a river emptying out into an endless sea. Weak with hunger and struggle, she felt herself die.
Waking up in death, the emptiness tried to overtake her. But she couldn’t leave Ada behind. Kicking against eternity, she clawed at the darkness, screaming and ripping at the edges of peace until she found herself back in an empty room.
She watched her daughter grow into a young woman, only to leave far beyond the walls of the house, where she could not follow. She looked on in silence as the pieces of her former life vanished. But the house remained. Years strung themselves together like pearls on a chain. From hallways and darkened rooms, she watched as new families came and went. Young ones grew old, just like her Ada had, and the old ones grew frail and went away. This was the new rhythm of her existence. But as time stretched on, the space between them became longer and longer. Eventually, the people stopped coming.
Heavy with the weight of centuries, the house began to crumble. The paint chipped and fell. Creatures bit and burrowed into the walls. Windows cracked, and the floor sagged. She watched as her wisps of feet floated above the decay. One morning, men with machines showed up and tore down the house, breaking all the walls into unrecognizable pieces, filling in the basement with its bones. She thought that she would disappear along with the walls, but she didn’t.
She felt neither the cold of the night nor the heat of the day, but she could still hear the sounds of the forest that had grown up around her, though she could not walk beyond the long-vanished boundaries of the home. The trees shifted and fell, and a new life grew from the old. Over time the animals morphed into strange and fantastic beasts, which she thought had only existed in fables. She remembered the sun. How the heavens glowed in bright and terrifying swirls of violet and reds. How the trees and animals withered away until it was just her standing alone in the burning ugliness. Until the land beneath her feet cracked and screamed and tore itself apart, and she found herself alone, drifting into the emptiness of the stars on the patch of dirt that had once been her home.
CODY MOWER is a writer from the Maine woods. His piece “Ghosts” won an Honourable Mention in the premier veteran anthology Proud to Be Vol.9. Other non-fiction work has been published in Moxy Magazine, Entropy Magazine, Up Portland, and a small travel blog called Eventually Everything, about life on a traveling bookmobile. Upcoming fiction work to appear in Love Letters to Poe, The Dread Machine, and The Society of Misfit Stories. You can find him on Twitter @HeavyistheC.
