Herring

Dead Woman

Home.

Four walls and a roof that doesn't ask a single f*****g thing from you except that you keep breathing inside it. The only place on earth where your collapse isn't a problem to be fixed but just part of the furniture.

I'd set the world on fire to keep mine.

The key turned in the lock. The door swung open. The smell hit me first—dust, old tea, the faint mustiness of a space that had been closed up for two weeks. Beneath it, the familiar scent of my life. My things. My space. My sanctuary.

I stepped inside and closed the door behind me and for a long moment I just stood there, breathing.

The apartment was exactly as I'd left it. The grey walls. The white trim. The light coming through the window—the same window I'd stood at two weeks ago, watching the rain and sharing a moment with it, us both with no particular desire to be here. The bookshelf and the small pile of books on the floor beside the chair— the ones that never made it to the shelf, living their honest lives in a stack that grew and shrank and grew again.

My bed. Unmade. Sheets tangled the way I'd left them, still holding the shape of my body from the last time I'd slept here. The pillow with its permanent indentation, the one that fit my head perfectly because it had been trained to over years of use.

My desk. The mechanical keyboard I'd spent too much money on, gathering a thin film of dust. The over-ear headphones draped over the monitor. The small DAC unit with its tangle of cables, a mess I kept meaning to organize and never would. A coffee mug with a dried ring at the bottom, abandoned two weeks ago and waiting patiently for my return.

The kitchen. Small but functional. The kettle on the counter, my most faithful appliance. The fridge humming its low, steady song. The sticky note still on its door, the one with three errands I'd never run.

And Aldy.

Aldy on the windowsill, exactly where I'd left him. A little browner at the tips than I remembered—two weeks without water will do that to a cactus—but alive. Still alive. His small pot catching the grey Seattle light, his spines casting tiny shadows on the sill. He looked, as he always looked, like he was judging me. Like he knew every bad decision I'd ever made and had decided, with great reluctance, to stick around anyway.

I crossed the room. Slowly. My ankle protesting, my ribs reminding me with every step that breathing was a negotiation. I reached the windowsill and pressed my forehead to Aldy's pot. The terracotta was cool against my skin.

Deia: "I'm sorry."

My voice cracked. Not from the injury. From something else.

Deia: "I'm so sorry. I thought about you. When I was down there, in the dark, when I thought I was going to die—I thought about you. I thought about who would water you. Who would know you needed watering. Who would even notice you were here. I thought you'd die slow and brown and alone and no one would know. Just like me."

Aldy said nothing. Cacti are excellent at keeping secrets.

Deia: "But I'm back. I'm back and you're alive and I'm alive and I'm never leaving you again. I swear. I swear on my life. On my very stupid, very fragile, very nearly-ended life. I'll never leave you."

I stood there for a long moment, forehead against the pot, breathing. The tears didn't come. I wasn't sure if I wanted them to or not.

I pulled back. Looked at him. He looked back, impassive.

Deia: "You need water. I need water. We both need water. This is a very dehydrated household."

I limped to the kitchen. Filled a glass. Drank it standing at the counter, the way I always did, because sitting down would have made it feel like a meal and meals implied I had time for them. Then I filled a small cup for Aldy and carried it back to the windowsill. I poured carefully, the way you pour for something you love, making sure the water reached the roots without flooding the pot.

Deia: "There. We're even."

I turned and looked at the apartment again. Really looked at it. The way you look at something you thought you'd never see again.

The fridge. My beautiful, dented, slightly-too-loud fridge. Covered in nothing—no photos, no magnets, no takeout menus—because my life was empty and so was its door. But it kept my food cold and my ice frozen and it had never once complained about the smell of whatever had died in the back of the vegetable drawer that one time. I crossed to it and pressed my lips to its door. The metal was cold. It tasted like nothing. It was perfect.

Deia: "I missed you, you magnificent bastard."

The floor. Oh, the floor. Cold grey linoleum, cracked in one corner near the bathroom door, always slightly dusty no matter how many times I swept it. I had spent so many nights sitting on this floor—against the bed, against the wall, in the middle of the room for no reason at all—that it knew the shape of me better than any chair ever could. I knelt. Slowly. Carefully. My ribs screamed. I ignored them. I pressed my lips to the floor. The linoleum was cool and smooth and smelled faintly of cleaning products from the last time I'd mopped, which was longer ago than I wanted to admit.

Deia: "Indeed, I have missed thy cold embrace. Thou art the finest floor in all the land."

The bookshelf. I ran my fingers along the spines—the ones I'd read a dozen times, the ones I'd never finished, the ones I kept meaning to start and never did. Each one a promise I'd made to myself and mostly broken. I pulled one out at random—a fantasy novel with a cracked spine and dog-eared pages—and held it to my chest like a talisman.

The window. I pressed my palm to the glass. It was cold. Outside, Seattle was doing its thing—grey sky, grey buildings, the faint shimmer of rain that hadn't quite committed yet. I had stood at this window so many mornings, coffee in hand, dreading the day ahead. I had never thought I'd miss it. I had never thought I'd be grateful to see it again. But here I was. Grateful. Stupidly, overwhelmingly grateful.

Deia: "I'm home. I'm f*****g home."

I sat on the floor—my floor, my beautiful, correctly-textured, slightly-dusty floor—and let the weight of it settle over me. The apartment was quiet. The only sounds were the hum of the fridge and the distant patter of rain against the glass and my own breathing, still shallow, still painful, but present. I was present. I was here.

Okay well uh, what now?

My phone.

They'd returned it with the rest of my things, still in the clear plastic bag. I'd forgotten about it until now. I pulled it out and pressed the power button. Nothing. Dead. Of course it was dead. Two weeks in a plastic bag will do that.

I limped to the desk, found the charger, plugged it in. The screen flickered to life after a minute—that slow, agonizing boot-up that phones do when they've been off for too long, like they're waking from a coma of their own. I watched the logo appear, disappear, reappear. Finally, the home screen.

Forty-seven messages.

Thirty-two from Kezia. The first few were casual—"dude are you alive" and "you missed a wild shift cocksucker was on one" and "text me back I'm bored." Then the tone shifted. The night of the chase.

"DEIA I JUST SAW YOU ON THE NEWS WHAT THE f**k" and "ARE YOU OKAY" and "please please please tell me you're okay."

Then, over the following days, a slow decline into something like grief. "I went by your apartment. No one answered. I'm really scared." "The news said someone died. It wasn't you. I know it wasn't you. Please let it not be you." "I'm still here. Whenever you wake up. I'm here."

The last one was from three days ago: "Okay at this point I'm assuming you're dead or in jail. If you're dead I'm going to kill you myself. If you're in jail tell me which one. I'll bring chips."

I laughed. It hurt. My ribs seized and I doubled over, gasping, but I was still laughing. Kezia. f*****g Kezia. The only person in the world who would threaten to kill me if I was already dead.

Two messages from my landlord. "Rent reminder." and "Late fee applied." I deleted both.

Thirteen spam messages. Various offers for things I didn't want and couldn't afford.

Zero messages from anyone else.

Empty life. Empty phone. At least there's Kezia. At least there's someone.

I typed out a reply with my left thumb, awkward and slow: "alive. home. will explain later. bring chips anyway."

She replied in under a minute. A string of emojis—crying face, heart, skull, middle finger, more hearts—that I interpreted as "I'm going to kill you myself for making me worry and then I'm going to hug you until you can't breathe."

Fair enough girl, fair enough.

The bed was calling me. Not literally—I wasn't that far gone—but the pull was real. I crossed the room and stood at the edge, looking down at the tangled sheets, the flattened pillow, the small indentation where my body usually lay. It looked like a nest. It looked like home. It looked like the only place in the world that had never asked anything of me except that I exist in it.

I lowered myself down. Slowly. Carefully. Every movement was a negotiation with my ribs, my ankle, my hand. But I made it. I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling—the same ceiling I'd stared at a thousand times, the one with the small crack near the light fixture that I kept meaning to mention to the landlord and never did. It was still there. Still cracked. Still mine.

Deia: "Oh, bed. My dearest, most faithful companion. Forsooth, I have missed thy lumpy embrace. Prithee, never let me leave thee again. Marry, I would wed thee if thou were sentient and also not a collection of fabric and springs and the accumulated dead skin cells of my former selves."

Yeah I'm weird like that.

The bed, being a bed, did not respond.

Deia: "Zounds, what a fine and noble mattress thou art. Verily, I have dreamed of this moment. In the cold dark of the water, I thought of thee. I thought of thy softness, thy warmth, thy perfect indifference to my suffering. Thou askest nothing. Thou givest everything. Thou art the ideal partner."

I pulled the duvet up to my chin. The fabric smelled like me—like old laundry and the particular scent of a person who has been sad in this exact spot many times before and will be sad here again. It was the best smell in the world.

Deia: "I'm going to sleep now. And when I wake, thou shalt still be here. And I shall still be here. And we shall continue our beautiful, dysfunctional relationship until one of us falls apart. Probably me. Almost certainly me."

I closed my eyes. Sleep took me like a lover who'd been waiting.

The weekend passed in a haze of catch-up work and strategic avoidance.

I woke late on Saturday, disoriented, unsure where the f**k I was. Then the familiar crack in the ceiling came into focus. Home. Alive. In my own bed. The rest could wait.

Coffee. The machine maundered its usual complaint. I growled back. The ritual felt different now—each step a small, defiant f**k-you to the void that had nearly swallowed me whole. I stood at the window, cup in hand, and watched Seattle do its grey bastard thing. The rain had committed. Proper rain. The kind that doesn't give a s**t about your plans. Beautiful. Miserable. Perfect.

Then the grind. Four weeks of lecture notes, dense and endless. Two essays, deadlines breathing down my neck. A group project I'd contributed exactly nothing to and would continue contributing nothing to until someone noticed. I read until my eyes burned. Typed one-handed, slow and clumsy, cursing every third word. Emailed Aldaine with the barest explanation—medical emergency—and got back a single word: "Noted." I hated him slightly less. Which was still a considerable amount of hate.

Sunday was for planning. I sat at my desk with a notebook and a pen, trying to map the rest of the semester like a general planning a campaign she wasn't sure she believed in. Classes. Assignments. Deadlines. The architecture of a life I was supposed to want. It felt abstract. Distant. Like reading about someone else's future in a language I used to speak.

I did not think about work. I did not think about rent. I did not think about the bike still locked to a rack outside the convenience store, its chain snapped, its tyres probably flat by now. I did not think about the fact that I had no income and bills that wouldn't wait. I did not think about Varietta's face underwater, her eyes opening, her hands on my shoulders shoving me down.

I did not think about any of it.

I'll deal with it later. Later is a problem for later Deia. Present Deia is still healing. Present Deia gets a pass.

By Sunday night, I had a plan. Not a good plan. Not a sustainable plan. But a plan. Go to class. Catch up. Keep my head down. Survive. The rest would figure itself out or it wouldn't. Either way, I'd be alive to see it.

I promised myself I'd live.

Yeah. That's what I'm gonna do.

The ring was on my desk.

I'd taken it out of my pocket on Saturday morning and placed it beside my keyboard, intending to deal with it later. Later had arrived. It sat there, catching the lamplight, throwing pink and gold and green across the surface of my desk like a tiny aurora.

I picked it up.

This belonged to a dead woman. A dead woman who tried to drown me. Wearing a dead woman's jewelry is probably cursed. That's definitely how curses work. I've read enough fairy tales to know you don't take things from people who die violently. It never ends well.

I turned it over. The opal bloomed. Pink to coral to rose. Gold sparks. Green threads. Violet fractures. Blue lightning. It was hypnotic. It was beautiful. It was wrong to keep and impossible to let go.

That b***h Varietta. Got what she deserved, maybe. Died the way she lived—violently, selfishly, trying to save herself at someone else's expense. But she had taste. I'll give her that. She had f*****g taste.

I held it up to the light. The inscription inside the band glinted—those tiny, ancient letters I couldn't read. They looked important. They looked like they meant something. Something I wasn't meant to understand.

Maybe I shouldn't wear the ring of someone who just died. Someone who tried to kill me. That seems like basic self-preservation. That seems like the kind of thing a smart person would know not to do.

I put it on.

It slid onto my finger like it had been waiting. Like it knew the shape of me before I did. Like it had been made for me and I was only just now catching up to that fact. It fit perfectly—not too tight, not too loose. Comfortable. Natural. Right.

Okay. Okay. That's... fine. It's a remembrance. A memento mori. A reminder that I almost died and decided not to. That's all. That's all it is.

I held my hand up. The ring caught the light and threw it back in colors I didn't have names for. Pink kaleidoscope. Gold embroidery. A galaxy on my finger.

Looks good on me, though. You have to admit.

I thought about Anders.

Not on purpose. The thought arrived uninvited, the way thoughts do when you're trying not to think about something. I was lying in bed, staring at the ring on my finger, and suddenly I was seeing his face. Or trying to. The memory was fragmented—we'd been running, it was dark, he had a scarf over the lower half. But I remembered his eyes. Dark. Watchful. Something behind them that wasn't quite a smile but wasn't not a smile either. Something that suggested he found the world amusing in a way he'd never explain.

His build. Big. Not threatening—just substantial. The kind of body that took up space without apologizing for it. Broad shoulders under those three coats. Hands that had grabbed my arm and pulled me through a closing train door with an ease that suggested he could have done it a hundred times and not broken a sweat.

And the way he smelled. That was the thing that didn't fit. Homeless men don't smell like cedar and something else—something warm and expensive, like sandalwood or amber or the kind of cologne that costs more than my rent. They don't smell like that. They smell like sweat and pavement and the accumulated grime of sleeping rough. He smelled like he'd stepped out of a shower and into those three coats five minutes before I ran into him.

Who the f**k are you, Anders Herc Chantel. What the f**k were you doing on Falk Street that night. Why were you running. Why did you help me. Why did you get off at Pioneer Square and disappear like you'd never existed.

Doesn't matter. I'll never see him again. And if I do, hopefully not under the same circumstances. Hopefully not while fleeing law enforcement. Hopefully not while my life is actively falling apart.

But if I do...

I turned the ring on my finger. The opal glimmered.

If I do, I'll ask him about the cologne.

I closed my eyes. The ring was warm against my skin. Not unpleasantly warm. Just... present. Like it had a pulse of its own. Like it was alive.

I fell asleep watching the colors shift in the dark. Pink to coral. Coral to gold. Gold to green. Green to violet. Violet to blue.

Blue to nothing.

~

Sheeesh, quite the time you had huh.

Do not let me rip the bowels out of your intestines, so help me god.

Relax girl, the stage is all yours. Enjoy your stay home. You'll wish you did.

I hate fuckers like you. What's next huh?

Acting like you don't know already. Or maybe you don't. That means it's working. Yay.

What's that supposed to mean?

Everything will be answered in the end sweetie.

No you answer me right this fuckin—

Whoops. Beep. Can't hear ya.

The poor thing doesn't even know what's coming. Could say the same about you no?

Home huh. I'll remember today. You should too. Now then. Where were we…

~